Ninety-three Times the Cattle Cars Left the Netherlands

The Second World War in Europe broke out on 3 September 1939. In the early hours of 10 May 1940, the German armies invaded the Netherlands, and the Dutch monarchy and their government went into exile, leaving the Commander-in-Chief in control. After a brave attempt at resistance, the country was forced to surrender on 14 May 1940. Almost overnight, the Dutch people formed a Resistance throughout the country.

As winter wore on toward the spring of 1942, I became aware of some of my parents' more unusual activities. Papa had been a friend of a member of an organization called the Ordedienst. The word means "order service," the body of people responsible for keeping order. This organization had been formed back in 1918, mostly from retired military and civil guards. They were created to protect against the possibility of a political revolution. But during the Nazi occupation of Holland, the Dutch resistance movement needed an existing organization to build on—and the Ordedienst, or O.D., was the ideal vehicle.

On a Sunday morning, July 26, 1942 a visitor showed up at our flat. I didn't know who it was and Papa wasn't home. Mama told me to hurry and get dressed, but not in the usual way, but instead in layers, four sets of clothing, one top of the other and to pack more in my little suitcase. I was very fond of my sailor suit and my football shirts, but it was midsummer and with a navy blue suit and so many shirts and pants under that, I was sweating like crazy. Our mysterious visitor accompanied us as we left our flat at at Waalstraat 109. We started off in the direction of the Central Station. I was excited. Nobody has said so, but I was pretty sure we were going on holiday to Egmond-aan-Zee. I also noticed that for some reason, Mama and I were not wearing the yellow stars that day.

Something was a little odd about this.

We stepped right onto the train. Mama was nervous-she said she was worried about air raids. On hearing an air raid alarm, everyone was supposed to clear the streets and take shelter. Mama was holding onto me and my brother Ido so tight. There was no way we could even open our mouths.

The train arrived at the Central station. I'd never been there before. It was an amazing, huge and ornate building from the nineteenth century.

Mama took us inside the station, past the coffee shops, past many people in uniform, and those with the Red Cross buckets collecting money. The station was filled with people who seemed to me like scary ghosts. Most of the skylight windows overhead were missing or broken-there had been a bombing of oil tanks not far away, at the harbor's edge; its percussion had shattered the glass and no one bothered to replace it. There were very noisy steam engines, lots of black smoke, and lots of soldiers with helmets and big boots and guns.

We climbed aboard a train bound for the town of Hoorn, which is north of Amsterdam on the eastern coast of a peninsula called West Friesland. There were still more scary looking people on the train. Mama was a nervous wreck the whole time. Ido and I had to be very quiet.

Arriving at Hoorn, we were met by Papa's old friend, Arie Broers. Arie got us all to climb into a milk truck, and then jumped in and got behind the wheel. He started up the truck and began driving. After awhile, we arrived in a town called Heerhugowaard. There was Papa, waiting for us. We were brought to the home of the Van Diepen family, who had a dairy farm in the rural part of Heerhugowaard. We were shown to a small room upstairs in the house. I was told this was where we would stay for awhile. This certainly was no Egmond-aan-Zee. This was no holiday place at all.

IN HIDING AT THE VAN DIEPEN FARM

Our little room had two straw mattresses, with urine stains on the ticking with the buttons hanging loose. From a wooden box, we pulled out some flannel blankets. This setup would, somehow, serve as my new bed. Somehow, the four of us were going to eat, live, and sleep in a room that was about ten feet square. Sometime later, I wondered how Papa must have felt, bringing his wife and children to a place like this. His lovely, intelligent wife, from the stellar Gompers family, who grew up on the Niewe Keizersgracht and who had a taste for all the better things in life. Now, here she would live in an upstairs room of a farmhouse. But then, the facts were simple. Our accommodations, albeit humble, were better than a boxcar.

Going into hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland was by no means a simple matter. We were putting our non-Jewish hosts at considerable risk. Hiding Jews in Holland was not a capital offense, but it might as well have been; the Nazis sent those caught to concentration camps as well. By agreeing to hide us on their dairy farm away from the city, the van Diepen family was trying to do its part. But there were severe restrictions on our activities-mainly because there were always farmhands coming and going, and not all of them could be trusted. We were only allowed to go downstairs between nine at night and five o'clock the next morning. Our washing water came from a pitcher. Then, we had the pot. All four of use the the container as a toilet during the day for emergencies. If the coast was clear, we could use the outdoor bathroom.

During the daylight hours, Ido and Papa would sit at a little table, playing cards and chess. To keep us busy, Papa got some bicycle wheel spokes and sharpened the ends-and Mama taught us boys how to knit. There was a narrow hallway just outside our room, where we could sit and eat. Here we ate our breakfast, before five in the morning, of course. Usually, we had some hard homemade bread, butter, and jam. Ang then at night, once the farmworkers were gone, we would get some hot potatoes, rice, soup, and vegetables. Sometimes we would even get a little meat stew. But we had to very careful to not leave crumbs behind.

It's funny how, in my mind, it now seems those days and nights passed quickly. I know they must have been agonizingly tedious. To lay low, to stay out of sight, means having very little to keep you stimulated. Of course, for someone whom the Nazis wanted to murder, an uneventful day was a good day. But the things that stand out in my mind are those few moments when we had some excitement-usually moments of jeopardy. It's funny, the kinds of things that pose a danger when you're in hiding. For example, you wouldn't think that children playing could pose a grave risk, but they did.

It was on a Sunday that the Van Diepen invited some of their extended family over for a hot lunch, so naturally, we were obliged to hide in our room and stay completely silent. Once the visiting children had left on their own, they began to play together. They came up the stairs, and we heard them fooling around just outside our door. There was no lock on this door. So my Papa very quietly got up and put his hands on the doorknob in case they tried to open it, which, of course they did. The door held fast. The kids would go, then they would come, and someone would try the door again.

Maybe the were playing some sort of game, like hide and seek, but on our side of the door, only the "hide" part counted. Papa didn't dare let go of that doorknob, nor even shift his weight lest a creaking floorboard gave us away. It would take but a second for one of these youngsters to pop the door open and abruptly find himself staring wide-eyed at four strange faces-faces of people who frankly weren't supposed to be there. Were that to happen, there would be some explaining to do in the family-and later, in town, someone might say something to someone else, and we might all lose our lives.

So, for what must have been an hour, Papa held that doorknob firmly in his two hands, in a way holding on for dear life. At last, the man of the house noticed something was going on and came up to intervene. They mustn't open that door, he explained, because he kept his furs and skins in that closet and that daylight would damage them. So the children were sent downstairs, and we were left alone again.

On another day that summer, a large German Army truck pulled up and stopped right in front of Petrus and Agatha van Diepen's house. The driver got out and rang the doorbell. My Mama, already terrified of these familiar heavy boot-steps, turned white as a sheet. And judging from the sound of her voice, I guess the Van Diepen's must have been terrified too when she opened the door. We heard the German soldier asking for directions. Then, he asked our landlady, " Are you all right, madam? You're shaking." " Oh, just a little cold", she said. The soldier said, " Cold? But it's summertime!" Then, he just walked away.

That night, we were all expecting the soldiers to return. Mama and Papa told my brother and me to be brave-and you know, that did make us feel secure. My Papa said, " The strong will always remain, and never go under. " I was afraid for my parents-yet I felt proud of their courage. But the soldiers didn't come back that night. Life went on.

One night, around midnight, the airplanes with their massive bombs returned-and then came a genuinely terrific explosion. We were very much afraid to leave our hiding place to see what was going on because we knew that the the German secret police would follow shortly-so Papa calmed us down, and we stayed inside. The next morning, we learned that a bomber had gotten hit and dropped his bombs-and they'd fallen right on the next house down the road.

Great Feeling of Quality

Arie M. Broers (1906-1976) was a fruit grower to Dr. de Vriesstraat 23 in Benningbroek, where now Peter Feld had his company. Arie thought that the persecution of the Jews by the Germans was wrong and went, ultimately going into the resistance. Among other things, he arranged for Jewish families hiding places and ration cards in West Friesland.

Together with his wife Annie and five children, he had six Jewish people in hiding, including the Cardozo family, throughout the war. They all worked in the fruit garden during the day.

In 1944, he became the most important man alongside A. C. Graaf, responsible for the dumping grounds and weapons transports in North Holland as a 'load master' of the Domestic Government. In the Wieringermeer, they set up a central warehouse.

In 1948 Arie van queen Wilhelmina received a special certificate for his great sense of sacrifice. People in hiding had nominated him for a knighthood, but he did not want them. He was proud that in Israel, representatives of the family planted trees for a new forest in his name and Annie Cardozo.

Papa’s regional commandant was also an old friend of his, Arie M. Broers, of the Nederland’s Binnenlandse Strijdkracht—Dutch Interior Forces. The NBS played an essential role throughout the occupation, working against both the German and Dutch Nazis. (Oddly enough, the acronym for their arch-opponents was very similar—NSB, the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging movement.

When the Nazis took over Holland in May 1940, instead of employing a military occupational government, as they had done in other countries like France, they established their Dutch civil government. The German Nazis considered the Dutch to be their long-lost Aryan brethren and planned to permanently annex Holland as part of Greater Germany. The Nazi government was headed by one of Hitler's friends, an Austrian named Arthur Von Seyss-Inquart.

​While they were still pretending to respect existing Dutch law, one of the first acts of this new government was to take an elaborate census of the whole Dutch population, including data about religion and ethnic descent. Then, they required everyone to carry an identification card, known as a persoonsbewijs.(ID Card) Perhaps because the Dutch have always been a civic-minded people, they willingly complied with these regulations. It was this massive catalog of freely given, precise personal information, what they did for a living, and to which religion and an ethnic group they belonged—that would later facilitate the grand Nazi plan to eliminate all Jews from Holland, forever.

Thus the persoonsbewijs became an integral part of daily life in Holland. Certainly, you would need one if you were ever questioned on the street by the authorities. But you also needed one just to get ration coupons for food, fuel, and other necessities.

Jews had a big letter J stamped on their persoonsbewijs. Non-Jews didn't. Therefore, many Jews and resistance workers had to be supplied with false identity cards just to survive. The Ordedienst was one of the organizations that specialized in supplying these counterfeit documents.

The counterfeiting enterprise eventually grew quite large, and The resistance printed thousands of false documents. The Jews obtained blank persoonsbewijs cards through resistance workers who had infiltrated and gotten jobs with the population registry. Along with stealing blank forms, these workers also made efforts to unravel the existing documentation housed in these offices. Whole file cabinets full of records might mysteriously disappear—having been dumped into a canal.

Because of his involvement with the Ordedienst, Papa had a phony non-Jewish identity card from early on, bearing the Christian-sounding name Willem Bakker. But Mama still had only a card with the J. Papa's friend Arie Broers, leader of the Schagen chapter of the Ordedienst, pointed out that this was not a good situation. The Nazi laws didn't recognize marriage between Jews and non-Jews, and extramarital intercourse between the two was severely punishable. So Arie arranged to get Mama a new persoonsbewijs, using Mama’s J I.D. The O.S. transferred the pictures and fingerprints to put on her new I.D. card.