Jan called me and said we had work to do. Up until that point I thought that the war was some kind of a play—very déclassé, you know, very badly acted. But after seeing those children without mothers and fathers, I knew it was all too real. For several months, I’d been helping to find places for Jewish children whose parents had to report for “labor assignments.” But this was different: the parents had just been snatched away with no thought given to the children. Very quickly, about ten of us students joined together to try to find hiding places for them.
The Jews had always felt safe in the Netherlands. They lived in a neutral,tolerant country and there hadn’t been a war in ages. They were so much a part of Dutch society that you often didn’t know who was Jewish and who wasn’t. Then when people started disappearing, you thought, “Oh, they must have been Jews.” Very strange.
Nobody wanted to believe the worst, so there was a lot of under-estimating. Early in ’42, I remember suggesting to one couple that they go into hiding, and they said, “No, we’re young. If we have to work in Germany, it won’t be a picnic, but we’ll get through it.” But after the razzia, parents would come to us and plead, “Can you hide my children?” You’d say yes, and then they’d say, “And my sister needs help too.” And then the sister would have a cousin. So from July ’42 on, from early morning ’till late at night, we were busy. But once you started, you simply had to go on. Sometimes I would fetch two or three children in
one day, and deliver them far into the country. By the end of August our group had found hiding places for 140 children. But those Jewish parents were unbelievably brave to part with their children. They figured it was the best bet for their children’s safety, but, still, you can’t believe that they actually gave them to us.
Probably they could tell that our motives were pure. We were just doing it for the children. You can’t let children be taken away. There was nothing to be afraid of, we thought. It was all so innocent. Yes, the Germans were always threatening us, but they didn’t reach us. It was just the Germans telling you, and you never believed them.
Later we became known as the Utrecht Kindercomité, but when we were actually doing the work, we were just a group of Utrecht students. A tight group we were, however, and it was marvelous being part of that group. We all knew each other, and we trusted each other completely. Each of us had something special. You felt at home; you felt safe. In a way, it was a great time. It was
terrible
, but that was exactly the reason why you could reach heights that would be impossible to reach in everyday life.
Jan Meulenbelt was our leader—he kept everything moving forward, but if people ran too far ahead, he would whistle, and they would stop and listen to him. He really knew how to give a pep talk, and he could be quite persuasive when he wanted to recruit someone into the group.
Once we went to the room of a fellow student named Frits Iordens, who later did everything from rescuing children to organizing an escape route for downed pilots. But at that time, he was studying law, and trying to stick to the books, though he loved to play the piano and violin. Jan started talking to him about the group, but he said, “Sorry, I came to the university to study, and that’s what I’m going to do.” But Jan kept on, and after a while Frits sat down at the piano and began to play something really beautiful. I could see that Jan was starting to get to him. Finally, Frits, between piano arpeggios, said, “OK, Jan, I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”
For me, it wasn’t really a choice: I knew I had to do it. I never had any second thoughts—if anything, I felt that I wanted to do more. I liked taking risks, and I didn’t mind getting into something a little dangerous. Some people had the same sympathies as I did, but they were too timid to get involved. And that was all right, for they were not the right people to do it. You had to be a kind of daredevil type, I think. Something like that.
Of course, all kinds of people were needed in the Resistance. There was one German-Jewish student who had taken some art courses in Berlin. She didn’t work with us on hiding children, but she was great at falsifying documents. And sometimes doing nothing was doing something.
When I was transporting a really Jewish-looking boy or girl, no one on the train said a thing, though they knew exactly what was happening. That was helping with the Resistance too.
Then again, there were people like this one couple—I invited them to join our group and the girl said, “You must look at this in a more astral way. Try to imagine that you are far off in the stars, and that you then look down from there on what goes on here.” I had no time to argue. I said, “You can just go burst!” and walked away. Sometimes people would tell me, “The Germans are unstoppable. Whatever you do won’t matter.” I answered, “It will matter to the children that we save.”
To find places for the children, I’d just knock on doors. Whenever I saw a big farm, I thought, Oh, they could very easily hide children there. Then I’d ask them if they’d be willing to do it. Most people would say no, sometimes in ridiculous ways. I remember one well-to-do farmer who said, “If it is God’s will for the Nazis to catch the Jewish children, then they will catch them.” I answered back, rather rudely, “If it’s God’s will for your barn to burn down tonight, then it will burn down. And your neighbors won’t help put the fire out, either!”
But most people were sympathetic, and at least offered suggestions. For example, there was a blacksmith in Utrecht I knew very well, but he worried that taking in Jewish children would endanger his own children. But he gave me the names of people he thought were reliable. It’s something you quickly got a feel for: this one I can trust; this one I can’t trust. And if they started asking for money, you never did it.
My father didn’t want to know what I was doing, and my mother never asked, though she helped me in everything. After the war, my father told me, “If I had known what you were doing, I would have locked you in your room!” He didn’t dare do anything himself, and that was a shame for him. My sister and brother-in-law, whom I loved very much, thought that what the Germans were doing was despicable, but they were too afraid to do anything. Once or twice they brought children to addresses, but they didn’t keep on with it. She said, “Oh, my heart was beating so fast on the train. I don’t dare to do it again.” I said, “No, you’re right. If you don’t dare to, please don’t. You will do it in the wrong way, so it’s better not to do it at all.” But they would hide papers and other materials for me, and I could always bring a child to them for a night or two if I had to.
Early in 1943, I began working closely with Gisela Söhnlein; I first met her in the fall of ’42 when she brought us children from Amsterdam. In contrast to my dark features and tomboyish ways, Gisela had wavy blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes, and she could be quite a stylish dresser
. Still, we hit it off right away. When she moved to Utrecht, she became part of the Kindercomité, and we spent every day finding safe addresses and taking the children to them, bringing supplies, faking papers, falsifying everything.
Every month we would go around and pick up the ration cards for the children—that way we could get them bread, butter, sugar, flour, tires for their bicycles, as well as shoes and clothing. Sometimes those cards were counterfeit, but usually we would have to take the papers for each child to one of our contacts working in the distribution offices, and then he would make the changes in identity and address, and give us a ration card for that child. But imagine having to obtain 200 of these cards a month. . . . When I was arrested and locked in my cell, I thought, Ahh, at last—rest.
On June 11, 1943, we tried to take action against some people we had trusted who turned out to be “wrong.” But we were all such amateurs that it came off rather badly. Soon we had the SD—the German intelligence operation above the Gestapo—searching for us. What did we know about dodging the SD? I was caught the next evening when I went to the train station in Utrecht to pick up my bicycle.
They took me to the local police station and left me under the watch of a Dutch policeman. I knew I had to warn the others, but I didn’t know how. I sat there on the hard bench, pouting at the policeman. I said, “I’ve done nothing wrong, and I can’t understand why this has happened. Today is my birthday, June 12, and I must call my parents. They are waiting for me!” It
was
my birthday; he could see that from my ID. He said, “Oh, no. It’s absolutely forbidden . . . if they know about it.” I said, “They will never know about it.” Finally he said, “If you go to the next room, you will find a very old-fashioned telephone hanging on the wall.”
So I quickly called my brother and said, “I’ve been arrested by mistake, but perhaps you can do something about it.” My mother soon came to the police station and cried, “My poor little baby, my youngest daughter!” I said to her, “Mama, the best thing you can do for me now is to be strong.” And that’s what she did.
Meanwhile, my brother had passed the news to Jan, and Jan called Gisela and told her to come hide at his place. But on the way over, the SD caught her. Later we were in prison together, and I was
so
glad. Gisela was always laughing and happy—the perfect person to be with in a terrible situation. I don’t think I would have made it without her. But with her, it was always fantastic.
When the SD came back, they sat me down at a table beneath the glare of a single light bulb hanging down from a frayed cord. At first they said nice things and did nice things, trying to get what they wanted. The main thing they wanted were the names of the boys: Jan Meulenbelt, Rut Matthijsen, and the others. If they caught them, they would have killed them, so I kept my mouth shut. When I wouldn’t talk, they took off my glasses and began to slap me in the face. I much preferred that to being treated nicely—it made it easier to not give in.
After a while, I started making up a really complicated story—I figured, the crazier it sounded, the more they’d believe it. After most of the night had passed, one of them sat down at a typewriter and said, “I’m typing out a warrant for the arrest of your parents.” I said, “If you think they know more than me, then you must do that.” But my legs were shaking under the table. To keep them still, I pressed them up against the wood, but that just made the whole table start shaking, which was even worse. They never did arrest my parents though.
They sent Gisela and me to the dreary prison at Hertogenbosch for a few days, and then to Haaren prison, which was a Catholic seminary that the Nazis had turned into a prison. As I was leaving the police station, someone said, “Oh, you will be away from everyone, and all alone, and it will be awful.” I said, “No, it won’t be so awful. My brothers have already been through this.” Two of my brothers had been picked up by the Nazis and had spent time in a prison, so, as far as I was concerned, it was the thing to do.
When we got to Haaren, I found that it was life also, though a very different kind of life. I heard someone in the cell above mine—a boy up there walking. My cell was quite small, with a window that was all bricked up, but there was still a very tiny opening that let in some light. And there was a sink with running water. I found that if I stood on a ledge, and put my mouth at the place where the vent went through the ceiling, I could speak to the boy in the cell above mine. The problem was that if I heard the guard, I had to immediately jump down. I jumped up and down so much that the prisoner in the cell below me must have thought that I was practicing a circus act.
But in this way I was able to talk to the boy above me, and I learned that he was a British paratrooper who had been dropped on the full moon as part of an espionage operation called
Englandspiel
. I thought that was
very
exciting. He told me that he had come to find out about the location of
anti-aircraft guns. I told him about my Strandausweis and the map in the Gestapo headquarters, but that didn’t do us any good, because I had eaten the Strandausweis, photo and all, soon after I had been arrested!
But we didn’t only talk about serious things. He told me about all the latest songs and films in England. Gisela had also made contact with the boy in the cell above her. It was
so
exciting that it didn’t even seem like such a bad thing that we were in prison. Of course, we didn’t know about the concentration camps and gas chambers, or the full picture of what the Nazis had in store for us. We only knew that we had to resist them in every way we could, and part of that was to not let them get to us. That was where our silly songs came in.
I did a lot of singing with Gisela—it was then that I started to call her Piglet. That’s because on the first day of prison, a letter was slipped to me from a boy I knew in another cell. It’s a very nice thing when someone welcomes you to prison, and I stuck it on my wall using some moistened bread. He called me Pooh, and he said that he was Christopher Robin. And then right away I named my friend Piglet, and we’ve been Pooh and Piglet ever since.
When I am nervous I like to sing, so the first day in prison, I started singing. And then Piglet heard me, and she started to sing back to me. She was only a few cells away, and that became the way we would communicate.
I got hold of a little pencil, and I would write letters to Piglet on scraps of paper. Whenever I sent her a letter, there were always three songs we would sing, all Sinterklaas songs. That’s the holiday we celebrate a few weeks before Christmas—it’s a time when Saint Nicholas comes from far away to bring gifts to all the children. So the moment I gave the letter to the boy in the next cell, I sang “The Boat of Sinterklaas is Coming.” And then when he gave it to his neighbor, Piglet would sing,“My Heart is Awaiting It.” And then when he gave it to her, she would sing, “Look What I’ve Got in my Shoe This Morning.” So, when I sent a letter to Piglet, I knew
exactly
how long it took for her to get it.
Once, just as I was finishing a letter, one of the guards saw me. He grabbed me and dragged me out of my cell, but he couldn’t get it—I ate it. Well, they did get part of it out of my mouth, but they couldn’t read it any longer, though they spent hours trying. And then they searched me, but they couldn’t find anything. So they made me undress—
that
they enjoyed very much. Meanwhile, Piglet started to sing a children’s song. I had, in fact, hidden my little pencil in one of my socks. As I was taking off my socks, I grasped the pencil with my toes, and they never did see it. I was
standing there with my clothes in a pile beside me, with Gisela singing, “I’d like to go around the world, and see all kinds of things.”