Bertie Maarsen Full Testimony

identification we'll just go for five you could just set it down okay okay my name is Bertie Marcin and I was born in the centre of Amsterdam Holland in 1936 and when the war broke out in 1940 by that time my parents had divorced and I lived with my mother in the southern part of Amsterdam my father was a lawyer and he had remarried and he remarried a lady who was came from a Catholic family and so his marriage was considered by the Germans a mixed marriage and I lived with my mother it was at that time an only child and she was and stay home mom and we had really a very not too exciting lifestyle we didn't go out and off a lot by the time that 1940 came around and the Germans invaded Holland in May of 1940 I was four years old I didn't go to preschool and a couple years later when I was supposed to go to elementary school at age six I was not allowed to go to school because I was Jewish it was in Holland this situation that if children went to school and were at school they would be transferred to an all Jewish school and well in my case I never went to school fortunately I could read at a very early age probably about age four or five but I couldn't write yet and of course having no schooling it's it's kind of disconcerting because you don't have any friends and it's just was very hard in 1940 thinks in Holland weren't as bad as they were in other countries because apparently Germany kind of considered Holland almost like another province and they left the people who were running the country kind of by themselves to run the country and hadn't more an oversight position the first year or so not a lot of things happened but little by little just like in Germany people were not allowed to teach doctors were not allowed to see non-jewish patients people all over lost their livelihood in my case my father was a lawyer and he had his clients and he felt that probably because he was married to a non-jewish lady he was protected for a while that did work about his family my father's family he came out of a family of six he was the oldest boy his parents first had three girls and then they had three boys and my father didn't trust the situation at all one of the reasons was probably because being a lawyer he he had as his clients a lot of German Jews who came from Germany and as and settled in Holland thinking that things would be better in the late 30s so he was very familiar with the situation that was in Germany and he tried to persuade his a sister some brothers to go into hiding it did work with some of them actually we lost during the war we lost my grandmother and grandfather both both of natural causes but that were brought on really by the situation of the war my grandmother in fact died of diabetes and breast cancer and one of the reasons was that she died very early in the war years was that they couldn't get any insulin anymore from England and so she died of that and then my grandfather could not handle at being cooped up in a place and became very senile and he died of natural causes also I think in about 1942 and my father was still a practicing law in early 1943 and he was of a conviction that we we all should go into hiding and so he begged my mother to go into hiding with me and that he would try to find him and find him a place to go and she refused and she said we are okay and one of the reasons she felt that she was not as much in danger was because she was she looked like Hitler's ideal person high blond and blue eyes and not particularly Jewish you're looking and when I when I now go to schools I always try to tell them what that means it means a Mediterranean look that means Spanish people look that way Italians look that way kind of olive colored skin dark and fairly pronounced nose that is the the the idea that people have of Jewish people that it isn't true we we know that now but in the war it was very helpful to be blunt in blue right and it's just a fact I myself I had bright red hair actually like my grandmother bright red hair in kind of greenish eyes and didn't look particularly Jewish I have a cousin who was the same age as I was our our fathers were brothers she was very dark dark hair typical Jewish looking and had a far harder time than I had so my mother in not having a job and not going out a lot except to go to the grocery store and perhaps go shopping if she had to with a very subdued and simple lifestyle she didn't want to put the Star of David on her clothes and mark herself cause being Jewish so she didn't do it and so she went around for quite a while without with without the Star of David when that was the Germans you had to do that and apparently we were betrayed the person is in our little street we were in a southern part of Amsterdam and just a small kind of a duplex building there was somebody industry who apparently betrayed all the Jewish families within about a mile radius that they knew and and kind of sold them out to the Germans why people do that a just big question that might be might have been a bottle of wine a bread as loaf of bread or some kind of other favors but early January in 1943 in the middle of the night and truck stopped in front of our house and there was a banging on the door and we were ordered to go with the Germans who are standing there they allowed my mother five minutes to pack I was told to put everything on that I could find one layer over another it was bitterly cold because it can be very very cold in Holland in in january/february and I was allowed to take one thing to take with me one toy I took a doll that was kind of a special doll and it is not that important to my life story but it was part of it in that time what your prized possession was was a doll with your own hair and as I had bright curly red hair that that really was kind of special to me so I grabbed that thing and I don't remember because I was still young I was six years old I don't remember if we had a suitcase with us it's still a question in my mind I can't ask my mother anymore and I don't know she probably would have had a small suitcase or something but we were ordered out of her house I had to leave everything and we were driven to an interrogation place where they put me in the waiting room and they took my mother into another room my mother told me after the war she survived and she she did tell me that I was very unruly and very upset and that I screamed and hollered and didn't want to be separated from her which of course is a normal reaction I suppose because I was frightened after a while they interrogated my mother and she found out that she was there because she didn't wear the Star of David and the yellow star was that was ordered by the Germans so she was in violation and that is why her papers had a big s on it and the letter S was for strife that means in English punishment so she was a punishment case because she didn't put the yellow star on her clothes after the irrigation we were taken to what they called a theater and this was a Jewish theater where where the workplace and everything else you know music and it was a little bit like building like the Paramount I always compare it with the Paramount here because it's one of those vertical theaters with different layers of balconies and levels where you can't see the play there were thousands of people there because what they did in Holland a it's a small country Holland is about a fourth of the size of the state of Washington at that time it had about 15 million people and they took everybody from all over to that particular place as kind of like a transit you can say camp because we couldn't get out it was a jail and so they had taken all the seats out and they there were thousands of people there so of that that episode in that in that building I do remember being so young my memory is not as vivid as somebody who was older and I think a lot of it is lost and a lot of it I kind of was able to reconstruct off the story but I do remember that every evening all the children in that building in that theater had to go across the street and there was an attic there and all the children from age about one and a half two years from the time that they could walk to teenagers 14 15 16 years old were brought across the street by the hundreds to go sleep in the Attic while the Attic was just a big empty place straw on the floor and we were told to go sleep and that's what you had to do and of course there was a lot of crying because the kids were very little kids were very very frightened the the the street in front of that theater was just a regular city street that is only in the eastern part of Amsterdam with some street cars going through it and those street cars apparently for some people played a role because people kind of disappeared when there was a street car going by because the guards couldn't see through the through the street car in my case that the street was of course empty when hundreds of kids were crossing there and the first evening that we had to go there everything was fine I took my doll with me because that was my prized possession but when we were upstairs in the Attic and there were all these kids there and kids were crying there was next to me a little girl about 2 years old and just just sobbing and so frightened and so I finally said to her why don't you just take my doll she'll she'll help you and she'll protect you and and I tried to to calm her down and she was fairly okay and then the next morning I let her keep my doll because she was so distraught and when we came across the road again and went into the theatre that I remember vividly because they brought us to the upper level of that building and all I saw was thousands of people and my mother I couldn't find I couldn't see and then I panicked and apparently I screamed so hard that my mother hurt me downstairs and of course thinking about it now as an adult you think by yourself I will why were you so worried these people couldn't get out so she was there but you could have found her but you don't think that way when you're six and a half year old so just panic so my mother heard me and found me and we spent another day there she had been able she was allowed one phone call and she had called my father and told him that we were in jail there in the in the theater and of course my father was shocked and what I found out from him just a couple years before he died in 1996-1997 he died just a couple years before that I was able to talk with him about it because after the war like many other mother other parents of people that I talked to the same thing happened to all of us our parents didn't want to talk about it and but he did tell me that he worked his network he called his clients he called his family please please help birdy is in Verde and I'm rather in the jail we have to get her out so he tried to get in touch with the underground which was difficult because this was not his normal clientele and finally I think it took him a day and finally he got into touch with a lady a student at the University of Amsterdam who said that she probably could help him they gave her a picture of me and well and and told her that I had red hair and you know they had enough material for her to to see what it looked like she said she would try and so the second evening when I went across the street before I left my mother didn't tell me what had transpired on phone itis of course I was too young and she the only thing she said to me I want you to be very obedient and do what people tell you and you have to promise me that and I said yes feather she didn't say anything and then when I went across the street to go to the Attic somebody took my hand and said birdie and I said yes come with me so she took me across the street with all the other children and then in it was pitch dark it's it's dark at night she took me to a building these are all kind of brownstone buildings so they're attached to each other she took me two doors down to the left where there was a Day Nursery oh it was a daycare center for children and she knocked on the door and somebody opened the door there and she said and she said goodbye to me and left and so there was a kind of a nurse there somebody and there were hardly any children because it was evening and I was told to go to bed and one of the things that kind of now I sometimes think about that I do not remember of the several days that I was in the in the in the theater also not in a nursery I don't remember eating I don't remember what I must have had some food but I do not remember what it was and how how it was where it came from I have no idea it mystifies me because memory is selective sometimes and I'm probably I was so much in shock by everything that I forgot these kind of trivial things like eating but anyway in that that night what I remember of that was that I was told to go in a bed that was too small and age six and a half I was very tall for my age I don't know why that happened because I'm only 5 feet 2 now but I was very tall and I didn't really fit in a 3-year crib and I remember being so uncomfortable I couldn't stretch my legs and I thought why do I have to sleep there anyway it wasn't I was an upset child I guess but by next morning about 5:30 in the morning my stepmother came to get me and later on I found out that this what they called the creche that is the kind of French Dutch word for a daycare center saved hundreds and hundreds of children the same way I was saved by letting kids disappear in this trip from there from the theater to across the street to the to the attic most of the children who were safe that way went next door where there was a Christian school and disappeared through the the back of the buildings which was alone you know at a yard they went into the building next door and then out in the tree street you know when it was safe to go because there were lots of kids going to school there in my case my stepmother she got me early in the morning she had a real she said it was the most frightening day of her whole life because I had no papers she did she was non-jewish so but we didn't dare to take that street guard this was in the eastern part of Amsterdam we walked to the middle of Amsterdam quite took us quite a while it's quite a long distance and I do remember her pulling on my arm faster-faster-faster and we went through little streets avoided the big streets because there were soldiers you know everywhere and made it to my my father's house which was an apartment on the third floor in the middle of Amsterdam that's the house where I was born in fact situated across from the Heineken brewery the old building and on the canal and she took me that same afternoon to her sister I have to stop well when when this has happened this happened to me and I was in the in the theater still and they were trying to get me out she had made my stepmother had made a call to her sister who with her brother-in-law and two teenage daughters lived very close to the German border in eastern part of Holland about 15 miles from the border there her brother-in-law was the postmaster in that small town and her sister the the the conversation that she had with her sister could not have been normal because the Germans listened in on all the conversations on phone on the phone lines so I suspect that the probably the conversation went a little bit like hello Joe this is will you know I wanted to deliver a package to you I'd like to come tomorrow if that is possible I offered to bring you that and I'd like to see you she knew exactly what was going on her sister because I think probably they over the years they they talked about this kind of thing not this happening but about the war and about the fact that you know she my stepmother had married a Jewish man so my stepmother took me in the train which was also a very risky proposition because I had no papers and we made it okay it was about to our two to two and a half hour train ride to the eastern part of Holland and she delivered me to her sister brother-in-law and the two teenage daughters I was given a bed in her in her youngest daughter's bedroom shared that with her and I stayed there for two and a half years this was in January 1943 and we were liberated in April of 1945 this is the eastern part of Holland which was liberated by the Canadian Army in at that time Holland is a very small country as I said about a fourth of the state of Washington but the interesting thing is that the country during the war was kind of divided in three zones the western zone where all the big cities are was really occupied by the Nazis and was really the worst many of the Jewish children especially survived on in the country in the middle part or in eastern part and in the middle part of the country my father after this had happened to me and after I I was saved from the theater the Nazis came to his door just a little bit later I think it was probably a month or two months later they knocked on the door they there was a very long staircase you have these high staircases in in Holland with these these brownstone buildings and so you have a little time and he had in his house so the house where I was born they had a hollow wall and they had taken something that he could go and move something aside and then go into that area and hide his wife my stepmother was an actress and it's in an opera singer and that came in very handy because the Germans came up on the staircase and where is your husband she said my husband my husband you're talking about my husband he's a terrible man he has treated me well anyway she made such a fuss and she gave him such a bad bad rap but they didn't believe her they took her to jail and so my stepmother spent two days in jail they tried to break her but that didn't work she all her theatrics she brought into being there and it actually saved my father's life they sent her home after two days they couldn't do a thing with her and well of course when she came home my father knew that time was up and he had to disappear so he he apparently I think they had a car that brought him to the middle part of Holland it's in a place called Mary Meehan and Nathan is very close to Arnhem where later on the battle of our team took place it was a cousin of my stepmother she had a large family a large Catholic family and so they took him in he was in an attic room for two years almost year and a half and for a person who was as active as my father was it was really punishment for him because he I could go out I could be in a house I could go downstairs or upstairs I couldn't go outside he couldn't go anywhere so he was stuck in that attic room and what saved his life he told me later from going insane in there he started to collect stamps and came out of the war with quite a stamp collection because my stepmother would buy things for him and just kept him busy kind of and she went back and forth to Amsterdam but decided at one point that she better you know stay with him and that was a good decision because very shortly after you couldn't travel freely from one place to another so they spent I think she spent there probably about a year with him in the meantime my mother we left her at the theater as far as my my story goes when I didn't come back the next morning she just hoped that everything had gone well and she went to the to the restroom and tore up her papers and flushed it through the toilet so she didn't have any papers anymore so when her turn came to show her papers she said I don't have them there are too many people here it's so chaotic I don't know where they are I lost him and what could they do they they they just kind of believed her and she was so she they didn't he never confronted her about the fact that I had gone that I was not there so because she did that they sent her to fit and fit is a little town in in the southern part of Holland it's kind of also like a transit camp but it was a Dutch camp not far from actually not that far from Amsterdam while she was there she they they punished people by putting them outside in the frost in the snow and they had to stand on uphill they called it an uphill where every person was called by name and if you were called by name you could go inside but that took hours because there were hundreds of people there probably thousands and at one time as she she stood outside there and they they called her name and she could go inside but she was numb her feet didn't she didn't feel anything anymore her legs and feet were numb so she was not in the best of condition to climb upon a little stool in order to get to her bed her bed was up it was there were two layers upstairs and downstairs and so and she slipped on the on the stool fell and broke her leg well the Germans didn't have much pity they left her in her bed for a week and by that time her leg was so swollen that it was just horrendous she was able to contact her fiance in who was investor work at a time he was a man she was engaged to he had volunteered to go to Westerbork he was in an accountant they didn't need him there and in order to do that they kind of he felt he could save his parents and so he had been there for a while and then he heard that she was you know she had broken her leg he finally sent her to honing in to the academic hospital they said her leg and put her in in a cast and then sent her to Westerberg so they were together daring Westerberg in about the end of February of 1943 they decided to get married in the camp they felt they had a better chance of surviving probably with the two of them so in March they were married by a minister a Protestant minister because my stepfather had been baptized before the war already to be Protestant and so she went into the same religion my my mother and nor my father nor my mother were observant my father went for one year to study for as a rabbi and then he went to his Orthodox parents and told them that this was not his cup of tea and he liked to go to loss law school so that's when my father ended up a lawyer and he after the war he ended up really agnostic he he did not believe in religion anymore like many people did after the war they kind of left their religion and some of them became more devout so dependent on the person and so I lost my drink I have to stop so my dad was it wasn't hiding in a me and that area was liberated in September of 1944 by the American army by the parachutists Battle of Arnhem and so he was free in the end of September he was free to go where he wanted but he couldn't get back to Amsterdam so you had to stay with his family while longer what he did do though was he he offered himself as and and kind of like a counselor to the American army he was fluent in English and to help to be kind of an intermediary between the Dutch government and the American army who was there so that gave him something to do and thinks of course for him were much better what what happened with me he knew that I was at of course at my aunt's and uncle's house he did not know how I was because all the communications like telephones they were impossible they were besides that when the middle of the country was kind of liberated there were no communications there were no phone lines everything was cut you know bridges were gone I mean even the roads were not passable in my hiding time I was in a large house and it was one of those in the Dutch towns there are really almost always just three big buildings and one a city hall and one is the church some kind of church usually Catholic Church and the third big building is always the post office and the post offices in those small towns in in Holland are everything together that means the front is supposed to office upstairs are the bedrooms in the back are the living quarters for the post and because it was a large house and because we were away from the kind of the front it was fairly easy to hide in I was supposed I was not not I was not to go near the windows I had to stay always only inside and it happened to have a large yard in the back with a garden with vegetables they had a lot of red currant bushes which are not very well known he understates I found but red currant bushes have very dense leaves they are bare in the winter but in the summer they deform kind of like a hedge you can't look through it and they had hundreds of them and that was in their yard and the yard was like an English garden with a brick wall around it that nobody could look through and so I was allowed in the summertime to to go outside and do some work there and I guess that's where I got my taste of gardening because I still like it we grew some vegetables they had a big brick their house was brick so I could play with my ball against brick wall but that was all the movement I could do I didn't have any friends yeah nobody knew I was there I was actually they called it later it was an i life of non-existence just a couple years ago one of the teenage girls at that time she was in her 80s was still alive and she mentioned to me do you remember we had this Christmas party and she gave in his whole story about this Christmas party and I said her name was hum and I said hum you forget one thing I didn't exist she said what do you mean and I said I wasn't at that party there were other people there nobody knew I was there oh my gosh I forgot so that was just a fact when people came I had to go upstairs sit in a chair or sit on a bed or lie on a bed and not move because they were afraid it was an older home when you walked upstairs she could hear downstairs and being in a small town and having two teenage daughters they couldn't go to a store and buy me books not even from the library because why do you need children's books you know your kids are 15 and 19 you know that was too dangerous and so my they sold my clothes the thing of that I didn't have at the end of the world was shoes was impossible yeah they couldn't get me shoes I had a piece of wood anime my feet and with some kind of a leather strap around it and my sweaters well the oldest daughter their home she was a knitter and she left in it so she would take an old of one of her old sweaters took the yarn took it all took it all out and use that yarn to knit me little sweaters and I had an example of how strange actually memory works a couple years ago she died last year so it's probably four or five years ago I was visiting her and when I was talking to her and I said hum I get this image in front of me I see this cobalt blue knit sweater and it has little white duckies on it in Endora knit in well she said of course I need you that and I said how come today I think about that now 60 years away from the from the war she said I always knit it's animals in your sweaters that's memory I've never thought about that before but anyway they kept me closed because of sewing and all kinds of things the one of the problems was of course to keep me busy and here I got real lucky because hum the oldest daughter had a fiancee and he was an elementary school teacher and he was one of the very few people who knew that I was there of course he came there often and he taught me how to write and he gave me the homework for his kids so when the kids kept in school got homework I got homework too so he kept me very much up on things like English and I'm not English but that's writing mathematics a little bit of algebra here and there but they were elementary school level things so at least I could read and write and that has been really a bonus for me in my later school life you know that I could at least fit in in some way during my time there two and a half years we had we had some some really kind of fairly dangerous things happening first of all we were very close to Germany and in the last year of the war we had the v1 and v2 s ballistic or actually there are what he calls things well you looked in the sky you saw this ball moving from one font one point to another and the supplies for these kind of missiles I guess they were they were loaded upon in a little railroad station very close to our house and the Allied people they they they bombed them sometimes so we had bombs going off and fairly tricky situations we had sirens going very often and I've escaped a couple times in very tricky situations I was once working at a desk near a window and my aunt called me and I didn't come right away and she was very angry with me she said birdy when I call you you have to come immediately and when she was saying we heard his big bang and we're at set the window had shattered and can we lost a lot of windows that time you know very tricky things we had a light we have a lot of airplanes going over bombing the rural area of Germany where all the heavy steel fabrications were for their tanks for their trucks for whatever and the Allied bombed them very often during raids at night and when those happened the sirens went off into town and we hid in a root cellar in the garden so this was big fun for me I was I I didn't have that sense of danger that adults had so you went in your pajamas you went through the garden and then you had to go into some kind of root cellar and there you sat on the lap of somebody you know they always had me on the left what I do remember of that root cellar is kind of interesting I of course visited the place several times after the war is the smell it had a mouth smell musty mousy smell and I still remember that but it was not a place of fear for me it was kind of well it was excitement and then when the raid was over we could go back home sometimes we they did not put on the sirens and sometimes we slept through whatever happened but then in the morning you could see you looked outside in the garden and there were all these aluminum strips on the on the ground apparently this was - it had something to do with the radar to confuse the radar I used to collect them that whole bunches of those things another thing was that we were we were in a big house and next to us on the other side of a small street so across the street was the headquarters of sizing court who is the guy who was at the they're actually the command of all of Holland we were right under their noses they made my aunt very angry because they had all these young girls sunning themselves on the roof and we looked right under and she said here they're pure again I mean this was not very accepted at that time but anyway the crazy thing is they never asked to search the place the only time that we had a fairly close call is when they came to the door in in the end of summer and they said to my my aunt you have fruit on your trees she said yes we do she said we wanted so she said there's the letter pick it so we didn't have to fruit but we had the fact that they didn't come in the house now one of the things that we also have during the war was of course I'd never went out except two times apparently my my cousin hung reminded me of that because I had forgotten she said they went we went out twice when there was very little light very little moon and they put a big hat over my my my hair and we went around the block twice in two and a half years that's the only time that I was actually on the street and I'm sure that my aunt Joe did not want us to do that but Tom thought that was an adventure come on let's go but anyway another thing happened while I was there it was a family of four which I joined and I actually I was part of their family I ate with them it at the same table there was nobody who could look into the window from the back because we had a big garden outside and nobody was in there that somebody joined us and that was the fiance or actually the boyfriend at that time of the younger daughter who was about 15 16 and he was about 6 foot 2 about 17 was ordered to go to Germany and he didn't want to go so he went into hiding also in our place and here is the difference in going into hiding and they didn't know what to do with me because there was not one place in the whole in the whole house or anywhere where I could really physically disappear in so what they did to protect me they taught me all the a lot of the Roman Catholic prayers because what the Germans did they would come in a house and he would suspect a child to be Jewish and they knew that the family was Catholic and of course you know the Catholic prayers when you were born into it and the Catholic household and so that's what they did and they also told me that I my parents were dead and they have been killed in the bombardments of Rotterdam at the beginning of the war so I was an orphan and they had taken me and that was the official the official version and then of course I knew the prayer so they I couldn't be tricked that way for him for for honey was his name when he came to live with us and and went into hiding that was a different story he had to disappear so if they would search the house that they couldn't find him and so what they did they in a closet in a coat closet or actually in a closet in one of the after rooms upstairs in the bedrooms they have the ceiling could be moved to the side and they installed a couple of rings gym rings where he could pull himself up in so if somebody came to the door that's where he had to go move it aside go use the Rings to go into you know above above the the closet and then put it back so you couldn't see anything from the outside so he could physically disappear and that is and actually it was a very good friend to me because I told him many many many times that after the war we were going to get married that was my fantasy of age they took or something but anyway he did married a younger daughter later after the war and we did all survive at the end of the war the last half a year was the hunger winter in Holland in the western part people were punished by the Nazis because some things had happened some some Germans had been shot or something and they did the same thing that they actually did with salla Stalingrad they they killed the population by not feeding them and so as it was the most severe winter we have ever had in Holland a lot of people died they died on the street they froze they there was no heat there was no food no nothing that was the winter that people ate tulip bulbs and that is not a story that is a real that was real life there is somebody in fact living in this Seattle area that who went through that he's not Jewish but he was on a farm and they didn't have any food and he has recipes for cooking tulip bulbs and I know him very well it's he joined me for a talk in his school one time and so the kids got really kind of an an idea of how it went to for our different population groups anyway the children little children the Germans allowed parents to send children to the east they came in big trucks by the hundreds to the families in the East because and that was the kind of the the breadbasket of the West is full of very fertile lands big farms cattle big farms with vegetables and everything else so we had enough food and eased and so the the the the Germans allowed kids to be sent there so we got a little three-year-old living with this so then my my aunt and uncle had not a family of four but a family of seven and food was scarce and was rationed we had rations for four people for seven people so what she did was she was of course the postmasters of life which gives you a certain status you know in a small town she took all our Linens she took all her silver went to the big farms and got his food and I cannot he when I go to schools kids always ask me if I was hungry and I can honestly say never we could not go to the store and buy chocolate and candy and all this kind of stuff you know but we have the basics we have bread we had potatoes we have sometimes vegetables not too much what I remember lots of bacon lots of eggs and butter and milk and that's actually all you need to survive on and that's my my aunt did for us to survive physically fortunately I was healthy I didn't need a doctor ever in those two and a half years and well that is it that that is my you know that the worst part was that I didn't have friends that I couldn't play that I didn't have school and that when the war ended in April of 1945 we were liberated by the Canadian by the Canadian Army that was the first time for me as far as the war was concerned it still is affecting my life at this time I'm very sensitive to noises I when rock music hit my ear I am hiding I can't handle it the Blue Angels are my foes I hate them I I have very bad reactions actually on it I worked a couple years ago or a couple ten years ago I worked in Seattle and I didn't realize they were practicing there did Blue Angels were practicing there their routines and they used to go in between the buildings to the office buildings in Seattle and I suddenly had this noise and I hit I hit the ground I was flat on the ground like that total gut reaction of course and I remember people asked me are you okay and I said yeah I was totally totally out of it and that is what I I think originates in our liberation there because the Canadian Army came in and the Germans who of course were all all powerful in the town had set up a machine gun in front of the front door there were grenades exploding all over and when that started my aunt and uncle put us all in basements that means we had a cellar under the house also and that cellar she had stocked with food she was very very smart lady stocked with food so we would have food in case we ever needed to be there and we were there and who came over there to sit with us with our neighbors from across the street because they didn't have any place to hide they didn't have a basement and so they must have been really surprised to see me there but at that time it didn't matter anymore and so we all stayed there for several days and the only time that we were allowed to go out of there was to go to the restroom in fact and then my my aunt would say quick quick quick quick you know and what I'll never forget is after about three days of fighting and a German show a soldier coming down the staircase into the basement where we were I never forget that he came down the staircase and all I saw was bloodied muddied boots and he asked my aunt for a wine do you have some wine some alcohol for my wounded and she said okay so she gave him everything she had so he moved up again and left and I took I took several days and the noise was deafening and we were kind of in a little daylight basement we had one window and we put all kind of blankets in there because things were flying around so much to keep safe we had to to be there it was an early April and it was Easter in fact I think it was Easter day that we were finally liberated and then of course people went out in the street and my aunt Joe said you are not going out and I said but I want to go out she said no no no you stay inside was she was very smart there were several people killed that day because they were still snipers from the buildings they just kept people down left and right but anyway after that that happened in early April the Canadian officers came in and asked hers asked my aunt if they could have part of the house because they had no place to stay the officers fine so we moved all in the bed in some of the bedrooms and they we gave them a couple rooms and that was my couple weeks that I taught them Dutch of course I had to teach them something and they gave me a very prized possession and well when I go to schools that seems to really get the attention of my after truth school kids they gave me chocolate I hadn't seen I'd seen chocolate for five years or six years or something and he gave me a bar of every chocolates dark red wrapper the wrapper is still the same anyway and well that blasted me a week I think I gave people little pieces here and there and I took some myself and then of course they taught me English those were my first English words were you know and taught there my aunt after after liberation in her first week of April she tried she knew that my father was free in the middle part of Holland but the big question was how do we get there because all the bridges were blown up and it was very hard to get somewhere in a straight line you had to go around and and it was forbidden I was a civilian and I was not to move but by the third week in April she had found somebody she knew in the Army in the Dutch army and she asked him if if he could get me to my father and he first said no and then he said ok but then I had to sit under a cloth in the back of a jeep he had to hide me because officially you're not allowed to and so I did go I think it took us two days to get a hundred miles from there because the roads were all gone and and but anyway he did deliver me on my ninth birthday on the 22nd of April in a me and to my father and I'm sure he did not know that I was coming and it must have been quite emotional for him in for me of course I stayed with my stepmother and my father for a little while we couldn't Holland was not liberated the western part was not liberated until May of 1945 and we didn't travel until about June yes and went back to the house where my father lived and where I was born and things weren't like they were when they left it because and the underground and the Germans had there they just squatted all these houses and you don't know anything that was not nailed or big was God and they did they did have to furniture because in Holland you can't get your furniture off the staircase it's impossible to almost has to go on the outside of the building they didn't go through that trouble but the rest there was an awful lot God and but we did have a roof above our heads which was very important in 1945 I stayed with them for a while and then they they tried to find out what happened to my mother and of course the Red Cross had a lot of Records and we found out that she was a Switzerland and what had happened to my mother after she joined her fiance and rest of our kin got married there they were there for quite a while they were there much longer than most people and we have not been able to find out exactly when she was they went through two duration start Terezin to the camp and I think that was probably in the end of 1943 probably 1944 in Terezin they had of course very hard time I don't know an awful lot of it after the war when my mother finally came back to Holland she wanted to talk about it and I was 9 9 years old and I didn't want to hear about it and so actually I missed the boat a little there because it's one of my regrets that I never really talked with her a lot about her camp experience I know that my stepfather was a fairly heavy and very tall man and he was under 100 pounds when he came from Terezin they were bought out by the Swiss Red Cross in exchange for trucks and that is how I think a couple hundred people were put in a train and they got to choice they were asked did they want to go and my mother said when they were talking about it well why did we stay here we could die here anyway we might as well go yeah but how do you know where you're going well they didn't and she said they just they just thought they might as well go and he ended up in sang Colin in the German part of Switzerland we're very well taken care of by the Swiss government were put up in a hotel God some kind of an a mentor family they got assigned a Swiss family who had volunteered and tried to get back into society and as it happened they came back to Holland in about July August around that time they came back from and of course I hadn't seen my mother in two and a half years more than two and a half years didn't recognize her she was pregnant with my my brother Jo who was born in October didn't really want to be with her must have been very very hard on my mother but then you I liked my father I loved my father and my stepmother and I was comfortable there but you know according to the law she was my she is she you come and she was my guardian so I had to live with her but they didn't have a place to live so first we lived for about a month in an attic somewhere in the south of Amsterdam and then we got a house and that is where my brother was born in October after my brother was born in October he she contracted typhus which killed a lot of people in the camps but there was a carrier in that part of the in that part of the city and this man was a mail carrier so he gave milk to everybody you know the good would go along with the cards that took him a while to find out who it was because a lot of people got sick she ended up in the hospital with my little brother who was probably hardly two months old and she survived so did my brother and in in July or actually probably in June of 1945 my father felt that I should go to school and as a matter of fact they they sent me to a public school where anti-semitism was very rampant where no teacher cared a darn about a Jewish child we hadn't had any schooling I was still totally a social had no idea to how to play games I was good in math and I was good in in in in in writing I could do all those things that was a plus but I was a mess and then on top of that to have a bright red hair in elementary school carrot top I was yelled at and I was teased constantly so by the time that summer vacation came it became very clear that I couldn't stay in a school like that and so they looked for another school and I ended up in September in what they called a Dalton school which is very similar to Montessori and it had smaller classes and it was more well it was more geared towards what kids could do and what kids couldn't do so that helped me and then they decided in the sixth grade to keep the to hold me over for the year so actually I did the fourth the fifth and the sixth grade I came into that school in June of 1945 in the fourth grade so I never had the first second and third and part of the fourth so I I was three years so the fifth sixth and seventh grade I did for three full years and then I was tested by my uncle the brother of my stepfather was a psychologist he came through the war through he was hidden and he came out of it okay in fact he was a neighbor of Anne Frank which is kind of interesting it's the same building where they lived at one time but he tested me and he told my parents that the thing they should do for me is put me in the most difficult school they could find in the country because I was so hungry for learning and it was I think it was kind of reaction because socially I was not accepted and that's the thing I could do and there were a lot of things I couldn't do so looking at it afterwards from from this viewpoint that my age I think I lucked out because they listened to him and they put me in a very difficult gymnasium in Amsterdam which is still existing where he had a lot of languages we had laughing let me read French German English and Dutch and then of course geography history algebra mathematics very very difficult school I was there for two years and then my my my family moved so I I couldn't do it anymore I commuted for a year but it was too hard and so I ended up in a Montessori high school did very well there and then I had after door my father father being a lawyer in wanted to have his daughter take over from him I went to law school for four years and that was at the time we do not have college in Holland it's kind of after high school you have to choose what you want to do so I was fine there and I think the the learning has helped me kind of cope and kind of wipe away the the loss I had because of the war the lady who whom I still think about quite a bit who helped me escape from the theater was a student and apparently she was shot just before the end of the war because she had helped many kids and I feel in now I'm talking into schools in schools and I'm trying to do that also for her that is well I think it came came around just a minute yeah I'm gonna shut it off

Channel: Holocaust Center for Humanity

Views: 8,085

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Id: IlYNXmw_uJM

Length: 69min 29sec (4169 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020