WW2 | 5. The Dutch Resistance (Superseded)

The post that was here has been superseded by this one.

This post remains open to preserve back links.

Resistance newspapers flourished,
but were strictly banned by the Nazis.

WW2 | 12. Holland after the War (Updated June 9, 2016)

After the War, it was a time for the Boissevain family to add up their deaths at the hands of the Nazis. In the immediate family, those who died in the Resistance were:

Janka Boissevain, 1943
Gi Boissevain, 1943

Louis Daniel Boissevain, 1943
Jan Canada Boissevan, 1944

Bob Boissevain, 1945

Walraven van Hall, 1945
Frits van Hall, 1945

Gédéon Jérémie Boissevain, 1945

Hester Boissevain, daughter of Bob Boissevain, counts 18 members of the Boissevain family involved in fighting the Nazis or rescuing and hiding Jews. That would be ten people other than Bob's family of eight. She says the family members were acting independently and were not primarily motivated by Christian faith. “It had nothing to do with religion,” she said. “They just thought what the Nazis were doing was absolutely wrong and wanted to do anything they could to keep Jews alive."

Others, like Willem van Stockum, son of Olga Boissevain, died in the military; Willem was a bomber pilot for the RAF who was shot down over France. Or, like Evert, they died in German labor camps, or they were killed by Allied bombs.

After the War: Deaths in Concentration Camps

The full extent of the horrors of the concentration camps–the Konzentrationlager, or K.L.–was not known until after the war. In fact the details of how they operated are only now in 2015 coming into full view. They were a combination of prison, army, and factory, as prisoners were treated simultaneously as inmates to be corrected, enemies to be combatted, and workers to be exploited. These forms of dehumanization were amplified by ideology and war.

Jan Canada Boissevain died in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp on January 30, 1945, just a few months before the Allies liberated it. Mies barely survived the Ravensbrück camp in Germany and the war. Annemie, daughter of Jan Canada to whom he wrote from Buchenwald, married Fernand van Asbeck and emigrated to New Zealand. Her son Jan van Asbeck is the only child of Annemie living in Holland.

Jan Canada's cousin Robert Lucas Boissevain was also in Buchenwald and died there on April 12, 1945–the day the camp was liberated.

Han de Booy and Willem Mengelberg (Chapter 4)

In the "hatchet days" after the liberation of Holland, the conductor Willem Mengelberg was stripped of his honors and his pension. He was close to several members of the Boissevain family who were at various times on the Board of the Concertgebouw, and they pointed out his help to many Jewish musicians and his belief that continuing to play music was good for the morale of Holland.

              

The Bob Boissevain Family 

After the war was over and the celebrations were held, a waiting period started full of dread, as the news of those who were killed was revealed in bits and pieces. After some time the wife and children of Robert Boissevain received the awful news that he had died in Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp.

He died from extreme hunger and severe illnesses - typhus, dysentery or cholera - the very day the camp was liberated by the Allies.

Postwar Migrations - Hester Boissevain Grinberg

After the war, some people who had left Holland did not come back. Others moved to Holland. Since the end of the war the Jewish-Dutch population, for example, has been fluid. Thousands of surviving Jews needed to leave Holland to forget the war. Some emigrated to the United States and about 10,000 Dutch Jews emigrated to Israel, of whom 6,000 remain.

Migration of Jews has also occurred to Holland. Between 5,000 and 12,000 of Jews in Holland are from Israel, mostly living in Amsterdam. There are now 41,000-45,000 people in the Netherlands defined as Jewish, of whom 44 percent are in Amsterdam. Approximately one in three Dutch Jews now has a non-Dutch background, the other large group being from Russia.

After the war, Hester Boissevain finished her studies to become a nurse and looked for a way to apply her skills. She was one of a relatively small number of people who decided to move to Israel without any religious identification with the new country. She says:

I saw pictures of the [Jewish] immigrants coming in the ships and landing in Haifa, and I said, "This country needs help, so why not?" I arrived in 1961. 

In 1964, on a kibbutz, she met Edy Grinberg from Istanbul. They married and moved to Kiryat Tivon, Israel. Hester converted to Judaism when she married, because she wanted her children to be part of the Israeli nation. The Grinbergs have a son and daughter, and five grandchildren.

Honors for the Bob Boissevain Family

In 1980, Hester's mother, Sonia received two decorations for her work with the Resistance. She received the Resistance Cross (Verzetsherdenkingkruis) from the Dutch Government, and the Yad Vashem Medal from the Israeli Government. This was for hiding the four Jewish people in her house - the three members of the Goldberg family and Jacob Vecht - and for preparing and disseminating underground newspapers.

All eight members of Bob and Sonia Boissevain's family are included among the Yad Vashem List of the Righteous for the Netherlands - seven in 1980 and Hester Boissevain Grinberg in 2007. The family was invited to plant four trees in early 1980 in the Garden of the Righteous. Sonia Boissevain joined the tree-planting ceremony. Photos that show the group sharing a meal in honor of the occasion in Hester's home town, Kiryat Tivon, are on the Yad Vashem web site.

Students in Haifa in 2012 put together an exhibit called "The Light in Darkness", on the wartime Resistance work of Robert Lucas Boissevain and his family.  Seniors at the Leo Baeck Education Center, a 2,000-pupil school founded in 1938, worked on the project for three years.  The exhibit includes documents, photos, and other objects from the Boissevain family and from the Jewish community in Amsterdam.

The exhibit had the support of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority and the Dutch Friends Foundation of the Holland Department of the Ghetto Fighters House Museum Association. The initiative began through Yael Rosen, director of the Righteous Among the Nations Project at ATZUM, a social activist organization. She tends to the financial and social needs of about 30 surviving Israeli residents who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, from about 130 who chose to accept citizenship in the Jewish state after World War II. Hester is among the few who converted to Judaism.

The Fate of "Mr. Knoppers"

Mister Knoppers returned home to Amsterdam and the family in Haarlem never heard from him again, for reasons that are understandable - his memories of the wartime period were horrible. He was a depressed man, hardly speaking with anyone. Mostly he worried about his wife, his daughter and his son. Hearing what had happened to so many other Jewish deportees, he became increasingly afraid about the fate of his own family.

"Mister Knoppers" returned to his life as Dr. Jacob Vecht. After some time he heard the news he feared so much, that both his wife and his daughter had been killed by the Nazis in a gas oven. However, his son was still alive, which gave him the energy to keep going. An Orthodox Jew, he kept alive the hope that he could transmit the Jewish faith and culture to his son.

His son, however, could not understand how God could have permitted the mass murder of some six million Jews, God's Chosen People. The son looked for shelter within the Roman Catholic Church, deciding he should become a Catholic priest.

Despite his doubts about himself, about his God, about the world, about his son, Dr. Jacob Vecht stayed interested in his son. Then one day his son was killed in a traffic accident. It was too much for him, and Mr. Knoppers, who survived the years of the war, went to the kitchen and put his head in a gas oven.

Charles Boissevain concludes: “Jacob saw no other way to bring peace to his tortured mind than to share the fate of his wife and daughter.”

The Goldbergs after the War

After that very sad story, it is a pleasure to tell the story of the Goldbergs. They fared well after the war. They were skilled and adaptable and they made their way successfully in the postwar world.

Parents - Leo and Lyubava Goldberg. We have a photograph of the parents, Leo and Lyubava Goldberg, in 1948, shown at the top of this story. That their family survived intact is miraculous, and their happiness at their survival is conveyed in their expressions in the photo.

Daughter 1 - Maria Goldberg Penkela.  The parents apparently returned to the home of their daughter Maria Penkela in Amsterdam, possibly at their pre-war address of Minervalaan.  Little information is available about this daughter.

Daughter 2 - Anya Goldberg / Anna Ormont. Anya Goldberg (1916-1988) was a talented pianist. She used the name Anna Ormont for her novel  The Five Hundred Women of Genghis Khan, a history of the warring tribes in Mongolia united to make the largest empire in history under Genghis Khan (1162?-1227?). Hester Boissevain Grinberg has seen the book (Grinberg 2011, 3). Anya/Anna married a Canadian soldier and moved to Canada via Montreal in 1946. She worked at her husband's business until she died in Ottawa in 1988. Her husband survived her by five years and presumably was left with whatever family letters or papers she brought with her from Europe or acquired.

William Ross Dakin (1913-1993), her husband, met Anya when he was serving in Europe as a Canadian soldier and they married there. Dakin was born in Gatt Cambridge, Waterloo, Ont., Canada, the son of William Scott Dakin (1877-1921) and Jesse Maud McKay (1877-1955). Anna Ormont and William Ross Dakin had no children, so his next of kin was probably his sister Jesse (?) Dakin. Any family papers were probably left to her.

Jesse was married to Edward James Houston (1918-2003), born September 15 in Arnprior, Ontario. He attended the University of Toronto (BA, 1947). He was admitted to Osgoode Hall Law School in 1947 and was called to the Bar in 1950. Houston served as an Assistant Crown Attorney in Ottawa in 1950-1952, when he resigned to go into private practice. He was appointed a Queen's Counsel in 1961. In 1975-82, he was a County Court Judge with the York Judicial District Court. Then he served as Judge-at-Large with the Ottawa-Carleton Judicial District Court, then as a supernumerary judge. In 1990-1993, Houston was a supernumerary judge with the Ontario Court of Justice (General) for Ottawa-Carleton. Houston served as director and vice-president of the Advocates' Society of Ontario. Houston served as a Commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Canada. Houston was a founder of the Eastern Professional Hockey League and was appointed its first president and later as an arbitrator for the National Hockey League. In 1989, Houston was inducted into the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame. He died in Ottawa on May 27, 2003.

William T. (Bill) Houston is the son of Jesse (?) Dakin and Edward James Houston. He was General Counsel of an energy company in Toronto until 2013. He was in touch with Hester in 2008 and was excited to find out more about the war years from her (Grinberg 2011, 5).

Alexander Forest,
Eisenhower's staff

Son - Alexander Goldberg / Forest. Alexander, the sole son of Leo, is an interesting person who emigrated to New York City, "before the war" according to Grinberg (2011, 5). He took the surname Forest upon arrival.

After the war he came back to Europe as an enlisted American soldier and was posted to Germany as part of General Eisenhower's staff, says Grinberg (2011, 5), to put his multiple language skills at the service of the U.S. Army.

Alexander's only surviving child is Gregory, who told me (Interview 1, 2014) that he understood that his father when in Germany was involved first with the Nuremberg Trials and then in responding to questions raised at Senator Joseph McCarthy's Hearings.

Alexander's knowledge of German, Russian and the ways of Communism must have been in demand, especially when McCarthy overreached himself in 1954 and accused the U.S. Army itself of being Communist, calling a decorated general a "disgrace". Joseph Welch famously ended McCarthy's leadership of the "Red Scare" on June 9, 1954 with his comment: "Have you no decency, sir?" McCarthy, his power destroyed, retreated into alcoholism and died at 48 in 1957.

Wedding of Gregory Forest and Eileen Hills Forest, Fort Lauderdale, 
Fla. (1983). L to R: Anna Ormont, Greg's half-sister Madeleine, his
 late sister Alexandra, Eileen, Greg, Madeleine's son Andrew, Greg's
 late mother Marion Drews and her third husband Paul McDonald. 
Photo by kind permission of (thanks!) the Forest family. This is 
the latest-dated extant photo of Anna.

Alexander was discharged from the Army and returned to New York City where he became involved in the instant-lettering business, which took aim at the high cost of printing. (I remember Letraset as one of the bigger companies in the business.)

Alexander's son Gregory and Greg's wife Eileen live in Florida, where I visited them. He is a regional sales manager for the Mercury Division of the Brunswick Company, based in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

They have two sons–Gregory Jr. and Jason. Like his grandfather, Jason serves in the U.S. Army in Germany.

The Jan Canada Boissevain Family (Chapter 6)

Graves of Gi and Janka Boissevain at the Heroes' Cemetery in Overveen,
sons of Jan "Canada" and Mies Boissevain. Photo by Mariska Muller,
posted by permission, taken at a Cemetery remembrance ceremony in 2014.
I visited the site in February 2015 with Charles Boissevain.

Jan Canada Boissevain was recognized by the Dutch Government after the war. He and his sons are included in the List of the Fallen in the Resistance.

His sons Janka and Gi Boissevain are buried in the heroes' cemetery, Eerebegraafts Bloemendaal Cemetery, along with their cousin Louis Daniel Boissevain.

Matthijs Ridderhoff, who betrayed CS6, was sentenced to death in 1947.

When CS6 was betrayed, the Nazis found ammunition at Corellistraat 6. But they didn't find it all. When the house was purchased in 1962 by the De Mol van Otterloo family, they began renovating the basement. They found under the cellar enough ammunition to blow up many blocks of houses, according to Het Parool.

Matt Hyland (standing) and Hansje van
Lennep, January 1995. Photo by JT Marlin.

Their mother Mies van Lennep Boissevain was very active after the war. Hansje van Lennep Hyland wrote to Diane Haddick:

Mies had been sent to Ravensbrueck, the concentration camp for women in Southern Germany. She was part of a group liberated by Sweden's Count Bernadotte and was sent to Sweden. When she heard that her husband and her two eldest sons had died, she did not want to live any more. But then she looked out of the window of the plane that was bringing them all to Sweden. They broke through the clouds and the sun shone on a quilt of farms and towns below. She decided there was still a lot for her to do on earth.   

When she eventually returned to Holland, she started a movement where people would make quilted skirts out of remnants of cloth left over from the war. Friends and family would donate the pieces of cloth. The called the skirt the "feast rok" (festival dress), to celebrate the liberation of Holland. 

Because of her heroic behavior in the concentration camp, where she would save her fellow prisoners from despair with talk and deeds, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to come to America as she wanted to thai her and meet her personally. [Diane Haddick Query: Did Mies van Lennep Boissevain ever did come to America at Mrs. Roosevelt's invitation, "and if she did, what happened?" Answer: Yes, she gave a lecture tour.

After the war, even though she had endured terrible hardship and her health was still poor, she overwhelmed her surroundings with energy and optimism. Bob Boissevain (her second cousin once removed, close to the family) says:

I remember how she once told us, roaring with laughter, how happy they were, when they got moved to another camp, that they were allowed to sleep on mattresses covered in cockroaches, rather than in barracks full of lice.

Mies Boissevain deserves to be on the Yad Vashem List of the Righteous, but during her lifetime she insisted that she only did her duty as a Dutch citizen and she did not want to be recognized officially for that. Her children for that reason did not seek any honors for their mother, nor did her sister Hester van Lennep Baračs.

When Mies returned to the Netherlands, there was not much left. She decided to cut from every piece of clothing that wasn't worn out yet, a small square or triangle. She sewed these together in 1947 to create what she called a Nationale Feestrok and is translated as “National Celebration Skirt". With this dress she went on tour in America, lecturing to women's groups and others about everything that was destroyed in the Netherlands and what had happened in the camps during the war. The skirt  became a symbol for Holland's post-war reconstruction.

A Resistance Museum (the South Holland Verzetsmuseum) in Gouda organized a 1994 exhibition "Present-Past, Carried Cheerfully" (Heden-Verleden, Blijmoedig Gedragen) which included a special book on Mies Boissevain-van Lennep (1896–1965).  In the Verzetsmuseum in Amsterdam (entrance opposite Artis) an example of her National Celebration Skirt is permanently displayed.

Summary of the Jan ("Canada") Boissevain Family in World War II 

Hansje van Lennep Hyland summarized the losses of Jan Canada's family as follows:

The Krauts ... first imprisoned ... Jan ["Canada"] Boissevain, then let him free (he was a banker and was accused of lending money to Jews, which was trumped up, as Holland never differentiated among its citizens), then arrested him again and sent him and Mies to two different concentration camps. 

Also taken were their two oldest sons: Jan Karel [Janka] and Gideon [Gi], who were part of an underground resistance group, all in their early 20s. In 1943 they and others were killed by a firing squad in the dunes. 

Their younger brother, Francois Boissevain and the kid's nanny, Jane, were sent to a concentration camp in Germany. They survived the war. Alas, Jan Canada did not - he died one month before Holland's liberation, in April 1945 in a camp near Berlin.

Gijs van Hall–Mayor of Amsterdam (Chapter 9)

In 1946, Gijs van Hall joined the Labour Party (PTB), but clearly showed that he was no ordinary member. Before the war he was not politically active. He had, after his return from the United States in view of the elections in 1933 with a group of friends with him at home speakers from different directions invited to explain on several evenings the programs of their parties. Among others, A A van Rijn spoke for the Christian Historical Union and HB Wiardi Beckman for the Social Democratic Workers' Party; in addition, a communist and a member of the NSB spoke, because there was time to make a choice. In 1946, however, he and his wife decided it was time to show their colors. Only the Freedom Party and the PTB were eligible. Again, they organized two nights of speeches, and then they decided to join the WPB.

In October 1948 Hall changed his job and he became director of the banking house Labouchere & Co. NV, a subsidiary of the Amsterdam Bank. To the dismay of the directors of the bank he became a candidate on July 31, 1956 for a Labor seat in the Senate. When the mayor of Amsterdam position became vacant, van Hall was appointed to it as of February 1, 1957.

As Mayor, van Hall confronted the government with the big problems of Amsterdam. He lobbied for the construction of the IJ tunnel, and for more housing. The city council in 1957 designated Bijlmermeer was the designated place. After eight years of conflict, in 1966 this happened.

Starting in 1945, van Hall was a member of the board of governors of the University of Amsterdam, then a purely municipal institution. The municipality, however, could not finance the necessary renovations and expansions, so starting in 1960 the rules were changed and the distribution of the burden was shared workably.

The Amsterdam police were understaffed and enjoyed little esteem by the population. In 1961 van Hall asked the Minister of Internal Affairs chief HJ van der Molen to be replaced. This request was not honored. Later in the sixties faced the metropolitan police with disturbances of a new kind. It was especially demonstrations against the US action in Vietnam, where in chorus 'Johnson murderer' was called. That was insulting a friendly head of state and, according to the law.

Provo deliberately set out to provoke authorities and provoke conflict in order to attract the attention of press and television. The overstretched police did not cope with the colorful mix of genuine protest, old-fashioned cop-taunting and rioting and often had no other alternative but to disperse the crowd. Amsterdam became divided into two camps. One saw the Provos as the source of turmoil, the other the police. The marriage of Princess Beatrix to a "German" on March 10, 1966 led to heavy riots.

The "construction workers riot", in which Provos and youthful vandals played a major role , occurred on June 13 and 14, 1966. They resulted from  misunderstandings quite symptomatic of the situation in Amsterdam at the time. The police chief was fired. A committee headed by C.J. Enschede was commissioned to investigate the Amsterdam problems.

Although van Hall was harassed at his private home, he wanted to hold on. The government, however, decided that van Hall was not the right man to solve the problems of public order in Amsterdam. In early May 1967 the Cabinet De Jong enabled him finally the choice: resign or get fired. He chose the latter - "there must be a scapegoat" he let slip on that occasion - and on June 30 of that year he resigned his office.

He remained a member of the Senate and became a member and vice-president of the Assemblies of the Council of Europe and Western European Union. In 1971 he introduced himself no longer re-election to the Senate, and with it fell the other two functions. In 1976, a year before his death, he published his memoirs: Experiences of Amsterdam.

Hall was a good Mayor, who felt a kinship with directors and financiers. He was open to new ideas, as evidenced by its membership of the WPB. In general there was great appreciation for his work as supervisor of the financial and economic condition of his city. It characterizes him as a tough negotiator, a resourceful improviser and a stubborn fighter. The contact with the council and the official duties were to him less, partly due to chronic back pain.

The M.S. Boissevain

The following story about the M.S. Boissevain was told in 2004 by Charles Boissevain of Twello, near Deventer, Holland in the family Bulletin, at boissevain.org. Within the family, because of so many Charles Boissevains, he is called Charles Twello Boissevain.

The M.S. Boissevain was used as transport ship for troops during World War II.

Charles Boissevain reports that, 30 years earlier, he came into possession of a Neptune Diploma in Amsterdam. It was presented to a soldier on the M.S. Boissevain. In 1974, when Charles was a student, he was given a birthday present by Roland Pessers - a ticket glued onto some cardboard. Pessers, says Charles, was a neighboring boy their neighborhood in Oisterwijk who used to scour flea markets. On the back he had written: “For Charles’ birthday, that this family picture may always have a place on your wall, under penalty of my discontent”.

Neptune Diploma for the M.S. Boissevain. It was given to
Dutch troops heading for Indonesia after World War II.

Closer inspection of the Diploma explains something about the Boissevain and Neptune christenings on crossing the equator, and on the last stage of the heyday of the great shipping companies and of Holland's colonial history in the Dutch East Indies. The diploma reads (translated from the Dutch):

I, NEPTUNE, GOD OF ALL SEAS Patron of all Mermaids, Treasure-chest keeper of all treasures which are thrown over board etc, etc, declare herewith that: Soldier 1st class Maas, J.K. I-2-R.lt.LuA crossed the equator on May 18, 1947 and in my opinion has been found suitable to defy all the dangers in the Far East and, after services done, to be returned home safely over my seas. Therefore it is pointed out to everyone, that the person in possession of this diploma, may he - land-dog that he obviously is -, again sail in my waters, gets the homage he deserves, given to him by me under penalty of my discontent. THUS DRAWN UP ABOARD M.S. Boissevain led by the C.O.T. The Lt.-Col. Der Art. A. Tuytel.

On May 4, 1946 the Dutch Government, back in power after Hitler's occupation, returned the ship to the KPM (Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij), the shipping company founded in 1888 by Jan Boissevain (NP 52) and others. Because the ship was fitted out for transporting troops, it was leased by the Dutch government for almost two years for the supply and removal of Dutch soldiers to  uphold the authority of Holland in the former Dutch Indies. Like the United States, Holland continued in war status after V-E Day because of the continued fighting in Japan.

In May 1947 the last of these journeys took place, after which the ship was converted into a passenger ship by Taikoo Dockyard in Hong Kong. During this transformation the Boissevain got the colours of the KJCPL (Koninklijke Java-China-Paketvaart Lijnen), the shipping company that resulted on July 1, 1947 from merger of KPM and the Java-China-Japan Line (JCJL).

Subsequently the ship and its sister ships Ruys and Tegelberg were deployed between the Far East and the east coast of South-America via South Africa. The journey Before the M.S. Boissevain was converted in Hong Kong, it made its last journey as transport ship for troops in May 1947. It involved the transport of a second regiment anti-aircraft artillery, consisting of 1,000 troops of the D-division, otherwise known as the Palmtree Division.

It was an odd mission for the participants, for in March 1947 it was clear that the Indonesians posed virtually no air threat. The regiment anti-aircraft artillery would therefore ultimately be used to supplement other divisions that were short-staffed, and it was thus that the men came to be at the disposition of the quartermaster general (QMG), the man responsible for the supply and outfit of the army.

The Transport Service Department was responsible for transporting troops to the Dutch Indies. The stamp on the diploma contains the inscription “Service of the quartermaster general, Dep. Of Transport Service, M.S. Boissevain, C.O.T.”. (C.O.T. stands for Commanding Officer Troops, i.e.,  commander of the troops being transported.)

On April 25, 1947 the troops boarded the Boissevain in Amsterdam. On board was the 1st battalion of the 2nd regiment light anti-aircraft artillery (1-2-R.lt.Lua), of which the 17th corps AAT (Supply- and Delivery Troops) was a part. Soldier J.K. Maas was one of them and lieutenant-colonel A. Tuytel was his commanding officer.

On May 6 they entered the tropics and on May 17 arrived in Sabang on the most northern point of Sumatra. The next day the ship crossed the equator at 14:20 hrs., the moment the diploma refers to. On May 20 they reached their destination, Batavia (now Jakarta).

Although the diploma states it was presented on crossing the equator, this is not wholly correct. The equator was crossed in the Malacca Strait, just South West of Singapore. This is a short and very busy route, in which there is certainly no time to hold a Neptune party. Therefore the christenings of the passengers and crew members for whom this was the first time, were in reality held on entering the tropics in the Indian Ocean. The christening ceremony had a sort of ragging feeling about it where a bucket or more of water wasn’t really an issue. For the more than 120,000 troops of the Royal Army, that served in the former Dutch-Indies between 1945 and 1949, this ritual was a welcome change to the month-long journey. Why soldier Maas didn’t do a better job in looking after his souvenir of the occasion is a mystery to me, says Charles Boissevain of Deventer.

The United Nations

Delegates from nations that had joined forces against the Axis powers met in San Francisco in April 1945 to "make the post-war world safe for peace-loving peoples." They called this the United Nations Conference on International Organization. The goal of conference was to prepare "a charter for a general international organization for the maintenance of international peace and security".

Spike Marlin, husband of Hilda van Stockum and son-in-law of Olga Boissevain, was at the United Nations conference in 1945 for the U.S. Government. He started work for the International Civil Aviation Organization and continued to work for the United Nations for the next 20 years.

Visiting Hilda van Stockum in Washington, D.C. in 1946

Hansje van Lennep Hyland wrote in 1999 about her visit in 1946:

My mother [Mrs. Cornelis van Lennep, 10 in the van Lennep family genealogy excerpt that is included referenced in the chapter on Wally van Hall] was rather concerned that her daughter [10c] was going far away in 1946, to work in the Netherlands Embassy in Washington, DC, and she said this to Hilda's cousin Olga Boissevain van Lennep [1d]. Olga offered to write to Hilda van Stockum to ask her to put me up for a while. Hilda agreed. 

I stayed several weeks at Hilda's house on Northampton Street [#3728] near Chevy Chase Circle in Washington, D.C., until Hilda's husband (Spike Marlin) was transferred to Montreal by his employer, the International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency. During that time Hilda suggested that we would PLAY being real cousins, since both of our families were back in Holland. 

Spike went ahead to try to rent a house in Montreal. Not able to find anything right away (it being  summer), he had to settle for a house that was, literally, IN THE WOODS, outside Montreal [in a place called Ste. Marguerite]. 

So the family moved into this house, with no running water. The smallest of Hilda's six kids was 1 1-1/2 year old Elisabeth. There was no driveable road to the house, so the rented car dropped them off a small distance away. Hilda's widowed mother, Olga ("Aunt Olga" to me) later had to go buy a bathing suit, as did the rest of the family: the "bath" was a lake... As a result, a book was born - Canadian Summer. 

Thanks to correspondence with Hilda and Aunt Olga, I knew beforehand of some of the adventures later printed in the book. Years later, I spent Christmas with them at Ste. Adele. They had a house near the church and on several occasions the priest (or minister) had to ask the Marlin family to tone down their noise during the church service! That told you a lot about Hilda and her family!! 

Hilda will be 91 on Feb. 9, 1999. She is writing a book about her studies at the State Academy of Arts in Amsterdam and is doing two paintings, RIGHT NOW!"  

Other Chapters: The above post is a draft of a chapter of a forthcoming book, The Boissevain Family and the Dutch Fight against the Nazis.

Notes

"Bill Houston": Archive on his father's papers, http://bit.ly/1xxNR80, from which the bio of his father was abbreviated. I have tried to reach him by phone to find out if there are any extant family papers from Anna Ormont.

"Yad Vashem": Yad Vashem List of the Righteous for the Netherlands.

Gijs van Hall: In April 1968 van Hall tape recorded his view of the problems during his mayoralty. What was said, he summarized in his memoirs. This tape is in the audiovisual department of the Municipal Archive. His book is Experiences of Amsterdam (Amsterdam [etc.], 1976). Obituaries on May 25, 1977 were in the NRC Handelsblad, Het Parool, Trouw and De Volkskrant: interrogation of G. van Hall, in Report containing the results of the study [of the] Committee of Inquiry into Government Policy 1940-1945 VIIc (s -Gravenhage, 1955) 194-204; first interim report ..., Second interim report ... [and] Final Report of the Commission of Inquiry Amsterdam. [Chaired by CJ Enschede] (three parts .; Hague, 1967); Rosenthal, "Amsterdam '66: the acquired crisis." Crisis decision-making in the Netherlands (Amsterdam [etc.], 1984), 135-190; W. Breedveld, interview with PJS de Jong, in For the unity of policy. Reflections on the occasion of fifty years, Ministry of General Affairs (The Hague, 1987), 219-228; Richter Roegholt, "Beatrix wanted to renounce her marriage in Amsterdam, Netherlands in Vrij, March 19, 1994. Photo: ANP Historical Photo Archive, frame number 30 843 [Gijs van Hall in 1967].

"M.S. Boissevain": Charles F.C.G. Boissevain, Deventer (NP 116). [I am curious about the use of the ship during World War II. Was it carrying troops in Asia? Europe? Under what flag?]

Sources (in formation)

Boissevain, Charles, emails of January 5 and 19, and February 8, 2015.

Forest, Greg, personal interview, January 2015.

Grinberg, Hester Boissevain, Autobiographical Notes, 2008 and 2011.

Grinberg, Hester Boissevain, phone interviews; letter to JT Marlin, January 2015.

Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: the Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945.

Jerusalem Post, May 2012.

A Dutch Family Resists Hitler (Superseded)

This post has been superseded by this one - http://bit.ly/1t9NfkG).

Plaque at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
honoring Robert L. Boissevain and wife
Helen S. van Tienhoven Boissevain
and children. Four trees were planted.

Just the beginning of this post is being retained so that links to this post are not destroyed.


****

What's it like to live in an occupied country?

What's it like to try to fight back against the occupiers?

My late mother Hilda van Stockum (1908-2006) has written two fictional books for children about the Dutch Resistance:

• The Winged Watchman (1962),  told from the perspective of two Dutch boys aged 10 and 14 living in a rural windmill.
• The Borrowed House (1975), told from the perspective of a German girl living in a "borrowed" house in Amsterdam with her parents, who are performers sent to entertain the German troops and SS. A Dutch translation of the second book was published by Mozaiek in 2013, retitled Het Gestolen Huis (The Stolen House).

The books, published half a century ago, are still in print and sell well. They are among the 20 top-ranked (by Goodreads) books for children on World War II, out of 176 nominees. The two books have just been optioned together for a television miniseries, with the idea that scenes and stories will cut between wartime cities in Holland and the wartime countryside.

These books are based on true stories and I have been asked by the people interested in doing a miniseries, and by an interested cousin, if I could document these stories. What did my mother's relatives do during the Dutch Occupation? As the last of those who can testify personally are dying off, it is important to capture the information and make a record. For me, it's been an interesting journey of discovery, with much left to do.  Continued here: http://cityeconomist.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-dutch-resistance-and-its-financing.html

VETS 8 | Ronald Allix, Homeless No More

Ronald Allix, 46, Was
Homeless in Detroit

Army Veteran Ronald Allix was laid off from his auto factory job during  the 2008 financial crisis.

His personal problems became crushing. He became:

• divorced, 
• homeless 
• desperate

Last month, Allix and 13 other Veterans aged between 25 and 60 graduated from the Blight Removal and Heavy Equipment Training Program at the Detroit Training Center, funded by the U.S. Department of Labor. It sounds a lot like the successful training program at the NJISJ in Newark.

All of the trainees were placed in Detroit area jobs. Allix has earned Michigan State licenses in asbestos and lead abatement and a certificate in heavy equipment operation. He has been hired as a construction laborer paying $12.75 an hour. He is preparing to move out of the shelter.

Allix applied for the program after seeing a flyer at Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries, which received a grant of $300,000 through the Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program in 2013. He sums up the outcome of his training succinctly as follows:

This was a life-changing experience for me. Without the program I would likely still be stuck because I didn't have a clear path in mind to get into anything else.

Patrick Beal, CEO of the Detroit Training Center, says: "Veterans are great candidates for job placement [because] they are disciplined and eager to learn new skills." Click Here for More Information

Veteran's Story 7 - Navy's First Female Officer - Mildred McAfee

The daughter of Rev. Dr. Cleland Boyd and Harriet Brown McAfee in Park College, Mo., Mildred H. McAfee was born in 1900 at the college her grandfather founded. After her family moved to Chicago, she attended the Francis W. Parker School.

McAfee entered Vassar with the Class of 1920 (overlapping by one year with Edna St. Vincent Millay), studying economics, sociology, and English - and playing on her class’s hockey and basketball teams and being active with Vassar's debate team and student government.

She served as the president of her class and president of the Christian Association. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa, she taught elementary and middle-school-aged girls in her home state for three years. In fall 1923, she left Illinois to become an acting professor of economics and sociology at Tusculum College in Greenville, Tenn.

Studying at the University of Chicago during the summers, McAfee earned her M.A. in Sociology in 1928. In 1926 she became Dean of Women at Centre College and stayed there till 1932, when she returned to Vassar as the Executive Secretary of the Associate Alumnae of Vassar College, helping to  raise money to build Kenyon Hall. Two years later, McAfee accepted the position of Dean of College Women at Oberlin College.

In 1936, Wellesley College ended an 18-month search involving more than 100 candidates, naming  Mildred McAfee its President at 36. Her presidency emphasized truth as the greatest and most precious object of scholarly pursuit, and defended a liberal arts education against accusations of indulgence during the Depression. She told Wellesley students:

I envisage the function of this college, or any college, to prepare an oncoming generation of students to disseminate truth. It is my conviction that truth is more easily given a hearing if it is presented by a healthy, well-adjusted, effective human being who sees the truth in the light of a world-philosophy which gives it meaning.

Her presidency of Wellesley was interrupted by World War II. As the United States mobilized against Nazi aggression, the need for women in the Navy became increasingly apparent. The last of the Yeomen (F) left active U.S. Navy duty 23 years before. Only a small number of Navy Nurses represented their gender in the U.S. Navy and they did not have formal officer status. Now, the Navy was preparing to accept a large number of enlisted women and in addition female officers to supervise them.

For this purpose, the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) was created.  Establishing the WAVES was complex because inter-war changes in the Naval Reserve legislation limited service to men. Though some had long known that uniformed women would be a wartime necessity, opinion was against it until Europe was overrun by the Nazis. Even then, it required creativity to get an authorization through The Congress. FDR signed it into law on 30 July 1942.

The next few months saw the commissioning of Mildred McAfee to head the WAVES. she had to manage recruiting, training, administration and uniform design - the basic WAVES uniform design is still in use in the 21st century. Within a year 27,000 women wore it.

These women served in a far wider range of occupations than had the Yeomen (F). Secretarial and clerical jobs still took a large portion of the women but thousands of WAVES also performed new duties in the aviation community, Judge Advocate General Corps, medical professions, communications, intelligence, science and technology.

The wartime Navy's demand for them was intense as it struggled to defeat Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and then the Japanese in the Pacific. At the end of World War II, there were more than 8,000 female officers and 80,000 enlisted WAVES, about 2½ percent of the Navy's total strength. In some locations WAVES constituted a majority of uniformed Naval personnel. Many remained in uniform to help get the Navy into, and through, the post-war era. (A total of 16 million Americans were on active duty in World War II. Of them, 8,000 are still living.)

To take on the job of running the WAVES in August 1942, McAfee took what turned out to be a two-and-a-half-year leave of absence from the Wellesley College presidency. She served at the rank of Lieutenant-Commander, the first woman ever commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Navy. She remained with the WAVES until 1945, was promoted to the rank of Captain, and received the Distinguished Service Medal for her work.

Upon her return to Wellesley, she married Rev. Dr. Douglass Horton, former dean of the Harvard Divinity School and a Congregational Minister. She retired from Wellesley in 1948. After retirement, McAfee worked with her husband in church and civic work and was also an active leader in education and social reform. Having written her M.A. thesis on the YWCA, she worked with the  Congregational Church to bridge gaps and create understanding through religion.

She served as a UNESCO delegate, was a director of the New York Life Insurance Company, the NBC, RCA, and the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Advancement of Education. Later she co-chaired the National Women’s Conference on Civil Rights.

McAfee’s husband died in the couple’s New Hampshire home in 1968. She survived him by 26 years, continuing her social and religious work until her own death in 1994. When she died, she had been awarded more than 31 honorary degrees.

Jobs after Discharge - How Male and Female Veterans Differ

It is hard for civilians to understand the extent of the
adjustment problems facing discharged soldiers.

The war in Iraq and Afghanistan has been winding down after more than 23 years.

Service members are being discharged into the civilian labor force in large numbers.

Physical and mental casualties have been greater than in prior wars, when more soldiers may have died but relatively fewer were injured.

The new Obama initiative against ISIS/ISIL announced a few hours ago is designed to avoid more American "boots on the ground".

The Challenge of Transition to Civilian Life 

Recently discharged soldiers may well be older than typical hires in the business and at the level they go into. They may bypass entry-level jobs if they are fortunate, or they may have to start at the bottom with younger people. If military retirees are to adjust successful to the transition to the private sector, the case for their retiring early may be stronger for military employees than for the workforce in general.

All of which opens up planning issues. Many veterans and their spouses face career difficulties following discharge of the active-duty partner, as the rhythm and requirements of military life is replaced by those of civilian life. Re-entering civilian life may be a major adjustment.

The anguish of some discharged soldiers is spilling onto the Internet, as individuals write about their shared experiences in the Middle East theater and inability of civilians to grasp what it was like.

The military services know that the adjustment is not easy and they have been developing programs to address the issues, for example:

• Helping active-duty personnel find civilian counterparts to their military specialties. 
• Providing guidance in their search for work. 
• Coaching veterans interested in becoming entrepreneurs.

The government has been releasing more information on these topics than in the past, thanks to great congressional interest in this subject. Congressional questions include:

• Where have transitional programs succeeded best? 
• How do veterans' paychecks and job titles change when they leave military service?

The U.S. Job Market - Weak for Everyone Since 2008

A starting point for appreciating the job market into which soldiers are being discharged is to appreciate how big a hit the American job market took because of the financial-markets crisis that peaked win September 2008 with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

(I started writing this post a year ago and decided to think some more about it before I published it. That is why the next three charts are a year old.)

Employment-Population Ratio, U.S., 2003-2013

Source: BLS http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000. Also on FRED 

database. Paul Krugman commented on his blog. Latest 2014 data show the
ratio has climbed to 59 percent, still four percentage points below 2007.

The number I would like to focus on is the ratio of the number of employed people relative to the population.

This ratio jumps around less than the unemployment number because it does not depend on the survey answers of a relatively small sample of households about which members of the household are described as "unemployed". 

The employment figures are not affected by answers to Census workers about variations in who is able to work, who is actively looking and who is prevented from working by school or care for a family member.

As shown in the chart above for all U.S. workers, the employment-population ratio was in the 62-63 percent range through mid-2008. Then it fell precipitously as the financial meltdown occurred. It has remained in the doldrums in the 58-59 percent range since the second half of 2009. That's a four-point drop.

The Different Job Experience of Male and Female Veterans

How do the employment-population ratios look for veterans? The "population" number could be computed a number of different ways, but the comparisons within the age cohorts should not be greatly affected by the way of population is defined, provided it is consistent.

The basic conclusion from the data for male veterans is that they are dropping out of the labor force in 2013 compared with 2012. Why? It's just one year's change, but here are some possibilities:

• Veterans of more distant wars may be dropping out because their skills are less in demand.
• Veterans of the Gulf War-era II - i.e., the most recently discharged veterans - are dropping out of the work force most significantly, meaning perhaps that the psychological wounds are most serious for them. 
• Gulf War-Era I veterans, i.e., veterans of the pre-2001 Gulf War, are showing an increase. This could mean eventual adjustment of veterans after discharge, or a greater need for the leadership skills developed during military service later in life. 
• The numbers could also mean something else, that preparedness for violence is not perceived as a big plus for young men entering most parts of the civilian workplace, and it is not therefore an asset in looking for work.

    Employment-Population Ratio by Service Era
Male Vets vs. Non-Vets, % (BLS Table A-5)

Source: BLS Table A-5, October 22, 2013 (1.usa.gov/13E9YV)

Women veterans, however, are increasing their presence in the labor force. All of their numbers are up. The Gulf War I veterans are again doing the best, with a 10.5 percentage point increase in their participation. Why are the numbers different from those for male veterans?

• Preparedness for violence may be seen as more of a big plus for women who have to work on night duty, or with customers who could be violent, or with co-workers who are men and may have difficulty adjusting to a female supervisor.
• Because fewer women go into military service, they are pre-selected as being willing to be different. This fact alone may be viewed positively by a civilian employer.
• These advantages in the civilian work force show up most clearly among Gulf War-era I veterans. It may be that younger female veterans are more likely than older ones to have skills that are  transferable to a civilian job from active-duty service.

Employment-Population Ratio by Service Era 
Female Vets vs. Non-Vets, % (BLS Table A-5)

Source: BLS Table A-5, October 22, 2013 (1.usa.gov/13E9YV)

These conclusions are speculative, but may be useful in addressing a real problem. Since I have limited time to work on this topic, I am posting these thoughts with the idea that someone else might be inspired to pick up on them. Do the 2014 data show a continuing trend? (The veterans'  numbers are published in detail every year.) 

WW1 | Tower of London Memorial

"Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red", an installation by Paul Cummins
and a team of volunteers to remember British soldiers who fell in the
Great War.

The British have set the standard for remembering their dead.

A London art installation features a Red Sea of 888,246 ceramic poppies - one for every British and Commonwealth soldier who died during World War I. It is shown at left.

The poppy became a symbol of World War I dead and Armistice Day because of "In Flanders Fields", the great poem by the Canadian John McCrae who was a battlefield physician in Belgium in 1915.  An excellent video with readings from War Poets appears here.

Most of the poppies were laid in the moat of the Tower of London throughout the summer by the artist Paul Cummins and more than 100 volunteer assistants.

The installation was opened in August, 100 years after the first hostilities of World War I. The last flower will be planted on November 11, Armistice Day, 1918.