Dini

Dini Polak is a lively Dutch woman in her mid-80s who has a debilitating muscle and balance disorder that has kept her in a wheelchair and homebound for ten years, but whose social media presence alone testifies to her avid interest in world affairs, politics, and literature. She is especially knowledgeable about the history of the Holocaust in Den Haag, the city where she was born in 1936 and has lived all her life. Dini’s last name, Polak, suggests a Jewish background. “Perhaps so,” she tells me in fluent English, “But that must have been many generations ago, when some great, great-grandfather converted to Christianity.” She was raised Protestant but is now defiantly agnostic. Her view of religion and her very liberal political outlook put her at odds with her cousin, Dewie Madna, one of my two foster sisters from the time I was in hiding as a baby from the Nazis with the Madna family. Dewie may have kept me from meeting Dini because she never shed her role as a protector of the Jewish baby that had been entrusted to her father. She did not want that baby, now long an adult, to be “contaminated” by Dini’s leftist political views. 

Sometime in 2010, however, Dewie, sensing my need to know the full story of my rescue from the Nazi hordes that had invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, did put me in touch with Dini, allowing me to visit her for the first time. Now, after the deaths of Tolé Madna—the man I called Papa—and my foster siblings Wil, Rob, and finally, in 2019 of Dewie herself, Dini is the only remaining witness to the heroic efforts to save the life of a helpless nine-month-old Jewish baby. While I enjoy her greetings and updates in Facebook Messenger, they are no substitute for the warm, tearful hug from this always stylishly dressed woman who has never forgotten the sudden appearance when she had just turned six, 82 years ago, of a baby who slept between her parents. A visit with Dini, her son Arthur, and her close friend Marijke also always means a delicious lunch, which in deference to the nine-month-old Jewish baby and despite her own scorn of religion, is always strictly kosher.

I was born November 23, 1941, and I came into little Dini’s life in September 1942. That was when my family went into hiding to avoid deportation to Poland by the Nazis, who had occupied the Netherlands 18 months earlier. While many families went into hiding as a family unit, like the well-known family of Anne Frank, others, like my family, chose to split up and hide in separate places and with different families as a form of insurance that if one member of the family was discovered, the others might still have a chance to survive. My father was convinced, my mother told me, that the Nazi regime was doomed after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and that our separation would be short. I learned from my mother that my father gained admission to a psychiatric hospital, the Remaerkliniek, by pretending to commit an act of suicide, and that she joined him there as a nurse’s assistant after my sisters had been entrusted to two devout Catholic women, Jo and Ko van Leeuwen, who lived next door to us, and after I had been entrusted to Annie Madna. Annie had been married to Tolé Madna, a native of the Dutch East Indies, from whom she was now divorced. Annie lived across the street from us with the three children of her marriage to Tolé: Wil, Dewie, and Rob.

For many years, I was led to believe that Annie Madna passed me on to her sister Jorina because some of her activities had brought her to the attention of the Nazi regime. Thanks to Dini, however, I now know that the more plausible reason why Annie passed me on to her sister was that Jorina was considerably younger and was married, and that the presence, therefore, of a nine-month-old baby would call less attention to the household. It was Dini’s father, Teunis, who gave me the name Bobby, a name that would stay with me throughout my years in hiding, and that I am still called by the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the families involved in my rescue. Unfortunately, Dini told me, in spite of all the care and love of her parents, I was not a happy baby and cried and coughed constantly, a description that makes me blush and shake my head. Jorina and her husband, Teunis, worried that I might be heard by their neighbor who was a member of the NSB, the Dutch Nazi Party. Dini recalls a visit by what she thought was a “geestelijke,” a priest, but who her parents said was a doctor. In all likelihood, however, both young Dini and her parents were correct. One likely visitor was Father Lodders, a priest who had befriended my parents and who had taken on the task of assuring that my sisters and I would be kept safe from the Nazis. The other, Dini recalled later, was a  trusted doctor arranged for by a trusted friend of both my family and Dini’s parents, Joop Innemee.

Three weeks after Jorina and Teunis had taken on the responsibility to hide me from the Nazis, they came to what Dini told me was a painful decision: that it would be safer for me to be with Annie Madna’s former husband, Tolé Madna. Dini recalls that her mother broke down in tears during a subsequent visit to Tolé Madna’s home, because Mima, the Indonesian nanny who had tended to the three Madna children, and who now cared for me, did not allow her to hold me. It was at Rob Madna’s funeral in April 2003 that I was approached by a woman who, with a smile on her face, wagged her finger at me and then hugged me and said, “You used to drink my milk!” Now I know that it was Dini and her older sister, Joke, who were instructed to save half the little bottle of milk they were given in school during the war years for the “new baby.” 

I regret that I never met Jorina or Teunis and did not have the opportunity to thank them for their heroic efforts to save my life. Jorina, I learned from Dini, was to be another victim of the war started by Nazi Germany. She was caught in a crossfire between Allied and German troops and died April 22, 1945, just two weeks before the Netherlands was liberated. Dini’s loss of her mother as a nine-year-old and my own loss of a father and two sisters, are part of the bond that ties us and one more reason why a visit with Dini is an essential part of our itinerary whenever my husband Joel and I are in Den Haag. 

Just when I thought I had said all there was to be said about Dini and the role her family played as the initial guardians in saving the life of this Jewish baby, she surprises me with a pithy comment on Facebook Messenger. One was a response to the seemingly simple question I raised during our last visit, “Do you know who gave me the name Bobby?” To which she replied, “I believe you were called Bobby when you were with us. I never knew your real name until we met in recent years.” And then a loving and humorous comment that to me goes much deeper, “As I write these words, I think of you as in a baby bath sitting on the table. The cold water, as I remember, splattering on your little torso, for which I felt so sorry. But then you were gekoesterd—coddled—and were fed the delicious ‘pap’—cream of wheat. My love to both of you.” And then, an hour later, she recalled the specific brand of the cream of wheat, “Molenaars Kindermeel!” A day or two later, she relayed two prints of a baby still often seen in nurseries, “My parents had these pictures in their bedroom, which is where you slept; so nice that I just came across them on FB. Much love, until next time.”

Innocuous, fun messages, but also causing me to think deeply of what it means to risk one’s life, not only, to hide any man or woman from the Nazi occupiers and their collaborators, but to take on the added responsibility of sheltering a completely helpless nine-month-old baby. How to soothe a baby crying because he has been ripped from his mother and the few smiling faces of a family he has learned to recognize? How to reassure that little stranger with the love they gave their two daughters, Joke and Dini, now eight and six? And then, how to provide the special care from feeding to diapering to a baby with no means of support because legally he does not exist? Babies grow into toddlers with a new array of needs. All that in the midst of a war. All that without even thinking of what ultimately might lie ahead.

Dini insisted I read a Dutch book by An van’t Oosten, De oorlog van Sophie, “Sophie’s War.” It vividly describes everyday life in Den Haag during the war from the viewpoint of a young girl called Sophie. One of the women in the book, referred to as Tante Kiki, stands out for her generosity in helping others. It wasn’t until I read the inscription by An van’t Oosten “Ook wij, mijn broertjes en ik ontvingen liefdevole zorg van, tante Kiki.” “We too, my little brothers and I received loving care from tante Kiki,” that I realized that the fictional Tante Kiki was based on none other than Dini’s own mother, Jorina. Like Jorina, Tante Kiki was shot and killed during the last days of the war. And like Jorina who left behind two daughters, Dini and Joke, Tante Kiki left behind two daughters, Roosje and Iris. Dini told me that An van’t Oosten honored Jorina by placing flowers on her grave every year on April 22, for as long as she lived.  It is obvious that I was not the only beneficiary of Jorina and Teunis’s boundless love, but that there were many others who followed me after I was placed in the arms of Mima. 

Dini Polak with Alfred, still called “Bobby,” in 2022. Courtesy of Alfred Münzer

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