Seventeen
Moments later I am in another living room as someone searches for a book. A large television is on low volume and there is the warm smell of oven french fries. The floor is strewn with children’s toys. “I’m sorry, the grandkids have been here all morning,” says the man, whose name is Wout de Bond. Thus far he has explained very little, but he has said one thing that comes as a revelation. During the war Lien spent time in this house.
This news disorients me. Lien herself has no recall of the neighbors. Right now Wout is too busy to offer further explanation; he has his back to me and is rummaging through a chest of drawers. Occasionally he pulls out documents and photographs, which are placed on a growing pile. I sit a little awkwardly, full of questions. When could Lien have been here? Why does she not remember it? And how could this man have been born because of her?
Eventually, the book that Wout was looking for is found and handed over, but he has other things that he wants to show me, so he heads out to the kitchen, calling to his wife with a question about a red folder, which he thought was in the drawers.
I am left alone, seated on the sofa. The book that he has left with me is called Bennekom: Jewish Refuge and it has been opened to page 142. There I see a picture that is familiar to me, of Lien aged eleven. Beside it is a small paragraph of text:
At Algemeer 33 with Gijs van Laar there was a Jewish girl, Lientje, in hiding. Lientje belonged to the family and was a total part of it. She attended the Reformed School. She survived the war.
There is nothing else.
I turn back a page and see that the previous entry is devoted to 31 Algemeer, the house where I am now. Here there is much more text as well as two photographs. One shows a three-year-old girl with a checked bow in her hair; it is labeled “Maartje.” The other is of a woman in her twenties who is called Hester Rubens. Both were Jewish and they lived here during the war. “There were many more people in hiding at Number 31,” the book tells me, “but their identities are unknown.”
As with the earlier news that Lien stayed with the neighbors, this information comes as a shock. So there were other Jews in hiding right where Lien lived on Algemeer. When she met Maartje or Hester Rubens, as Lien must have done if she stayed here in this house, she could have had no idea of who they really were. The notion that Bennekom was a Jewish refuge comes as a total surprise to me. I have spent a lifetime visiting this village, and even now, though I have talked to my mother and her family about the work that I am doing, no one has ever mentioned this past.
Still waiting for Wout’s return, I scan page 140, which is devoted to the house across the street. Here too, I learn, there were Jews hidden. A man and a woman, not a couple, lived concealed in an attic space, which could be accessed only through a ladder that ran behind the false wall of a bedroom on the second floor.
Skipping back a few pages, I start the entry at the beginning and read about Bertha Ruurds, a local woman who often visited Algemeer during the war and who even lived for a while on this street. Through small tokens, Bertha signaled her loyalty to the resistance. She planted orange marigolds in her front garden, sold portraits and little tiles that featured the royal family, and distributed copies of the Protestant underground newspaper, Trouw. In this way, she became a point of contact, a distributor of information, always quick to help. Only after the war had ended and the relevant files were gone through was it discovered that Bertha was, in reality, an informer, employed by the Political Police. It was thanks to her that, on September 4, 1943, officers raided 32 Algemeer, right across the street from the Van Laars. The home owner went to prison and Salomon Micheels and Wilhelmina Labzowski, discovered hiding in the attic, were sent straight to Auschwitz as “punishment cases,” both dead before the end of the month.
Two hideout addresses within a few yards of where Lien lived. Another six on the adjoining street. My sense of the one village in the Netherlands that I thought I knew has suddenly changed.
It was, it turns out, not just Algemeer that had secrets. At least 166 Jews spent time in hiding in Bennekom, a village of just five thousand, and more than 80 percent of them survived. This is the opposite of the national picture. So why here, a place in which, in 1940, there were virtually no Jews?
The answer is really twofold. It is the achievement of remarkable people, but it is also the product of history, of connections, and of land. Bennekom is a place of hills, woods, and simple farmyards, which, in terms of landscape, makes it un-Dutch. In the 1930s, the place was known as a holiday resort to Jewish visitors from the cities, and when the war came, it was a natural location to seek out. There was room here for disappearance, and its rental villas, campsites, hotels, and leisure clubs were points of contact through which rescuers might be found.
Help itself, of course, came not from land but from people. For example, from Piet and Anna Schoorl. This couple, who enjoyed sports and motorbiking, owned a food-testing laboratory in the center of the village. In July 1942, Piet got a call from an old acquaintance, a businessman from Rotterdam named Leo van Leeuwen. A few years earlier, before the war started, Leo and his family had come to the village for a vacation, and he and Piet had played tennis together at the local country club. They were hardly close, but Leo was desperate. He and his family had just received their summons for transport to Poland, and so with no other options available, he asked if Piet and Anna might be willing to help them by saving the life of their little girl.
It was the decision of a moment. Piet, who was away on business in the big city, could not even consult his wife. She later described the sudden arrival of a stranger at her doorstep, who brought “a pretty little blond girl with a tear on her cheek.” Anna knew nothing of the situation, had in fact never knowingly met a Jewish person, but she could imagine what had happened. So little Eline, aged just three, was tucked into bed next to the Schoorls’ own daughter, who was four, and hidden from view.
And once contact was established, the connection deepened. Eline’s elder brother, Karel, also came over, and some time later so too did their parents, Leo himself and his wife, Pauline. Then, on top of this, as the crisis deepened, Leo’s cousin and his family joined the group. The pressure on Piet and Anna was almost unbearable, but in spite of this, they decided that it was possible to do more. So they rigged up the laboratory in the village as a safe house, and through Piet’s business connections, put out the call that sanctuary might be found. Families and unaccompanied children now made their way to Bennekom, often to stay only for a while beneath the laboratory before being brought, with the help of the village doctor, Wim Kan, to a permanent address. In this way over fifty people owed their lives to the Schoorls.
And then there was a raid. Police from the big city had heard, through their interrogations, about what the Schoorls were doing and they descended on the house. Amazingly, the hiding place proved effective and no one was discovered, but Piet was arrested soon afterward and spent seven months detained by the SS. By this time a whole network was active: food suppliers, couriers, and locations throughout the village to keep the hideaways safe. Piet kept his secrets and, when released in May 1944, simply resumed his work.
Finally, after the failed Allied landings, while the SS patrolled the streets and requisitioned the houses, the Schoorls one by one cycled a dozen Jewish children—white-faced from their months in hiding—to safety in a forester’s shed on the Keijenbergseweg. From there they were collected a day later, concealed on a wagon among bales of straw. The children survived, as did all the others who relied on the Schoorls.
ONE MIGHT THINK that Piet and Anna would today be remembered through a street name or a statue, that their names would be famous, but this is not the case. After the war, Piet’s business, which was ill equipped for the modern food industry, went under. He got a job at the agricultural college, which to him was a comedown in life. In his declining years he was plagued by depression. When he died in 1980, Anna applied for a war pension, but her request was declined.
As I read about Anna’s disappointment, I am struck by the contrast with the case of the widow of Wim Henneicke, the head of the Search Division of the Hausraterfassung, the Jew-hunting operation that sent around nine thousand to their deaths. In the final stages of the war, Henneicke was shot by the resistance, and afterward, in compensation, his wife was granted a pension of two hundred guilders a month.
WOUT RETURNS, having found the red folder, and as we look through it he tells me about his father and mother and the work that they did during the war. Right underneath me, he explains, below the sofa where I am sitting, there is a wooden panel that is lined up with the grooves of the floorboards and therefore difficult to spot. To get to it you would need to move the furniture and then lift the carpet. And then, once opened, this trapdoor leads to a dug-out space beneath the house. It looks empty and innocuous. To a searching policeman it is supposed to look like space for ventilation, preventing damp. But if you crawl flat in the darkness on your stomach, this shallow passage will take you to a wall of sand and behind that to a room with furniture and electric light, where a Jewish family lived in hiding during the war.
To me, seated on Wout’s sofa with the TV still on in the background, the world suddenly seems different. To think that this secret life existed, unmentioned, right below Lien’s feet. I look again at the book and see that, alongside Lien’s entry for 33 Algemeer, there is mention of another woman, Bets Engers, who also hid with the Van Laars. Who was Bets Engers? Lien remembers nothing of her. Was this before her arrival? If so, how long did she stay? On my phone I look back at the photograph of the Van Laar family, remembering now that there was another figure standing with the group. There she is, a curly-haired young woman, to one side, directly behind Lien. Is this Bets? Wout does not know. Memory is selective and not always reliable. So many facts are irretrievably lost.
Wout and I talk for a while about his parents, looking over old photographs as we speak. He writes down a series of e-mail addresses, listing people in the local history society who might be able to help me with my research. Then, with the light outside already fading, I ask what he meant when he said that he was born because of Lien. This part of the story is still unclear.
“Oh,” he smiles, “it’s best to hear about that from my sister. She lives in Ede now.”
Together we look at a picture of a teenage girl with a Peter Pan collar who holds out a doll-like baby in a christening gown. Printed with ruffled edges, it looks staged and formal. The girl’s smile, though, is real enough.
“That’s Corrie with me just after the war,” Wout tells me.
In neat printed letters he writes down her full name, telephone number, and address and attaches his card, which bears the head of an Alsatian.
“Keep in touch,” he says.
BACK ON THE BIKE, I head through the woods to my aunt and uncle’s house, riding alongside the big trunk road that was, during the war, still just a forest track. It was somewhere along here that the Schoorls hid the group of Jewish children in a forester’s shed.
This morning I was running through the landing fields of the Allied Airborne and then, straight after, past burial mounds that date from more than four thousand years back. These woods are no longer simply a childhood playground. Even the trees are not quite what I thought.
During the war there was one small pine very close to here on the edge of the village in the grounds of the Keltenwoud hotel. It looked no different from the others, but all the same, on a regular schedule, it was uprooted by its owner and replaced. Below the ground, that tree fitted into a wooden, boxlike structure, which formed the entrance to a secret room.
It took until 1995 for Leo Durlacher, by then in his seventies, to write its description. He and his family spent time hidden in a shed at the back of the hotel. A warning system, which was driven by a sewing machine motor, told them when police were on their way. If the alarm was raised, the four would then run to the tree that was really a secret entrance, then seal themselves into the darkness belowground. Breathing by means of a hand pump connected to the surface, they would listen in silence as heavy boots moved around above their heads.
WHEN I GET IN, I call Wout’s sister, Corrie. She would be happy to talk, she says, and adds, only half joking, that I had better hurry: she is well into her eighties, after all.
They all feel rushed, these meetings—Marianne at number 33, Wout at number 31, and now this with his sister, whose home, it turns out, is right behind the office where my uncle works.
I suggest ten the next morning.
“That,” says Corrie, “should be quick enough.”