Sadly, I have no personal memories of Mima. All I know about her comes from countless photographs of an always serious looking dark-skinned woman with her sleek black hair almost always combed back into a bun, of a few words of Mima’s native languages, Maleis, of a taste for Indonesian cooking, and, of course from the many stories about her that my foster siblings, Dewie, Wille, and Robby, shared with me. I do remember visiting Mima’s grave at the Eik Duinen cemetery many times with Tolé Madna or Papa Madna, as I called him for the rest of his life. On one such occasion, he and I solemnly buried a cigar box containing the remains of Papa’s favorite Pietje, a bright yellow canary, at the foot of Mima’s grave. In later years, after my mother and I moved to Belgium and then to the United States, a return to Den Haag (The Hague) always included a visit to Mima’s grave.
Mima and Alfred in the fall of 1942. USHMM, courtesy of Alfred Münzer
I was placed in Mima’s arms in October 1941 when I was 11 months old. My Polish Jewish parents immigrated to the Netherlands to escape rising antisemitism and to seek opportunities in a country that had welcomed Jews for hundreds of years. My father, Simcha Münzer, arrived in The Hague in 1930 and started a men’s clothing business. His childhood sweetheart and cousin, my mother, Gisele Münzer, followed, and they were married in November 1932. They had three children, my sister Eva born in 1936, my sister Liana born in 1938, and me, Alfred, born on November 23, 1941, 18 months after the German invasion of the Netherlands. Our family lived at Zoutmanstraat 98, next to my father’s business at Zoutmanstraat 100. My parents were close friends with their neighbors, especially the sisters Jo and Ko van Leeuwen, who lived next door at Zoutmanstraat 102, and Annie Madna and her children, who lived across the street at Zoutmanstraat 79.
Annie Madna had been married to Tolé Madna. Annie was born in the Netherlands, but Tolé was born in the Dutch East Indies, now called Indonesia, and immigrated from Maos, a village near Malang, to the Netherlands in 1916, at age 20. They were married in 1927 and like my parents, had three children, Wil, born in 1927, Dewie, born in 1929, and Rob in 1931. They divorced shortly thereafter. Tolé managed an Indonesian restaurant, and that is where, I believe, he first met Mima, whom he hired as a baboe, a nanny, to care for the family’s three children. From photographs of Mima with the Madna children, she was already a member of the household when Rob was a baby. Baboe was what nannies were called in the Dutch East Indies. Baboe is said to be a contraction of mbak, sister, and ibu, mother, the two traits ideally embodied in a nanny.
For most of my life I knew almost nothing about Mima’s background, except that she was born in Indonesia, and judging from the traditional floor-length batik sarong she favored, probably on the Island of Java. She was never taught to read or write and did not speak Dutch, only Maleis, as the Indonesian language was called prior to Indonesian independence when it became Bahasa. While other members of the Madna family were nominally Christian, Mima was Muslim with a heavy Buddhist overtone. Dewie told me that Mima created a little Buddhist shrine where she placed small amounts of food, which no one could touch for a designated period, even when hunger was at its worst.
In August 1942, Jewish men, including my father, were summoned for “labor duty,” i.e., to report to a concentration camp. Knowing that that meant a strong likelihood of being sent “East,” it was a signal to my family to go into hiding. My sisters were initially placed with the devoutly Catholic sisters Jo and Ko van Leeuwen while the local priest, Pater Lodders, searched for a safer place where they could hide. I was entrusted to Annie Madna. My parents went into hiding at the Remaerkliniek (Oud Rozenburg,) my father as a patient and my mother as a nurse.
Annie Madna felt I would be safer with her sister and her sister’s husband, Jorina and Teunis Polak, where the presence of a baby would be less conspicuous. I remained with Jorina and Teunis for about three weeks, but then, because they had a neighbor who was a member of the NSB, the Dutch Nazi Party, I was finally placed with Tolé Madna at Van Kinsbergenstraat 40, in October 1942. That is when Mima took on the role, not just of my baboe, my nanny, or my caregiver, but truly the only person I identified as my mother. The first picture of the two of us was taken about a month later, according to the inscription on the back. Rob Madna told me that I slept in Mima’s bed, and that she kept a knife under her pillow, vowing to fight off any Nazi who might try to get me.
The plan had been for me to be with the Madna family for a few weeks and then to be transferred to what was thought to be a safer place in the north of the Netherlands. According to Rob Madna, Mima refused to part with me, and Tolé was persuaded to keep me. Because I was in the home illegally, there were no ration coupons for me, and Mima and the Madna family shared their own meager rations with me. When a German officer came to search the house, Rob said, it was Mima who was sent to open the door. She could only shake her head at the German’s words, and he quickly became frustrated by her lack of understanding and left. It is thanks to Mima that the few memories I have of my three years with the Madna family are all of love and laughter.
My parents only succeeded in hiding for three months. They were deported to Westerbork, then Vught, and finally to Auschwitz and a series of other camps. My father survived through liberation by the US Army but died two months later and lies buried in the former Ebensee concentration camp in Austria. My sisters were transferred from the van Leeuwen sisters to the home of Rosalia Mazurowski. Sadly, Rosalia’s husband denounced her and my sisters to the Nazis. Rosalia was deported to Vught and then to Ravensbrück, where she contracted typhus but survived. My sisters, however, were killed February 11, 1944, in Auschwitz. The punishment meted out to Rosalia is a reminder of the risk taken by people who, like Mima and the Madna family, attempted to shelter Jews from the Nazis.
Fortunately, my mother survived the concentration camps, and I was reunited with her in July 1945. I have a clear memory of that reunion, and of crying and refusing to sit in her lap and pushing her away. I was three and a half years old. To me she was a stranger, and my mother was Mima. To illustrate how protective Mima was of me, my mother told me that she encouraged Mima to go to a movie, so I could get used to being alone with her. Mima, however, came back a few minutes later and wagged her finger at my mother, warning her not to hit me. Sadly, Mima suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage two months later, September 30, 1945.
I have no visual memories of Mima, only of a few words of Maleis and a taste for Indonesian food. My mother picked up some Maleis from listening to me and learned some Indonesian cooking.
One memory of Mima was miraculously resurrected at the ceremony held at the American School in The Hague, where Tolé Madna and Mima were honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. It was the melody of the Indonesian lullaby “Nina Bobo.” I did not know it was called “Nina Bobo,” but, as it was sung by a young Vietnamese student playing the part of Mima in a reenactment of my rescue by the Madna family, I recognized the melody and immediately fell under its spell. Many years later, I told the story of how Mima and Tolé Madna saved my life during the Holocaust to a diverse group of Indonesian students, men and women, some Muslim, some Christian, who were in the United States to learn about religious diversity. When I mentioned “Nina Bobo,” they spontaneously began to sing the lullaby, and then came up to me, embraced me, and with tears in their eyes, said “we are family.” All of us in that moment became the children of a childless, nearly forgotten, saintly woman, known only as Mima.
Rob Madna was ten years old when I suddenly appeared in the Madna home. He admitted to having felt a little unhappy because he had been Mima’s favorite, and now he came in second. I asked him whether he knew Mima’s last name. He said it might have been Saïna. Even her gravestone only bears the name Mima. There is no date of birth. Rob told me that some members of the family and in the Indonesian community believed Mima died of “a broken heart” because her baby was being taken from her. Recently I reconnected with Arthur Friederizi, the little boy to my left in a photo where I sit on a tricycle and Rob stands behind me. He is a few years older than I and remembers coming to the house and enjoying Mima’s cooking and later playing with “het kleine joodse jongetje,” the little Jewish boy under her care. There are also earlier photographs taken by his father of him and his sister with Mima in the Friederizi backyard.
It took my reunion with Arthur Friederizi and a search in The Hague city archives for deaths that occurred on the date inscribed on Mima’s gravestone, September 30, 1945, to find out that her real last name was Saimah. She was probably 45 years old when she died and was born in Serang, about 90 kilometers from Jakarta. She left from the port of Weltevreden, probably as a Zeebaboe, a nanny hired by Dutch émigrés from Indonesia to the homeland to care for their children during the voyage. She was registered in The Hague, September 10, 1926, and identified as being Muslim. Interestingly there is no listing in the archives of a first name. But to members of the Madna family—and here I count myself as a member—she will always simply be Mima.
I have remained close with the Madna family. I visited Papa two months before his death at age 96 on September 6, 1992. Afterwards I remained in touch with Rob, Wil, and Dewie. All three are now deceased, but now I am in regular contact with the three children from Papa’s second marriage, Wanny, Tolé, and Matipa, and continue to share the legacy of Mima and Papa to his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In 2021 the Historical Museum of The Hague launched an exhibition called Macht, or Power, to coincide with the restoration of the Binnenhof, the seat of the Netherlands Parliament dating back to the Middle Ages. In the midst of an exhibit on the Nazi occupation as an example of the abuse of power and its terrible consequences, it featured Mima as an example of an ordinary citizen exercising their “macht,” their power to resist and fight those who abuse power.
Mima may have come from a poor Indonesian background and clearly had a heart of gold. When surrounded by a world filled with hate, she knew what was right and put her life at risk to save a nine-month-old Jewish baby. It is thanks to Mima and Tolé that I survived the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of my father and sisters. Mima and Tolé allowed me to grow up and set me on a path to become a physician and a specialist in lung disease. They embodied love for a fellow human being that I have tried to emulate during my own life.
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