There was life after Belsen.
The Pomstras took us in. The two-bedroom apartment was crowded with the addition of three children, but the neighbours made an attic room available, which had a very comfortable and clean bed. Max, Jacky and I slept there without a problem.
We had to get used to the Pomstras’ family lifestyle. This meant sitting up straight at the table for meals after we had washed our hands. Mr Pomstra made us join in thanking the Lord for the meals that were put on the table, and after each meal he would read a passage from the Bible before we were allowed to leave.
Food was still scarce in Amsterdam so the army bag with the flour and sugar came in very handy. Mrs Pomstra was very good at obtaining potatoes with the extra ration tickets given to us by the government. Every morning I had to peel about four kilograms of potatoes, and Mrs Pomstra taught me how to peel a potato so as not to lose too much potato with the skin.
Max went to Central Station in Amsterdam every day and stayed there from early in the morning until late in the afternoon. There he would read the list of names of those who had returned from the camps in Germany. Each night he would come home dejected, but the next day he would be off again in the hope our father or mother would return to us.
Then, in the first week of July I arrived home from a visit to a girlfriend when Mrs Pomstra told me that my father had arrived at Central Station that morning, and the doctors who examined him had transferred him to a hospital. Soon Mrs Pomstra and I were on the tram on our way to see my father. She told me that Max and Jacky had seen my father at the station and later in hospital.
A nurse directed us to the room where my father was lying in bed, supported by pillows. I rushed up to him and put my arms around his thin frame. He looked so skinny. Tears of happiness filled his eyes and all he could say was, ‘You have grown so much, Hetty.’ We both cried. The feeling of relief that our ordeal was over left us without words.
When we had recovered, my father told me that when he had to leave us on 4 December 1944 he had been transported with about two hundred men to Sachsenhausen, but after a few days he and another man had been separated from the diamond group. He had told Uncle Max to volunteer to join him but he wanted to stay with the diamond group. This decision determined Uncle Max’s fate—he died in Belsen.
My father was sent to a camp near Berlin where he was put to work in the Siemens Cable factory.
When the war came close the Germans took the entire camp on a death march. My father had to walk from Berlin to Mecklenburg-Schwerin, which was about two hundred and twenty kilometres to the north-west.
At the start of the march he had met up with Gary B., a young man who had been employed by us in Amsterdam prior to our deportation. The march took a big toll on the hungry. When the prisoners could not continue to walk or dropped down on the road, the SS shot them without mercy.
At the end of the second day, my father said to Gary, ‘I cannot go any further, I am finished. I will step out of the column. Gary, please tell my wife and children I love them.’
‘No, Mr Werkendam,’ Gary said, ‘don’t do it. Think of your wife and your children. Here, lean on me. We are both going to make it, you will see.’
Gary persuaded my father to go on. Leaning on Gary, he had only taken about ten more steps, when right in front of him he found a strong stick from a tree. He picked it up and by leaning on the stick when making each difficult step, he had managed to stay on the march for seven long days before they were liberated by the United States army.
On 3 June he had flown with Gary from Luneburg to Brussels, Belgium, at about noon—we had missed each other at the airfield by only a couple of hours.
About a week before coming to Amsterdam he had met up with his niece, Doortje, in Brussels. Doortje had been in Auschwitz and after she returned to Amsterdam had travelled to Brussels in the hope of finding some family members. She had told my father that his three children were back in Amsterdam.
‘What about my wife? he had asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Is my wife dead?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she repeated.
From that moment on my father had no rest, and he travelled to Amsterdam to be reunited with us on the first available transport.
My father was a very sick man. His legs were swollen with oedema but after a few days in hospital, wild horses could not keep him away and he came home to the Pomstras.
Not being a person to sit home for long, he persuaded Mr Pomstra to find him a bicycle so he could go with Max each day to Central Station to see if my mother had arrived on one of the many boats coming from Sweden with refugees. The first few days we had to help him on and off the bike, and in order for him to stop and get off he used to wrap his arms around the light pole in front of our door to bring the bike to a halt. But after a week his health had improved and he was able to get on and off the bike by himself.
Months went by, and every day Max and my father would return from Central Station without news of my mother. We knew she was in Sweden but communication was still difficult in postwar Europe.
It was three long months before my mother finally came back. What joy, what happiness! She had put on an enormous amount of weight, as the Swedes had fattened up all the ex-prisoners. We hugged her and touched her every few seconds, and my father was on cloud nine now that he had his family around him again.
My mother’s transport from Belsen on 5 December 1944 had been sent to Beendorf concentration camp. There she had been put to work deep in the salt mines to build automatic pilot instruments for German planes. She was liberated and sent to Sweden with most of the women of the diamond group transport, when a high-ranking Nazi (believed to be Himler) gave them to the Swedish diplomat Count Graf Bernadotte in exchange for a box of vodka.
The Pomstras were beautiful people. They had a full house and we must have inconvenienced them at times, but never was there a cross word. Their hospitality was unsurpassed and their kindness helped to heal some of the pain we felt at having lost close family members.
My mother had been to see the mayor of Amsterdam to ask him for assistance to allocate us a home of our own. Our previous home around the corner from where the Pomstras lived was occupied by another family. After a long wait we were allocated an apartment, fully furnished, which the government had confiscated from a Dutch Nazi. (Later we purchased furniture from the Dutch government.) Can one express the happiness we felt that we had a home of our own again and we could go to sleep at night without fear of being raided?
Amsterdam was dead. There was no commerce and all the shops in the city were boarded up. Slowly, ever so slowly, things changed. Here and there shops opened up again in the Amsterdam central business district (CBD).
My father decided not to return to the markets but to start a large fashion store in the CBD. The son of Polak & Son, his main supplier previously, had returned and found piles and piles of fabrics in his stores, apparently amassed by the German liquidator of the business. What a windfall that was. The business prospered as my father and mother manufactured badly needed garments for the Dutch population, who had gone without for many years.
I had returned to school but it became clear to me, as well as my brothers, that studying was out of the question. We were still too mentally affected to concentrate on the curriculum. All five of us spoke very slowly and it was only after many years that we could say our brainpower had recuperated to the state that we could speak normally again.
Aunty Jet offered to teach me how to cut diamonds. She was one of the best in the business and my father advised me to take up her offer. I had two enjoyable years learning all about it, and I do believe that I became very good at it. But factory work did not appeal to me as it kept me inside all day. I wanted to be outside. So I persuaded my father to let me join the fashion world and to help out in the shop. At night I studied dress designing. I loved working with the beautiful garments we sold.
The years passed quickly and when Max was called up for military service in 1951, he decided to emigrate to Australia instead. He had fallen in love with a girl who had emigrated in February, and by April that same year Max was on the boat to Sydney. He did not even wait for my marriage, which took place in May 1951.
Six months later Jacky was on the boat to Australia to join Max.
My daughter, Julia Louise Maja (‘Maja’ was from the first two letters of Max and Jacky) was born on 10 February 1952. Then disaster struck as my wonderful young husband became ill and never recovered.
Four months after Julia was born my parents decided to emigrate to Australia, as the political situation in Berlin worried them and they believed another war was imminent. I had to stay behind because my husband was sick.
It took two long years before the Australian government reluctantly allowed me to enter the country and, as I was by then a single parent, I had to sign an undertaking that I would never request any assistance or pension from the government.
In 1972 I was given an award as the most successful migrant. When I asked, ‘Why me?’ I was told that I had come to Australia with a little girl but had never asked for assistance, and I had been an achiever.
Fifty years after our liberation, ‘The Children’, as we call ourselves, came from every part of the world to once more be with the woman who had so valiantly saved our lives in Bergen-Belsen.
Luba Tryzynska-Frederick, seventy-six years old, was to receive the highest decoration from Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for Humanitarian Services in difficult circumstances.
Thirty-one ‘Children’ attended the reunion and the tears were flowing freely as we embraced each other after so many years.
Although we were all fifty years older and had our own individual life experiences, we still, after all those years, quickly recognised and hugged each other and became, before thirty minutes had passed, the same close knit group we had been in Belsen.
On 15 April 1995, on the exact anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, in the Town Hall of Amsterdam, Sister Luba was decorated by the Deputy Mayor in the name of Queen Beatrix. When he pinned the Silver Medal on her, all her Children and the many guests gave her a standing ovation.
The Deputy Mayor said, ‘This recognition is long overdue,’ and he thanked Sister Luba in the name of all the people of Holland for her gallant work.
We had a few wonderful exciting days together in Amsterdam until the moment came when we all had to say goodbye once again.
The memories of this reunion will stay in my heart until the end of my days.
A fiftieth commemoration was also held at Belsen. Exprisoners went to Belsen from all over the world to show their respect for those who had suffered and succumbed to the brutal treatment of the Nazis.
I had no intention of going there ever again, but when (my little) Robby asked me to accompany him as he was in a wheelchair, having lost one leg from the after-effects of Belsen, how could I refuse. Also, Maurice wanted to find Leni’s grave, and I believed I could help him with that.
So I found myself in the bus on the way to the place which, at times, still gives me nightmares. In the bus were women and men who had travelled from the USA and Canada. I was the only one from Australia.
The bus stopped and some one said, ‘This is Bergen-Belsen.’ There was absolute quiet. You could have heard a pin drop. This was the moment of truth, when we had to enter once more the gates of Belsen. Then the driver was told to continue on to another destination, and after about five minutes I realised that we had entered the recuperation camp. After fifty years the buildings looked the same, except that now there was no one about. It was clean and empty.
After a few minutes we left the camp and we came to the small cemetery in which I remembered Leni was buried—together with seventeen thousand persons who died after the liberation from the effects of malnutrition and from typhus, along with seventy doctors and nurses who contracted typhus whilst trying to help the poor victims.
As I alighted from the bus I noticed a much-decorated English military officer and a small man in a black suit standing next to the gate, and I walked up to them.
I asked the officer if he had been one of the liberators of Belsen. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but this gentleman next to me was one of them, in fact’, he continued, ‘he was the young soldier who was sitting on the bulldozer pushing all those dead bodies into the mass graves. You must have seen it many times on TV.’
I was introduced to Frank Chapman, and before he knew it I put my arms around him and hugged him, and thanked him, after all those years, for liberating me. I had been unable to do so at the time as I had not been able to come out of my bed to meet the liberators.
Then Frank pointed out the one person in the crowd I had never forgotten. The image of his profile was engraved in my mind, and when I saw him after all those years I ran up and embraced him in the same way I had with Frank. I thanked and kissed, after fifty years, Dick Williams, the proud young soldier who was the first to enter Belsen with the white flag on 13 April 1945.
Later that day a luncheon was given to the ex-prisoners by the British Armed Forces, who are still in possession of the forty square kilometres of land surrendered in April 1945 by the German generals. At that luncheon, after fifty years, I again met Helen and Zosua who had helped Sister Luba look after us.
The solemn commemoration on 26 April 1995 took place in the grounds which were once Bergen-Belsen. The concentration camp is no more and only the silent mass graves tell the terrible story of what took place there during the barbaric regime of the Nazis.
I had great reservations about entering Belsen once again, but, surprisingly, it did not rekindle the horrors as I had imagined. Instead it was as if all those mass graves were telling me, ‘WE ARE AT PEACE NOW’.