The Other Schindlers (18 page)
Read The Other Schindlers Online
Authors: Agnes Grunwald-Spier
Nothing can compare to the pure evil of the Nazis, who organised the scientific murder of millions of Jews. In South Africa it was oppression, not annihilation. But the frightening connection is that in both cases there was a total intolerance and lack of respect for another race – which is unacceptable on any level.
127
Jaap acknowledges the influence of his parents. ‘We were brought up with high ethical standards, which together with your religion, I believe, contribute to you acting righteously.’ He adds: ‘Why did most people not help the Jews? You should ask them. Maybe they were not in a position to do so, or were too scared. It is possible, of course, that maybe they just didn’t care about their fellow beings.’
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Jaap is extremely modest about his achievements and will not be called a hero: ‘I hate the inappropriate word “hero”. This is an example of the debasement of human values which makes common decency heroism!’
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Why did I do it? Because it was the only normal thing to do. One can’t sit and watch when people are in mortal danger even when you do not know them. While working we got to know more and more Jews and many became friends. Yes, it also became more risky. If the landings at Arnheim in September 1944 (when the German collaborators fled) had happened two weeks later, we would have been caught, as we found from the papers after the war. But we were saved and that is all I can say.
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After a long and fruitful life, Jaap regards the work he did saving Dutch Jews as the time ‘when I was most useful’:
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It is an important thing in my life to feel that I was useful somewhere … that I did not live just to enjoy myself. Nothing else I ever did was as important. A friend of mine said to me that the war was the time he really lived. For me, it was the time I lived the most intensely.
132
Jaap seems to have a feeling for individuals rather than causes:
I don’t know whether I am an humanitarian. I must confess that I don’t get exited by a flood in India or an earthquake in Iran, as tragic as these events may be. But I will automatically help an individual or family, as both my parents always did. My father, being an advocate as I was, had a more general influence on me.
As to South Africa, I was never involved, nor in Holland or here, in any organised politics. I might, however, have influenced some individuals. Sixty years have passed but sometimes I think what happened during those train transports to the
extermination
camps. All I can do is try to forget.
133
When asked about his actions he was humble: ‘Why did I do it? How could you not do it? If I see you drowning, I would get you out. Any decent person with the imagination to do something to help would have helped. If you did not help, you were not decent.’
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On 29 May 2003 Jaap was honoured at Yad Vashem where, in the Remembrance Hall, he was recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations. He had travelled with a group of fifty South African Jews on a solidarity mission and they planted fifty trees in the South African Memorial Forest ‘Golani Junction’. ‘Apparently Mr van Proosdij was overcome by emotion at this ceremony which for him represented the incarnation of an oppressed people into a sovereign nation.’
135
John/Jaap Schoen (1923–2007).
John Schoen’s family provide a similar example of humanitarianism as they brought up their children to be kind to everyone and help people. John grew up in Geldermalsen, about an hour by train from Amsterdam. His father was a supervisor on the railways and they lived near the station:
My father always helped people, every night we had people come to the house wanting a job and my father gave a lot of people a job on the railways. During the war we had a lot of people coming from towns wanting food, my mother always gave food to these people.
136
John was born on 26 July 1923. John said his parents were very loving and
charitable
, but not religious. He said he had a happy family life. John was 21 when in July 1944 his parents were approached by a beautiful young woman from the Dutch Underground. She was aged 20 and John admitted he really fancied her and escorted her back to the station later.
137
She had come from Amsterdam to ask John’s parents to look after a little Jewish girl aged about 5. At the time, John’s brother Joost, known as Joop, was 10 and his sister Trijntje, known as Tiny, was 15. They all knew Suze was Jewish and that keeping her was very risky. However, she looked more Indonesian than Jewish. If the Nazis had found out about Suze, the whole family could have been sent to a camp, but they agreed to keep her.
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John told me that when Suze’s family were rounded up by the Nazis, she must have been at a neighbour’s home because she escaped. John also said the family
members were all sent to Auschwitz and gassed. He says that understandably she was very disturbed when she first arrived at their home and cried a great deal: ‘At first Suze woke up during the night to shout for her mother and father, and was also wetting the bed, but being so young, she accepted my mother as her mother. She loved my mother very much, so did my mother.’
139
John has said that his parents had joined the Underground because they were opposed to the German invasion of Holland, and also because of the Nazis’
persecution
of the Jews. They were involved in sheltering Allied airmen, using a hidden radio and a printing press to pass on vital information.
In September 1944 parts of the Netherlands had been recaptured by British and Canadian troops and they launched Operation Market Garden which was intended to retrieve the rest of the country. The mission failed and the film
A Bridge Too Far
portrayed the story. As a result, a general railway strike was called to disrupt German transports and 90 per cent of the workers supported the strike. Anyone who participated in the strike was in grave danger of being arrested with the risk of death. Therefore, as John’s father still worked for the railways they had to leave their home and go into hiding in Asperen, a small town near Geldermalsen. That hiding place housed the print shop where work was done for the Resistance.
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It should be remembered that the strike led to dreadful repercussions: the Germans had to bring in their own railway workers to get the trains working and therefore decided in October 1944 to forbid the importing of food into the Netherlands. Food rations were reduced from 1,400 calories a day in August 1944 to 1,000 calories in December, and by April 1945 it was down to 500 calories. This winter is known as the ‘Hungry Winter’ and people were so desperate for food that they were eating tulip bulbs.
141
Ria Sanders, who was born in 1926 and lived in The Hague, sent me her recollections of that time. She told me that people ate sugar beet which was normally considered cattle food, and tulip bulbs which were quite nice sliced and fried like onions, but when the power stopped they couldn’t cook even if they had food. She said all rabbits, cats and dogs
disappeared
at that time.
142
Whilst the Schoens were staying in the printing shop, they were nearly betrayed by a Nazi infiltrator, who they thought was also in the Resistance, and asked them to do some printing. A little while later the house was raided by three men with guns who forced their way in asking for a boy of 20. His father said there was no such boy there. Jaap was hiding in one of the two attics, shivering with fear and cold in his pyjamas. Apparently, the ‘Gestapo did not sense that our little girl, the only brunette in a blond family, was Jewish’. They asked Suze what was in the cellar and she said there was nothing but mice. Jaap said:
My mother Anna Johanna started to laugh, to the annoyance of the Gestapo, who told her to put her hands up or they would shoot her. My mother said ladies don’t do things like that, and refused. We were very frightened, but they didn’t shoot her. They went away, and we were safe for another day.
143
Apparently they checked the other attic, so Jaap was not discovered. Jaap recorded that the boy in question was caught eventually, sentenced by a court of two judges and, after digging his own grave, was shot.
144
The sheer absurdity of the Nazis’ methods of control was exemplified by the Dutch being forbidden to grow orange flowers in their garden because they were interpreted as a sign of loyalty to the Dutch queen as head of the House of Orange. John’s father allegedly dug up all their marigolds and put them on the compost heap, only for John’s mother to rescue and re-plant them. He said: ‘She showed great courage throughout the occupation.’
145
It is significant that John has recorded that all his parents’ friends had Jewish girls to hide. Significantly, more Jewish girls were saved all over occupied Europe simply because circumcised Jewish boys were easily identified and were
therefore
a more risky proposition.
146
John Schoen specifically told me there were no Jewish boys hidden in his village.
147
John has said his parents had no Jewish friends themselves because their home was not in an area in which any Jews had lived. However, he has commented that most people in Holland ‘have always kept the Jews in high esteem. Soon after the Germans went to Holland, we saw the Jews wearing the Jewish cross, but as time went on, we saw less and less of them. We knew they were sent to the gas chambers.’
148
He has written of becoming aware that Jews were disappearing and seeing them being transported:
One of the trains packed with Jews on their way to a concentration camp stopped at our village station and I will never forget their faces – full of despair.
There was an immediate reaction – all the onlookers on the platform rushed to buy all the food on the snack trolley to hand in through the train windows to the poor souls.
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Suze became extremely attached to the Schoens and maintained contact with them even after she moved to America. In 1953 Suze came back for Tiny’s wedding,
150
and she visited Anna Schoen in Holland every year until Anna died. Suze married a Jewish policeman, Arnold Brown, in 1956.
John visited Suze in Florida in the mid-1990s and said: ‘It was wonderful to see her again, to know that she had had a long and happy life.’ She had two daughters,
Arleen Rose (1959) and Diane Kitty (1963), but died of lung cancer in May 1999 aged only 60, after suffering for five years. Arnold still maintains contact with John Schoen and has said:
I met Suze in Connecticut in 1953 and we were married three years later. We used to talk a lot about the war, and she told me about how her family had been taken to the camps, and how she had escaped, sheltered by Jaap and his family.
Even though my wife has died, I still talk to Jaap on the telephone from time to time. It’s a kind of bond between us that no amount of time could erase. Without the Schoens, I would never have met and fallen in love with my wife, and I would not have had the wonderful life I was privileged to share with her.
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When I spoke to Arnold Brown, he told me that Suze had been moved from place to place by the Underground, and although the time she spent with the Schoens was very happy, she was very traumatised by her experiences. She did not tell her daughters about those times.
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John joined the Dutch army in June 1945 and for part of his training was stationed at Wolverhampton Barracks in 1946. At a local dance he met Pamela Cox and they were married in February 1947. In May 1947 he was sent to serve in Indonesia until 1950, when he came back to England to set up home with his wife and worked at the local Co-op. They had three children – Christopher (1952), Peter (1955) and Gerard (1959). In 1966 the family moved to Cardiff and John became manager of the food hall at the David Morgan department store; he worked there until he retired in 1984.
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Sadly, John Schoen, my original informant through the CCJ, died on 8 May 2007 aged 83.
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His son Peter has provided some additional family history, and Peter’s cousin Ed van Rijswijk, Tiny’s son, has provided remarkable information about Suze’s story and the work of the Dutch Resistance. He has traced the
family’s
history back to around 1700. Arleen visited Ed in March 2009 when he told her about the research on her mother’s family: Suze’s parents were Samuel van der Bijl (born 23 October 1908) and Alida Hamerslag (9 January 1911) whose children were Bernard (16 November 1931), Kitty (3 February 1933) and Suze (14 January 1939). All five of them were born in Amsterdam. The family were arrested at their home there, Ruyshstraat 98 II, on 20 June 1943. About 5,500 people were arrested that day in the city as a result of a big razzia (a round-up of Jews – similar to Aktion).
155
Ed explained:
In the case of 20th June 1943, a whole section of Amsterdam was sealed off, nobody could get in or out and all the people that lived within that section were taken from their homes. They had to leave their houses with minimal baggage and lock their
houses. Housekeys had to be given to the Germans. Later on all the furniture was taken from these houses and most of it disappeared to Germany. The people had to gather in nearby squares and from there were taken to nearby railway-stations in trucks or trams. The people that were [there] on this day, more than 5,500, went directly to the Westerbork Camp.
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Westerbork was a Dutch transit camp in the north-east Netherlands. The Dutch Jews were either sent there or to Vught. They were then moved to the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland on 13 July 1943 and killed on 16 July 1943. John thought they had gone to Auschwitz, which is understandable as often the victims’ true fates and destinations were not known until after the end of the war, and by then he was in the army. Over 110,000 Dutch Jews were sent either to Auschwitz or Sobibor and some other smaller camps; 75 per cent of these Dutch Jews did not survive.