A Family Photograph

This is one of about a hundred photographs of my family that survived the Holocaust and that have allowed me a glimpse of life before the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands and before I was born. 

Going from left to right, there is my father’s youngest brother, my uncle Emil, holding my sister Leah; next to him is my mother; and finally, my father is holding my sister Eva. Unfortunately, the photograph does not bear a date. But from the appearance of my sister Leah, who was born November 11, 1938, and who seems to be less than a year old, and from the dense foliage in the background and the light wrap around my mother’s shoulders, I assume that the picture was taken sometime in the spring of 1939. A joyful day in the park, far removed from the fury of Jewish persecution unfolding a few hundred miles to the east. A fury that would, in short order, engulf all five family members enjoying a sunny day at leisure.  

My uncle Emil will appear in many candid photographs, always tending adoringly to his nieces, my sisters. Unlike my father—who will rarely smile, always wear a jacket and tie, and keep his hair neatly coiffed like Humphrey Bogart—Uncle Emil will always bear a smile and often be in shirtsleeves and an open collar. He will be there in the small photograph taken at my bris, my circumcision ceremony, just visible next to my sisters and my father, now, like my father, wearing a fedora as behooves a man observant of Jewish tradition and looking more serious and concerned. According to records in the The Hague city archives, Emil will move several times, finally settling at an address back in the Jewish neighborhood near the main train station. The next and final address where he will live is not in any city archives, but on a small card in the records of the International Tracing Service, “Haarlem, Theemstraat 50,” with a handwritten red pencil notation, “TR 8.2.44.” That is the date when he will be on the same “transport” as my sisters from Westerbork to Auschwitz. 

My mother will find herself pregnant about two years after this photograph was taken and 18 months into the Nazi occupation. She will face the stern advice of her obstetrician to have an abortion because it would be “immoral to bring another Jewish life into the world.” She will, however, remember the biblical story of a woman called Hannah and Hannah’s agonizing desire to have a child, and will reject her obstetrician’s advice, allowing me to enter this world. She will worry that I might not be getting enough of her attention because of all the obstacles and demands placed on her by the ever-tightening vise of the Nazi occupation. In mid-1942 she will face the excruciating decision to part with her children, so they will be safe from the Nazi hordes and their collaborators. She will bid farewell to my father who will go into hiding in a psychiatric hospital, the Remaerkliniek, and she will then tearfully bring Eva and Leah to the van Leeuwen sisters living next door, and be left all alone with me, a helpless nine-month-old baby. She will fear that a member of the SS might ring the doorbell, and she will wrap a piece of cloth around the clapper to dampen the dreaded sound. She will then, however, anxiously spend the night on the stairs to watch the clapper. A few days later she will wrap me in a blanket and carry me, along with my yellow stuffed rabbit, across the street to Annie Madna. She will close the door of our home and join my father in the Remaerkliniek, where she will work as a nurse’s assistant. She and my father will be overjoyed by an unexpected visit of my sisters on Christmas Day, 1942. But their joy will be short lived, as a week later they will both be arrested along with 250 other Jews hiding in the hospital and taken to the 17th-century home of Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, serving as an SS prison. She will spend 17 months in 12 concentration camps, always hiding the small photographs of my circumcision on her body, in constant fear that if she loses the photographs, it will mean that I have been killed. She will be reunited with me and live in defiance of Adolf Hitler’s intentions, to the age of 94. 

My father will follow the same path as my mother until he will be transported to Auschwitz in March 1944, while she will remain in Vught until June 1944. They will never see each other again, as he, after six months of slave labor in a coal mine near Auschwitz, will be taken to a hellhole called Mauthausen, and then to Gusen, to Steyer and finally to, Ebensee, a glorious place high in the Austrian Alps, where years later The Sound of Music will be filmed, but where he will be forced to work in underground, abandoned salt mines, assembling V2 rockets for the German Army. He will live long enough to be liberated by the 80th US Army but will succumb to starvation and disease three months later and will be buried in the concentration camp, in a grave where I will stand 13 years later in 1958 and for the very first time, at age 16, shed tears for the father I never knew.  

Eva and Leah will each celebrate two more birthdays and then will be photographed seated on a sofa to either side of their younger brother, me, then about six months old. As the Nazi threat becomes ever more real, they will be taken by Tante Jo and Tante Ko to the Elandstraatkerk and be baptized by Father Lodders and will assume a Catholic identity. Father Lodders will take on the task of finding a safer place to hide. He will interview a couple from his parish, Roza and Johannes Schermer, who own a small guesthouse Rust en Vrede, Peace and Serenity, and will entrust Eva and Leah with them sometime in October 1943. Less than four months later, Johannes Schermer will denounce his wife and my sisters to the Gestapo and also falsely accuse his wife of being a Polish Jew. As a result, on February 6, my sisters and Roza Mazurowski will be arrested and imprisoned. Roza will be sent to concentration camps in Vught and Ravensbrück. She will survive typhus and eventually return to the Netherlands. Eva and Leah, however, will be sent to Auschwitz on February 9, 1944, on the same transport as their uncle Emil. All three will be killed in Auschwitz on February 11, 1944. 

Seventy-five years later, my hands will touch the bricks bearing the names of my father, my uncle Emil, and my sisters, Eva and Leah, on a newly inaugurated monument in Amsterdam to the 102,000 Jews and 200 Roma and Sinti victims of the Nazis from the Netherlands. And once again I will shed tears for what was and what might have been. And again, all four will be remembered as my husband, Joel, and I witness on June 1, 2023, the placement of Stolpersteine, Stumbling Stones, concrete blocks bearing a brass plate with their identities and fate under the Nazis, in the sidewalk of what would be their last home in the city of The Hague in the Netherlands. We will pray that those who might stumble on these stones would remember that the fires of Auschwitz and other death camps were never fully extinguished and commit to a world free of discrimination, hate, and bigotry and to a world that celebrates our common humanity. 

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