Arthur and Helga

All I know about my early life comes from photographs and the stories my mother told me. Yesterday, I received a photograph I had never seen before. It opened a whole new chapter, and it left me stunned and speechless. It is the earliest picture I have of me together with my mother. The photo was one of many I received in an email from an unremembered friend, Arthur Friederizi. 

I recognized the last name Friederizi from an inscription on the back of another photograph, which was taken while I was in hiding from the Nazis with the Madna family. I always share that photograph when I tell the story of my family during the Holocaust and of being hidden as a nine-month-old Jewish baby with the Indonesian Dutch Madna family and their Indonesian nanny, Mima Saïna. It shows me as a beaming three-year-old on a tricycle while my foster brother Rob Madna lovingly watches over me. To my right there is a smiling young girl wearing a sweater and a plaid skirt holding my hand, and to my left there is a very erect-standing boy, younger than the girl, squinting in the sunlight and dressed in what might be a scout’s uniform. These kids, I tell the audience, were the only ones trusted to come and play with me while I was in hiding from the Nazis and confined to the house.  

In the photo I just received, and which completely took me by surprise, I am on the same tricycle but look a bit older, my bangs are shorter, and my smile is more restrained, bordering on shy. Behind me, there is the same girl, now in a summery short-sleeved dress, and, unmistakably, to the right of the girl, in front of a door with peeling paint, is my mother. She bears a faint, wistful, melancholic smile, the kind of smile that I learned over many ensuing years signified a mix of joy and regret. My mother’s hair is shorter, and the flowery dress drapes a body that is much leaner than in all the prewar photos, or than at any time in later life. The photo must have been taken in August 1945, shortly after she was repatriated to the Netherlands from Sweden, where she had been sent to recuperate after she was liberated from the concentration camps. It had to have been within days of when she and I were reunited and when I had refused to sit in her lap, pushing her away because to me she was a complete stranger. Is that why the girl—and not my mother—has a hand on my shoulder? 

The girl is also in earlier photos of that time. In one, I struggle as she tries to keep me in her lap. In another, she is coaxing me as I sit on a swing with a serious-looking Mima next to us. Until a few days ago, I never knew the girl’s name. Now I know it is Helga. I was too young when the photos were taken to have any memory of the Friederizi kids. But the young boy was twice my age at the time, old enough to remember. Some 75 years later, he recognized a picture of me while reading a feature article in a Dutch newspaper, the Algemeen Dagblad, about a book written by Herman Keppy, Zijn Jullie Kerels of Lafaards?, or Are You Guys or Cowards? The book is about the Indonesian Dutch resistance movement during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. He saw a photograph of Mima holding me, and immediately recognized het joodse jongetje Bobby (the little Jewish boy called Bobby) he played with during the war years. Bobby was the name I was given while I was in hiding. He quickly got in touch with Herman Keppy, who put him in touch with me. That is how I learned that the boy squinting in the sunlight is Arthur and that the girl in the plaid skirt is his older sister Helga. The photograph, like many others, Arthur told me, was taken by his father, Carl, to whom I am grateful for allowing me to see and learn, even this many years later, details about my life while in hiding from the Nazis. 

For the last few weeks, Arthur and I have feverishly exchanged emails and photographs. I had always been told that the Friederizi kids were trusted because their parents, although German, were Communists and therefore staunchly anti-Nazi and sure not to betray me to the German occupiers or their Dutch collaborators. I still do not know whether they were Communists, but there is no doubt about the anti-Nazi bona fides of Carl and Fanny Friederizi. Whenever there was a “razzia,” a round-up of Jews, Arthur told me, they provided a hiding place under the floorboards of their home for two Jewish men, Alex Borisky and Eric Baruch. Both men survived the Nazi occupation. 

The life story of Arthur’s parents does suggest they were rebels. Carl Friederizi was born in 1886 in Warstein, Germany. When he was 18 in 1904 and war seemed imminent, he left Germany, first for Charleroi in Belgium. There he met his first wife and worked building derricks for a coalmine. Two children were born in short order. When Germany invaded France, marching through Belgium, the family was placed in an internment camp, and Carl received a call-up to the German Army and was sent to the front in Verdun. The trauma of the war led to the dissolution of his marriage. In 1926, Carl moved to the Netherlands where he met his second wife, Fanny. She was born in Bavaria in 1899, but in 1927, at age 28, wanted to leave Germany for Mexico. To get the necessary papers and funds to get to Mexico, she first settled in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Her life took on a different course when she met Carl. They were married in The Hague in 1930. Helga was born in 1936 and Arthur in 1938, the same years as my sisters, Eva and Leah, who sadly did not share my good fortune and were denounced to the Nazis and killed at Auschwitz.  

Sometime in the 1930s, Arthur’s parents befriended the Madna family. Arthur and his parents were frequent visitors to the Madna home at van Kinsbergenstraat 40. Arthur remembers how much he enjoyed getting his first taste of the Indonesian noodle dish Bami. Mima, the nanny in whose bed I slept and who kept a knife under her pillow vowing to kill any Nazi who might try to get me, was a fabulous cook, he said. It was Mima, I told Arthur, who taught my mother how to make Bami, Nasi Goreng, and Tumis to accommodate my own Indonesian palate.   

Arthur’s father, Carl, was an avid photographer and took many pictures of the Madna family, only some of which I had in my collection. Many of the ones Arthur sent me were of a much younger Tolé Madna and of Tolé’s son, Rob. There is one photo of a large all-Indo-Dutch gathering with Arthur’s parents as the sole exception. Arthur does not know when or where this picture was taken, but it illustrates the affinity between the Friederizis and Tolé’s Indo-Dutch community. The intimate friendship between the Madna and Friederizi families is also shown by the name Arthur’s father chose for an herbal remedy he developed and marketed, Toco-Tholin, Toco because the oils have their origin in Asia and Tholin as a tribute to his close friend Tolé, who was born in the former Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia.   

Another photograph that I regularly include in my talks shows Papa Madna with me in his arms, Mima, a slightly younger Arthur, and a woman with a faint smile in the upper left corner to whom I never paid much attention. Arthur confirmed she is his mother, Fanny.  Tragically, Arthur’s mother died of dysentery on her birthday, January 28, 1945, a victim of the famine that struck the Netherlands during that winter; six months before my father succumbed in the Ebensee concentration camp on July 25, 1945. She died three months before liberation, and my father died three months after. The Friederizi home barely escaped the accidental bombing by the Allies of the Bezuidenhout neighborhood of The Hague on March 25, 1945, an event that deeply scarred Carl Friederizi. 

I was surprised to learn that the more impromptu pictures of me and Helga were taken in the backyard of the Friederizi home. As proof, Arthur sent me an earlier picture of himself on the same swing, and like me, being coaxed by Helga. I always assumed the Friederizis lived next door to the Madnas, but they lived in an altogether different neighborhood. Arthur assumes I was taken to their home by tram. If true, it disproves my assumption that I never left the house on van Kinsbergenstraat. But it fits with the recollection of my foster sister, Dewie Madna, that at least in the first year or two when I was hidden with them and when the Nazis were too preoccupied with deporting adults to pay attention to babies, her father enjoyed taking me out in a stroller. He would respond to the queries from people about the blond and blue-eyed baby he was tending to by simply telling them I was his son. “They would shake their heads and think,” he used to say, “poor Indonesian man, doesn’t realize his wife has been sleeping around.” Papa Madna was able to make light of the darkness of that anxiety-filled time. It was in that same spirit that he allowed six-year-old Arthur and eight-year-old Helga to befriend a little Jewish boy called Bobby, putting a smile on that little boy’s face, a smile and a friendship renewed 75 years later.

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