Tante Jansje

Another relative came to visit us in July 1945. Here, suddenly, was a woman we'd never expected to see again. The Nazis had spared her for just one reason—she knew how to sew fur hats. The German armies in the east desperately needed fur hats. So, the Wehrmacht had issued a unique sperr, or exemption, for this woman. Her documents had been marked indispensable, and this status was even tattooed on her arm. In this way, Jansje Gompers had survived ten different concentration camps.

In the summer of 1945, returning from a refugee camp in Sweden, she'd spent a little while recuperating with some friends called Aunt Marie and Uncle Herman in Utrecht. It was there that I met up with my Aunt Juliette. After several flights of steep stairs, I was exhausted—how those people get up and down those stairs is remarkable. Juliette was Aunt Jansje's sister, whom I had last seen at the New Year's party in 1942, with her husband Uncle Ab, who did not return as he was murdered in Auschwitz.

Aunt Jansje said that it seemed like a lifetime when she met her sister for the first time in three years. "Oh, kid, you looked like a movie star." Aunt Juliette explained that the suit she had on was a suit she had worn during her hiding times. However, Aunt Jansje said, "Ab, her husband, and Flip are not returning." Later on, she came to visit us, up north, in Benningbroek with her daughter Grace.

During her time in captivity, Jansje had thought of almost nothing but her son, Ernest. For those three odd years, she had even kept a small photograph of him wrapped up and hidden inside her vagina. Aunt Jansje often spent time with us because Ernest was hiding in the town of Midwoud with another Koopman family. These Koopmans could not have children of their own for medical reasons. They had decided that if Ernest's parents did not return, Ernest would be their adopted son. In those three years, they had spoiled him and treated him as their baby.

Now, one summer day, my Papa showed up at their door with a woman they'd never met who only wanted to be reunited with her son. Nothing is ever simple. Suddenly Ernest had two mothers. He was so young at the time and he'd been sent to West Friesland, his memory of his natural parents could quickly have been overshadowed by the loving care of his wartime foster parents. But there were no two ways about it. Ernest's protectors would now have to return him to the care of his natural mother, Jansje—who for three years in hell had dreamed only of seeing him again. It must have been a confusing time for him.

Once Jansje was reunited with Ernest, they both ended up in the Cardozo house, as did Caroline Noach, who had two sons who were doctors in Amsterdam. Papa helped Caroline with butter and eggs. Tante Jansje told us the whole story of her long journey through the life of death.

Having just been torn away from her husband, on May 4, 1943, Jansje arrived at the Dutch transit camp at Vught, in North Brabant. Vught was also a labor camp for those Jews who were deemed valid. Jansje was first put to work making hats for the Wehrmacht. The camp commander at Vught had approached the Philips manufacturing company to see if they would like to use the labor force available in the camp. At first, Philips declined—they didn't want anything to do with slave labor. But after thinking about it, the manufacturers came back with a counterproposal. If, as an employer, they could influence conditions in the camp, making sure the prisoners were fed and adequately housed, etc., this setup might justify the relationship. So, with this agreement, a Philips workshop was started, using some 400 Jewish women as a labor force. As a skilled manual laborer, Jansje Gompers was assigned to the "Philips Group."

Black and white shot of a water-filled ditch, barbed-wire fences, and guard towers

For just over a year, the women in the "Philips Group" helped manufacture electrical hardware —including shavers, dynamos, and tubes for radios. And they survived. Then, in June 1944, the party came to an abrupt end. The order came that all remaining Jews at Vught must now be deported to the east. Jansje's next stop was Auschwitz.

It was at Auschwitz that prisoners got numbers tattooed on their arms. Strong young women were selected to work in the camp, and they would last until either their bodies or their minds gave out under stress. The strong young women from the "Philips Group" were assigned to help the elder and weaker people get undressed, give them a towel and some soap, and send them off in groups for a "shower," from which, of course, they would never return. Daughters would have to undress their mothers and say goodbye.

With the onset of the bitter cold winter came a new string of journeys for the "indispensable" Jansje and her group—trips whose purpose never became entirely clear. First, they were sent by rail to Arbeitslager Reichenbach, then on to Sportschule Langebilau. From there, the women were marched on foot for four days, through the snowy mountains, en route to Trautenau. On the way, they ate snow to keep from dehydrating, and at night they slept on top of each other in haystacks. Arriving at Trautenau, the women were herded into an abandoned factory infested with roaches and lice and were given a half-liter of watery soup. Once in a while, they'd get a potato peel or a bit of bread. They stayed there for four days.

Then, herded into open cattle cars, the women traveled for five days en route to Bohemia, in snow and hailstorms, with many wet blankets to keep them warm. Frequent air-raids made continuous movement impossible, and the train often stopped to wait for hours along with a siding. Parked one time about 100 meters from the railway station at Leipzig, the women sat trembling under their communal blankets, peering out at the unearthly bombardment flaring all around them. It seemed that at any moment, the bombs would hit them. And indeed, shortly after the train pulled out again, those same bombs blew the station to pieces.

Pausing again at Celle and now without any food at all, the women sat the whole night in the cattle car, trying everything they could to avoid frostbite. At noon the next day, they arrived at Bergen-Belsen, where they experienced a fantastic luxury. The Nazis gave each prisoner hot coffee a half-piece of bread, sausage, and an ounce of butter. The women jumped at this feast like wild animals. For many people, Bergen-Belsen was the last stop. But not for this group. They were strong, they were workers, and they were still alive. Somebody somewhere had plans for them. So back on the train they went, to continue their crazy, zigzagging tour of the Reich.

The Liberation of Bergen-belsen Concentration Camp, April 1945 Overview of Camp No 1, now substantially evacuated, taken from a watch tower used by the German guards.

In the third week of February, they arrived at a place called Neuengamme/Porta Westfalica. This location was where they were supposed to live now—on a beautiful mountainside. Their poor excuse for a barracks was still unfinished when they arrived, and it was two days before they got anything to eat. The Nazis built the factory where they put them to work inside a mountain.

Each morning, the women had to walk forty-five minutes up a steep incline to the entrance. Stepping in for the first time, Jansje was wide-eyed with wonder at this fantastic feat of engineering—but terrified of what would become of her. Now lowered by lift six hundred meters down to their new workplace, the workers would receive a bit of watery soup and a tiny bit of bread before marching off to work deep inside the factory. Now and then, they might steal some potato peels from the garbage cans, clean them and boil them on a stove. But they knew that they were starving and were not expected to survive for long. They might have worked themselves to death in that place—but as fate would have it, after only four weeks, the American forces had come too close for comfort, so the factory was hastily abandoned.

When word spread that the U.S. Army was in Westphalia, it gave the Dutch women cause for hope. It meant the Allies were closer to Holland, and the Allies would liberate Holland soon. Some of the women even talked about escaping the train and walking to Holland from here. But that proved impossible. The Germans packed the women off again, this time in a closed, airless cattle car. After yet another unbearable trip, they arrived at Beendorf, which is between Magdeburg and Braunschweig, deep in the middle of Nazi Germany. Here, they were given somewhat better food. The soup was thicker, with a slightly larger piece of bread, and sometimes butter, honey, jam, or even sausage.

The Nazis now put the women laborers to work in an old salt mine, converted to manufacture parts for airplanes. Each day, they had to walk an hour to get to work, and the stinging salty air was awful for their health. But even this ordeal was short-lived. The Allies were coming closer still, and the Nazis moved the women once more.

This time, it was an unforgettable transport of 4,000 women of all nationalities, thrown into cattle cars with 160 women per car, with no chance even to sit, much less sleep. Every night, they would hear screams from the various cattle cars. The guards beat some women, and some were killed for no apparent reason apart from its sport. Jansje was lucky: she was only kicked until her ribs cracked.

None of the women knew where they were going or why. Were they still supposed to be workers, or where they all now merely condemned? In the unrelenting agony, the Nazis drove some of the women straight out of their minds.

At a wooded area, in a place called Ludwigslust, the train stopped for two days. On the first day, the prisoners were allowed out of the cars to be fed. Their captors cooked a soup, and the prisoners stood in line in the rain for a good five hours, waiting for a cup of soup. The guards kept order by occasionally beating someone standing in line—anyone, it didn't matter who. We didn't know the reason behind the punishment for standing; Jansje was struck in the head with a rubber club. She waited patiently. Unfortunately, there just wasn't enough soup that day for everyone, so after standing in thunderstorms for five hours, the last few hundred people in line—Jansje included—were sent away, demoralized, beaten, soaking wet, and still hungry.

Citizens of Ludwigslust dig graves in May 1945 in the town square under the direction of soldiers of the 82rd US Airborne Division for decent reburial of the Wobbelin camp victims by the end of World War II.

The following day, they got word that more soup was being prepared and ready by ten. But then, before the feeding could take place, another order came: Everyone back to their cars. It was on to Hamburg. As always, their railway journey was a passage between bombings. It seemed as if they were taking a grand tour of the destruction of Germany.

Sometime later—by now wholly dazed with hunger and fatigue—Jansje awoke and peered out at the apocalyptic vision that was Hamburg. The port city of the north was now a ghastly skeleton, a drab mountainscape of rubble, with random bones of buildings stabbing into a sky of smoke—and here and there, a green plant or a tree, a tiny green spot of irony blooming in the devastation. Just then, a shriek of joy erupted in the car with the Dutch women. Someone had seen their old commander from Vught standing outside, and the women all cried out to him. He approached the train, calling out in amazement, "Is this the 'Philips Group?'"

Footage from ‘Every Face Has a Name,’ a 2015 documentary about the process of identifying the names of refugees in post-liberation newsreel footage from Sweden’s Malmo port in 1945 (courtesy: Menemsha Films)

He arranged to have them brought to Eidolstedt, just outside Hamburg, fed a thick cabbage soup. It tasted good. Very good.

And there they stayed until the Allies came, and the Germans gave up. The dazed prisoners were shipped north again, arriving by ferry at Malmö, Sweden—where they were nursed back to health in a camp for displaced persons.

I sat and listened to this story from Tante Jansje. We had heard rumors before, but now these words were coming from the mouth of someone close to me. Watching her, I thought back to how she looked at the lively New Year's Eve party she had thrown just a few years before, in her luxurious flat in the Zuider Amstellaan. She was a changed person now, but still beautiful. The ravages of captivity could not overcome the innate beauty of her person.

I've mentioned the ambivalence I had about being Jewish as a child just after the war. Because many people had worked hard to make Jews a thing of the past, Jewishness seemed more of a liability. And having already spent a good piece of my childhood living among the gentiles, I wasn't sure if being a Jew was something I needed or wanted to pursue. Again, maybe it wasn't worth the trouble.

For some reason, she heard Tante Jansje's story changed all that. Her own identity as a Jew had accompanied her such a long way—from life, through death, and back again—that no one hearing her tale could turn his back on that identity. This woman had journeyed through ten different concentration camps and lived to tell me what I have just told you. My doubt got up and left me that day. I would be a Jew.