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THE HOLOCAUST AND ITS CONTEXTS
The Rescue of Belsen’s

Diamond Children
Bettine Siertsema
The Holocaust and its Contexts
Series Editors
Ben Barkow
The Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association
Huddersfield, UK
Suzanne Bardgett
Imperial War Museum
London, UK
More than sixty years on, the Holocaust remains a subject of intense
debate with ever-widening ramifications. This series aims to demonstrate
the continuing relevance of the Holocaust and related issues in contempo-
rary society, politics and culture; studying the Holocaust and its history
broadens our understanding not only of the events themselves but also of
their present-day significance. The series acknowledges and responds to
the continuing gaps in our knowledge about the events that constituted
the Holocaust, the various forms in which the Holocaust has been remem-
bered, interpreted and discussed, and the increasing importance of the
Holocaust today to many individuals and communities.
More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14433
Bettine Siertsema
The Rescue of
Belsen’s Diamond
Children
Bettine Siertsema
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ISSN 2731-5711 ISSN 2731-572X (electronic)

The Holocaust and its Contexts
ISBN 978-3-030-97706-1 ISBN 978-3-030-97707-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97707-8
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Acknowledgements
This book could not have been written without the help of many. First and
foremost are the survivors who were willing to talk to me: Max Kleerekoper
(now deceased), Rob Engelander, Mirjam Gosman-Lopes Cardozo,
Gerard Lakmaker, Marc Degen, Anita Leeser-Gassan, Elly Vleeschhouwer-
Blocq, and Femke Roos-Meijer. Prof. Dawn Skorczewski had similar talks
with Louk van Embden and Oscar Lehmann. The fact that they were
prepared to have these conversations fills me with great gratitude, because
bringing back memories of a period so horrific that one would rather not
think about it is not easy. I am well aware that talking about the camp
experiences can wreak havoc on their mood and their sleep. This makes
me all the more appreciative of their willingness to accept these negative
consequences in order to have one or more conversations with me about
this traumatising period.
Hetty Verolme-Werkendam was my first contact with the Luba chil-
dren. She provided me with a list of names and addresses of diamond
children still alive at the time. Equally important was the fact that she gave
me access to two statements by her father about his stay in Sachsenhausen
and subsequent experiences. Rob Engelander did the same with the letters
his mother and father wrote home shortly after the liberation. Together
these documents were essential for the chapters on Sachsenhausen and
Beendorf, which fill a gap in the history of the Holocaust, since—till
now—very little was known of the experiences of the diamond men and
women in these camps. I am grateful to Gerard Lakmaker for the many
documents about the reunion and the loan of the autobiography of Luba,
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
which was unavailable in any other way. Some children of the ‘Luba chil-
dren’—Ben Gosman, Sharon and Jacqueline van Embden, and Marion
Kas-Cohen—offered valuable additional information. Furthermore,
Marion Kas provided me with relevant documents, such as the transport
lists from 4 and 5 December 1944. Elsbeth Kars, though not directly
involved, completed the picture of the pre-war diamond industry.
Thanks are also in order to the anonymous reviewer of my book pro-
posal for his or her valuable advice and the suggestions for improvement.
My VU colleague Tijl Vanneste, currently working at the Universidade
Nova de Lisboa, provided me with useful information about the Nazi raid
of the Diamond Exchange. My research was enriched by the contact with
colleagues whom I hadn’t even met, both for the new data that it pro-
duced and for the contact itself. My thanks go to Diete Oudesluijs, who
wrote a book on the Dutch prisoners of Sachsenhausen, to Jan van
Ommen, who wrote on the Swedish operation to rescue prisoners from
Ravensbrück and Beendorf (and other camps), and to Roman Wasserman
Wroblewski, chairman of the Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association,
who researches the same rescue operation from the Swedish side. For me,
the attention he pays to the non-Dutch children saved by Luba, Hermina,
and Ada Bimko was a correction to my exclusive focus on the Dutch
children.
The whole project would not have been possible without the patient
assistance of the staff of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, who
uploaded the numerous survivors’ interviews that were not available
online. The staff of the NIOD and of the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam
were also very willing to help me in providing the archival documents
I needed.
Transcribing video interviews is an incredibly time-consuming task, and
I am extremely grateful to Geraldine Raap, Edo Groot, Jeannette Raap,
and Dylan Stevens for their help. They made a substantial contribution to
the realisation of this book. The students of the honours programme and
of the third-year course ‘The Holocaust: History and Memory’ at VU
Amsterdam in 2018 have also contributed to the transcription of the
testimonies.
I am grateful to Research Institute CLUE+ of the Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, which provided funds for the linguistic editing of the transla-
tion of Diamantkinderen (Laren: Verbum, 2020). Dr Leston Buell was
vital in developing the preliminary translation into smooth and
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
natural-sounding English. Having a linguistic editor of such quality, who

finds solutions for all kinds of problems pertaining to style and word
choice, was not only instructive but also enjoyable and inspiring.
My research into the fate of the Dutch diamond Jews and their children
started as a joint project with my close friend and colleague from Brandeis
University in Boston, Prof. Dawn Skorczewski. Being able to share frus-
trations and doubts, but also the joy of finding new facts, was a great
stimulus. The joint trajectory split after some time for practical reasons,
resulting in two books, the present one (and its Dutch predecessor) and
Dawn Skorczewski and Karen Maandag-Ralph’s book Sieg Maandag: Life
and Art in the Aftermath of Bergen-Belsen. But by no means did splitting
the project result in a decrease of her warm interest and moral support.
How priceless such a friendship is!
This extended translation of the Dutch book Diamantkinderen was
supported by a grant from the CLUE+ research institute of the Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam.
Contents
1 A Brief Overview of the History 1
2 Sources 7
3 Amsterdam, 1940–1943: ‘A Rather False Sense of Security’ 15
4 Westerbork
and Vught: ‘It Was a Nice Camp, but Despair
Played a Big Role Too’ 35
5 Bergen-Belsen: ‘Everything Fell by the Wayside’ 61
6 Sachsenhausen:
‘You’re Reduced to Nothing. You’re
Worth Less Than a Dog’ 87
7 Beendorf: ‘It Is a Miracle That I Survived’101
8 The
Children and Nurse Luba: ‘Just Bring All Those
Little Children to Me’115
9 Liberation:
‘I Can Still See the Horror on the Faces of the
English’135
10 Post-War Lives: ‘Crying Doesn’t Help’153
ix
x Contents
11 The 1995 Reunion: ‘A Time to Heal’167
12 Testimony: A Valuable Yet Tricky Source177
Who’s Who199
Bibliography205
Index213
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Pre-war picture postcard of the Soep diamond factory. Note
how the English text shows the company’s international
orientation. (Fotobureau J. van Dijk & Zn, Amsterdam) 23
Fig. 4.1 Jack and Betty Engelander with baby Robby. (Private collection) 38
Fig. 8.1 Luba Tryszynska in 1946. (Courtesy of Swedish Holocaust
Memorial Association) 118
Fig. 8.2 In the middle Luba Tryszynska, on the left Hermina Krancová.
(Courtesy of the Swedish Holocaust Memorial Association) 120
Fig. 9.1 The boy on the left is Jack Cohen Rodriguez, the little boy on
the bottom right is Robby Engelander. In the back row on the
left is Nurse Luba. Still from a movie made by the British army,
Imperial War Museum (IWM FLM 1467) 137
Fig. 11.1 Luba Tryszynska-Frederick in 1995. (Private collection) 173
Fig. 11.2 The 1995 reunion. Front row: on the left Rob Engelander,
third from the left Hetty Verolme-Werkendam, then Luba
Tryszynska and Hela Jafe-Los, on the right Marc Degen;
Second row, second from the left Jack Cohen Rodriguez, Lida
Fles-Vos, Stella Fertig-Degen, Mirjam Gosman-Lopes Cardozo
and (partly visible) Judy Haveman-Lopes Cardozo, on the right
Louk van Embden; Third row, on the left Maurice Rabbie
Raynor (with moustache), Ronny Abram, Sieg Maandag (with
yellow shawl), second from the right Marcus Kleerekoper
(with gray jacket); Back row, on the right Gerard Lakmaker
(with blue jacket). (Private collection) 174
xi
CHAPTER 1
A Brief Overview of the History
From the sixteenth century onwards Amsterdam was home to a diamond

industry.1 The Spanish and Portuguese Jews who settled there at the end
of the fifteenth century played an important role in this industry. The joint
Catholic sovereigns Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile had given
them the choice of either converting to Catholicism or leaving the Iberian
Peninsula. A new influx into Amsterdam followed after 1585, when
Antwerp fell into Spanish, that is Catholic, hands. The Portuguese Jews
who had settled there previously now moved on to the Northern
Netherlands and especially to Amsterdam, where there was freedom of
religion. In addition to their expertise, they also brought their network of
international trade contacts with them. Sources of rough diamonds were
India (from before the beginning of our era), Brazil (bounteous diamond
fields discovered in 1727), Russia (nineteenth century), and South Africa
and other African countries (from around 1870).
The diamond industry has always employed a great many Jews, partly
because it was not organised into a guild. In the Middle Ages Jews were
barred from joining guilds, so most trades were not open to them. But in
the absence of a guild, the diamond trade was. The processing of the
1
Simone Lipschitz, The Amsterdam Diamond Exchange (Amsterdam: Stadsuitgeverij
Amsterdam, 1990, bilingual edition), 27.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
B. Siertsema, The Rescue of Belsen’s Diamond Children, The
Holocaust and its Contexts,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97707-8_1
2 B. SIERTSEMA
hardest material found in nature required great skill and expertise, often
passed on from father to son, and sometimes from mother to daughter. It
was a generally respected and relatively well-paid craft.2
There was a clear hierarchy in the business. At the top were the cleavers,
who after careful examination—which could take hours, sometimes even
days—split the rough diamond. Then the sawyers went to work, giving
the stone its basic shape. The cutting edges were chosen in such a way that
the largest and purest stone was left by cutting away any irregularities with
as little loss of material as possible. At first this work was often done at
home, including by women. And finally, the polishers did their work by
sharpening the facets that give the stone its radiant appearance. Each job
required great expertise and concentration. Remarkably many women
worked as sawyers and polishers, because they were considered eminently
suitable for this sort of precision work, which required little physical
strength, but of course also because they were generally cheaper labourers
than men.3 Apart from large machines for sawing and the so-called mills
with grinding wheels, all sorts of small equipment were used, such as caps
and adjusting instruments, which served to keep the diamond at the cor-
rect angle for sawing and polishing, and a whole range of sieves, pliers, and
magnifiers. At the top of the diamond industry were the factory owners
and traders, who with their international contacts took care of supplying
the raw material and selling the final product. However, they had almost
always learned the trade in practice and had therefore also gained their
own craft experience.
Particularly due to the discovery of rich sites in South Africa, the dia-
mond industry in Amsterdam flourished in the late nineteenth century.
Not only the availability of rough stone was key, an equally important fac-
tor was the emerging industrialisation. At first the mills in the domestic
workshops were mainly operated by women, but now in large factory
spaces, first horsepower and later steam power were employed. In the
twentieth century the large machines were driven by electric motors, but
there was always a great deal of manual work involved. The rising prosper-
ity led to a great demand not only for industrial diamonds but also for
jewels. Good craftsmen had their work cut out for them and were well
2
Philo Bregstein & Salvador Bloemgarten (samenstellers), Herinnering aan Joods
Amsterdam (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1994), 48–53.
3
Lipschitz, Amsterdam Diamond Exchange, 33.
1 A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY 3
paid. This flourishing period, from 1870 onwards, is called the Cape Era.4
By 1890 around half of Amsterdam was economically dependent on the
diamond trade, which counted some 6500 merchants and workers on all
levels.5 The extent to which the rich diamond workers profited from the
rather sudden increase in prosperity during the Cape Era becomes clear
from a popular story that circulated, about how the diamond men used to
light their cigars with banknotes, to flaunt their wealth.6 The overall pros-
perity in the trade was due to the profitable deals the Dutch merchants
had struck with the De Beers company, founded by Cecil Rhodes, which
held a monopoly of the diamond sites in the British Cape Colony (and
remained the global monopolist until the start of the twenty-first century).
Obviously, that prosperity was acquired at the expense of the South African
miners, whose working conditions were far worse than the already unfa-
vourable ones of the diamond labourers at the Amsterdam side of
the trade.7
In 1891 the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange was established, and in
1894 the General Dutch Diamond Workers Association, the ANDB (in
Dutch: Algemene Nederlandse Diamantbewerkers Bond), was founded. It
was a very influential trade union, which not only strove to serve the socio-
economic interests of its members but also aimed at their cultural eleva-
tion. This can still be seen in the impressive trade union building, ‘de
Burcht van Berlage’ in today’s Henri Polaklaan in Amsterdam. The edifice
contained murals by Richard Roland Holst with lines of poetry by his wife
Henriette, as well as a library, and all sorts of courses were organised there.
The ANDB was highly successful in its negotiations with employers, with
results including the first 44-hour working week, later a 40-hour week,
and two weeks of paid holiday. But this strong position of the trade union
also led to a gradual shift of the main centre of the industry to Antwerp,
where working conditions were less favourable and thus cheaper for
employers. The First World War brought some recovery to Amsterdam’s
position, but the inevitable economic fluctuations struck hard, and even
4
S. Asscher, Diamant, wonderlijk kristal (Bussum: Unieboek, 1975), 33–36.
5
Saskia Coenen Snyder, ‘As Long as It Sparkles!’: The Diamond Industry in Nineteenth-
Century Amsterdam. Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 22(2) (Winter
2017), 40–41.
6
Lipschitz, Amsterdam Diamond Exchange, 33.
7
See for the history of the ties between colonialism and the diamond industry and the
exploitation of miners: Tijl Vanneste, Blood, Sweat and Earth: The Struggle for Control over
the World’s Diamonds Throughout History (London: Reaktion Books, 2021).
4 B. SIERTSEMA
before the stock market crash of 1929, 7000 of Amsterdam’s 9000 dia-
mond workers had become unemployed. The years before the Second
World War showed some improvement.8
Illustrative of Amsterdam’s position as a diamond city is the fact that
the largest diamond ever found was entrusted to the Asscher Company to
be processed. It was the Cullinan diamond, a gift of the government of
Transvaal to the English king in 1907 as thanks for the self-government
that this former colony was granted. The story goes that Abraham Asscher,
the later co-president of the Jewish Council, simply took the boat from
England with the rough diamond in his pocket, because that seemed safer
to him than transporting it with the torpedo boat destroyer that was the
officially announced means of transportation.9 The cleaving was done by
Abraham’s elder brother, Joseph Asscher. To this day the stones adorn the
British crown jewels. Earlier, in the mid-nineteenth century, another leg-
endary diamond, the Koh-i-Noor, was cut and polished in facets by the
firm Coster in Amsterdam for Queen Victoria.
The Diamond Exemption

During the Second World War the Amsterdam diamond Jews, at least part
of them, were exempt from deportation for a long time. The Germans
wanted to set up their own diamond industry in order to provide jobs for
wounded and disabled soldiers, following the example of France, which
had done something similar after the First World War. But just as impor-
tant was the intention to acquire foreign exchange, while the hard indus-
trial diamond was a necessary component for the production of weapons,
planes, and the like. How eager the Germans were to get hold of dia-
monds became clear during the infamous robbery at the Diamond
Exchange at the Weesperplein on 16 April 1942. All traders had to come
to the Exchange with their entire stock of diamonds, which was then con-
fiscated, supposedly to store them in a safer place than in Amsterdam. In
total some 70,000 carats were seized. But apart from the robbery itself,
the aggressive treatment and humiliating body search also made it clear
8
Karin Hofmeester (ed.), Een schitterende erfenis: 125 jaar nalatenschap van de Algemene
Nederlandse Diamantbewerkersbond (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2019).
9
R.M. Meijer, Cullinan maakte Asscher wereldberoemd. Ons Amsterdam 1 February 1998
(onsamsterdam.nl/cullinan-maakte-asscher-wereldberoemd). See also https://royalasscher.
com/cullinan/.
1 A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY 5
that the Jewish diamond traders were essentially completely disenfran-

chised. Traders who voluntarily surrendered their unregistered stock were
given a Sperre, an exemption, which—for the time being—allowed them
to stay in Amsterdam.10
The plan to establish their own German diamond industry required
diamond workers as well as traders and manufacturers. The former because
of their skills, the latter because of their expertise and international trade
contacts. The first plan was to set up such an industry near concentration
camp Vught, where some of the infrastructure of the Philips factory could
be used. Later the location changed to Bergen-Belsen, in the heart of
Germany. The diamond dealers showed themselves to be good negotia-
tors: they were able to get a guarantee that the exemption would apply not
only to themselves but to their immediate families as well. Later on, when
their deportation proved inevitable, they managed to get a deal with bet-
ter living conditions in the camp where they were housed better than the
ordinary camp inmates. But the Germans, for their part, also used such
concessions to squeeze from them even more money and diamonds.
In the end, the people who were able to obtain a diamond exemption
represented only a fraction of the total number of diamond workers.
Anyone looking for the term ‘diamond worker’ in the Dutch website of
the digital Jewish Monument will find, page after page, many dozens of
people who had that profession and were killed in Auschwitz in 1942 or
in Sobibor in 1943.11 In view of those days they must have been unable to
acquire the coveted exemption.
People from the diamond group who were exempt from deportation
were left untouched until 1943. Then most families had to go to
Westerbork, where they stayed together as a group, though after some
time a few men were forced to return to Amsterdam to continue working
there under guard. But from early 1944 all diamond Jews were deported
to Bergen-Belsen with various transports, the last one in September 1944.
10
Bies van Ede and Paul Post, De diamantenroof: Hoe hoge nazi’s met geroofde diamanten
uit Nederland en België een nieuw leven opbouwden (Utrecht: Omniboek, 2016). Lipschitz,
Amsterdam Diamond Exchange, 85.
11
http://www.joodsmonument.
6 B. SIERTSEMA
Bergen-Belsen and Beyond

In Bergen-Belsen the diamond people shared the same barrack and were
exempted from heavy forced labour in order to save their hands.
Nevertheless, conditions became more and more precarious due to the
increasing food shortage. In November their fate began to turn and privi-
leges were withdrawn. On 4 December 1944, the last remnant of hope
that they could escape a dire fate was abruptly dashed: without prior warn-
ing the men were deported to an unknown destination. Later it turned
out to be Sachsenhausen, where most of them soon died. From there, the
few survivors were later sent on to other camps in the infamous death
marches. No more than 6 men of the original 177 survived.
One day after the men, the (smaller) group of women had to leave
Bergen-Belsen as well. They were put to work in the aircraft industry in
the underground salt mines of Beendorf in the Harz, a satellite camp of
Neuengamme. The conditions and treatment were terrible, but because
the work was underground, the women suffered somewhat less from the
harsh winter weather. Moreover, in April 1945, just before the end of the
war, a time when there were many deaths among the other prisoners, they
were taken to Sweden by the Red Cross, reportedly thanks to the media-
tion of the Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte. Rumour has it that
his quid pro quo consisted of a few cases of whiskey. Thus, a relatively
large number of the women survived.
The children were left to fend for themselves and would have been
doomed if not for a young Polish Jewess, Luba Tryszynska. With great
courage and ingenuity she was able to pull the children through the last
terrible months of Bergen-Belsen, despite the prevailing epidemics of
typhoid and diphtheria and despite the acute and worsening food short-
age. The help of Dr Ada Bimko in the background was indispensable. Like
Luba Tryszynska, she was a Jewish prisoner who had first been to Auschwitz
and had lost her husband and child there. Baby Philip de Goede, born on
16 November 1943 in Westerbork, could not be saved. He died on 31
January 1945. For 11-year-old Helena Rabbie the liberation came too late
as well, although she did witness it herself, but she died of typhoid fever
on 24 April 1945. Two others died shortly after the liberation. Except
these, all the children survived.
This book tells the story of the fate of the Amsterdam Diamond Jews
and their children during the Holocaust as much as possible in their own
words. The next chapter will account for the sources of these words and
the theoretical background of their usage.
CHAPTER 2
Sources
The use of survivors’ testimonies as a historical source is less controversial

today than it was at the beginning of Holocaust historiography. Overviews
of this methodological debate can be found with Zoë Waxman,1 Donald
Bloxham,2 and Tony Kushner,3 among others. I will just briefly summarise
the main milestones.
The earliest historians of the Holocaust tended to look down on survi-
vors’ testimonies, both written and oral, as a source for their historiogra-
phies. Raul Hilberg, author of the encompassing The Destruction of the
European Jews (1961) doubted their reliability.4 The preference for the
allegedly less subjective sources provided by formal documents even led
Leon Poliakov to quote executioners rather than victims in his Harvest of
1
Zoë Waxman, Transcending History? Methodological Problems in Holocaust Testimony.
In The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004), 143–157.
2
Donald Bloxham, The victims: Dealing with testimony. The Holocaust: Critical Historical
Approaches, eds Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2005), 16–60.
3
Tony Kushner, Holocaust testimony, ethics, and the problem of representation. In Poetics
Today 26(2) (2006), 275–295.
4
Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,
2001), 49.

Switzerland AG 2022
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8 B. SIERTSEMA
Hate (1951).5 Another reason to stay away from the use of testimonies is
deference for the stories the victims or survivors have to tell as something
that can’t be looked at critically or mined for data like names, places, dates,
and other hard facts. According to theorists like David Patterson and Elie
Wiesel, doing so comes close to sacrilege.6 But while the motivation may
differ, the effect of dismissing victims’ testimonies as a historical source is
no different.
Martin Gilbert was the first historian who consistently quoted from
victims’ testimonies in his day-by-day account in The Holocaust: A Jewish
Tragedy (1987), but he was criticised for his mainly illustrative use of these
testimonies. Yet he may have paved the way for leading historians like Saul
Friedländer,7 Christopher Browning,8 and Dan Stone,9 who make full use
of testimony for their histories of the Holocaust. As Orna Kenan, who
abridged Friedländer’s two-volume standard work, stated, these sources
‘warn us against easy generalisations, and tear through the smugness of
scholarly detachment.’10 She is talking about sources such as diaries and
letters written at the time of the events, but it is no less true for oral testi-
monies (though Kenan may judge differently, as just a few lines earlier she
mentions ‘fallible memoirs’ with a touch of disdain).
Oral History
In general, historians agree that victims’ testimonies should be used with
caution. This is all the more true for oral testimonies. Human memory has
always been a fallible instrument, and traumatic experiences from long ago
pose an extra problem. In the late twentieth century a new discipline
developed, Memory Studies, dealing with the interface of psychology, psy-
chiatry, cultural anthropology, sociology, and history. Combining Memory
5
Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate (London: Elek Books), 1956, xiv, as quoted by Donald
Bloxham, The victims, 32.
6
Zoë Waxman, Transcending History? 143–144. She refers to David Patterson, Along the
Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1999), 7.
7
Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1945, abridged by Orna Kenan (New
York: Harper Perennial, 2009).
8
Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New
York: Norton, 2010).
9
Dan Stone, The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
10
Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, xi.
2 SOURCES 9
Studies and Trauma Studies,11 as Cathy Caruth did,12 proved a fruitful

subfield. With regard to the Holocaust, scholars such as Shoshana Felman,
Dori Laub, and Lawrence Langer have been key. On the basis of mostly
oral Holocaust testimonies these authors reflected on the functioning of
memory in relation to traumatic events, such as in Holocaust Testimony:
The Ruins of Memory13 and Testimony: Crises in Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis and History.14
Oral testimonies were collected starting shortly after the war. David
Boder was the first to do so on audiotape in European displaced persons’
camps. Several national research institutes on the war created their own
collections, such as those in Amsterdam, Paris, Warsaw, and Jerusalem.
Due to lack of available technology these testimonies were often taken
down in shorthand instead of being recorded on tape. From the 1980s
onwards this process of collecting testimonies received a major boost,
becoming the aim of a number of projects, each with its own characteris-
tics. The best known are those of Yad Vashem, the Fortunoff Collection at
Yale University, and the Visual History Archive, also known as the
Spielberg collection, initially called the Survivors of the Shoah Visual
History Archive, and in this book referred to as the VHA interviews. The
latter, created from the mid-1990s with the revenue from Spielberg’s film
Schindler’s List, comprises some 52,000 video interviews in 34 languages,
recorded in 57 countries. The project met with serious criticism, in par-
ticular from scholars involved with the Fortunoff Archive,15 and much of
this criticism is legitimate, but the vast scope of the project and the well-
designed search tools in the online catalogue make it a rich and very useful
source for research for historians, as well as for memory scholars and
trauma scholars.
11
See for an overview of this combination: Karyn Ball, Trauma and Memory Studies. In
Oxford Encyclopaedia of Literature, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.
013.1129. Accessed 26 October 2021.
12
Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, Maryland: John
Hopkins University Press, 1995).
13
Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimony: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991).
14
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises in Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis and History (London/New York: Routledge, 1992).
15
See, for instance, Henry Greenspan and Sidney Bolkosky, When is an interview an inter-
view? Notes from listening to Holocaust survivors. Poetics Today 27(2) (2006), 431–449.
10 B. SIERTSEMA
The VHA interviews are all roughly set up in the same way, using a
predetermined schedule with time frames budgeted for each topic to be
discussed. Such a schedule can work as a solid structure, but in some cases
it can also have the effect of a constraining straightjacket. The interviews
follow the chronology of the events, for which the survivor has previously
filled out a questionnaire of more than 40 pages,16 that the interviewer
uses as a guideline to preserve the chronological order and the general
outline of the story. About 20 per cent of the interview is allotted to the
witness’s pre-war life and another 20 per cent to his or her post-war life.
The witnesses—the VHA prefers the term ‘survivors’—are filmed in their
homes with the camera in a fixed position, and the interviewer and camera
crew do not pause for any emotional breakdowns or other disruptions that
may occur. At the end the witness is asked for his or her message for future
generations and each interview concludes with a portrait of the witness
with his or her partner and offspring, and lastly with pictures of photos
and artefacts that figure in the story.
Twenty-three interviews from this collection constitute the basis of this
book. They will be supplemented by written testimonies, autobiographical
texts, and personal interviews with 11 individuals, partly overlapping with
the VHA, some of them new while others are survivors’ children, and
partly with witnesses close to the event but not part of the core group of
Dutch diamond workers and their families.
The various testimonies are not mere illustration but the very power
that drives the narrative. In a way, however, this book does use the testi-
monies for ‘mining’ facts that, put together, offer a coherent account of
what happened to a group of Amsterdam diamond workers and their fami-
lies. To this end, the book employs more or less the same method as, for
example, Christopher Browning in Remembering Survival, Rebecca
Clifford in Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust,17 and Diane
Wolf in Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in
Holland.18 The result of studies like these is a kind of group biography.
The advantage of oral testimonies over any written source is the layer of
non-verbal language that adds meaning. Facial expressions, hand gestures,
16
Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
University Press, 2015), 122.
17
Rebecca Clifford, Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust (New Haven/London:
Yale University Press, 2020).
18
Diane L. Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland
(Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2007).
2 SOURCES 11
posture, coughing, tears—while all these elements may not necessarily

change the content of what is verbally told, they do contribute to the
overall meaning of the story. Obviously, in written language such elements
are difficult to transmit. Oral history theorist Lynn Abrams warns the oral
historian to ‘beware the power of the transcript to transform the source
from its natural mutability into unnatural fixity.’19 I have tried to include
the most noticeable instances of non-verbal expression into the transcripts,
but I add interpretations of them only in passing, so as not to interrupt the
story unnecessarily. Almost every testimony quoted here would be deserv-
ing of a detailed description and analysis of those non-verbal elements and
their meaning,20 but that would be at the cost of the story these joint
interviews have to tell, and it is telling the story of a group of Dutch-
Jewish diamond workers and their wives and children, as much as possible
in their own words, that is my main purpose.
The quotes from the oral testimonies are printed in italics to clearly
distinguish them from the author’s text, but—for the sake of readability—
without reference to the source. They are rendered as literally as possible,
with all the hiccups that are normal in spontaneous discourse, which
means that sentences are sometimes left unfinished and that interviewees
interrupt themselves and may make errors in grammar or choice of words.
Repetitions are maintained as well, because these can be an indication of
the importance the speaker attaches to what is said. Testimonies in Dutch
are translated by me, without stating it each time those interviews are
quoted; in the overview of the sources readers can see which interviews are
originally in English and which are translated from Dutch. This poses an
additional problem: the language errors made by survivors who emigrated
to the United Stated or other English language countries. Sometimes one
can detect their native Dutch in their grammar or choice of words.
Wherever traceable and needed for a right understanding an explanation
has been added in square brackets.
The first chapter offers an overview of the whole story of this group of
diamond workers and their families, as well as, very briefly, the general
background on the diamond trade in Amsterdam. The next chapters tell
the story more in detail, quoting from a variety of testimonies. They
19
Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (New York: Routledge, 2016, 2nd edn), 24.
20
See for instance Dawn Skorczewski and Bettine Siertsema, ‘The kind of spirit people still
kept’: VHA testimonies of Amsterdam’s Diamond Jews. Holocaust Studies: A Journal of
Culture and History 26(1) (2020), 62–84.
12 B. SIERTSEMA
maintain the general chronology, starting with the outbreak of war in the
Netherlands in May 1940. In Chaps. 3 and 4, a wide variety of witnesses
will come to the fore, but this group will narrow down in the subsequent
chapters. A helpful instrument may be the overview of all the people who
figure in these chapters added at the end of the book for quick reference.
The events told in Chaps. 6, 7, and 8 took place in more or less the same
span of time, the last five months of the war; each of these chapters follows
a subset of the diamond group: the men, the women, and the children.
Chapters 9, 10, and 11 mainly track the lives of the children: their libera-
tion, their post-war lives, and the reunion organised in 1995.
Drawing on so many oral and written testimonies permits a comparison
of how events are remembered. Chapter 12 discusses some of the con-
tested issues, and possible explanations for the differences that occur. In
that last chapter the findings will be held up against some of the theoreti-
cal literature on testimonies as well.
Primary Sources
As mentioned above, 24 witnesses of this history of Jewish diamond work-
ers gave a video testimony for the Shoah Foundation Visual History
Archive in the mid-1990s: 12 children and eight adults of the group who
ended up in Bergen-Belsen, and an additional four people with some other
connection to the story. Due to their young age at the time, five other
child survivors were still alive to be interviewed by either my colleague and
friend Dawn Skorczewski or me, as well as three child survivors who had
also given a video testimony. In addition to this, I talked with four chil-
dren of survivors.
In the years immediately after the war, the National Institute for War
Documentation (RIOD, now NIOD, the Netherlands Institute for War,
Holocaust, and Genocide Studies) conducted interviews with many hun-
dreds of survivors of the camps, of which a stenographic report was made.
The typescript is kept in the NIOD archive. Some of these reports are
from women from the diamond transport. They provided input for Chaps.
4, 5, and especially 7. Two child survivors published their memoirs. Osher
Lehmann, born in 1933, wrote Faith at the Brink, in which his Orthodox
Jewish faith plays a central role,21 and Hetty Verolme-Werkendam, the
oldest girl of the group, born in 1930, wrote The Children’s House of
21
Osher M. Lehmann, Faith at the Brink (Brooklyn, New York: Lehmann Books, 1996).
2 SOURCES 13
Belsen, which was reprinted numerous times and translated into various
languages.22 Lehmann gave a VHA testimony as well and was interviewed
by Dawn Skorczewski in June 2018. Hetty Verolme did not give a VHA
testimony, but she was very forthcoming and helpful in telephone conver-
sations with Dawn Skorczewski and me. Luba Tryszynska, the woman
who played an essential role in rescuing the children, gave (at least) three
interviews, an audiotape of two of them can be consulted on the USHMM
(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) website, while the third
one has been transcribed.23 Furthermore, she published an autobiography,
with the help of two ghostwriters,24 and two children’s picture books were
based on her story.25
Important sources for Chap. 6, ‘Sachsenhausen’, are two unpublished
written statements by Maurice Werkendam, Hetty’s father, of which the
copyright is deposited with the Children of Belsen and the Holocaust
Trust, the report of an interview with Jack Engelander by two Belgian
journalists,26 and some personal letters in the possession of his son, Rob
Engelander. His mother Betty wrote a few elaborate letters home from
Sweden, where she recuperated after the liberation: an invaluable source
for Chap. 7, ‘Beendorf’. Personal documents were important as a source
for Chap. 11, ‘Reunion’, as well. They were made available to me by
Gerard Lakmaker, one of the child survivors and main organiser of the
reunion, and by Ben Gosman, son of one of the other child survivors.
22
Hetty E. Verolme, The Children’s House of Belsen (North Fremantle, Australia: Fremantle
Arts Centre Press, 2000).
23
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn503525 and https://collections.
ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn631821. The transcribed interview was with Seymour Brief
for the Southeastern Florida Holocaust Memorial Center, Inc. in Miami on 18 August 1980.
24
The Eyes of an Angel: The Story of Luba Tryszynska Frederick, as told to David Michael
Smith and Susan Goschie (Portland, Oregon: Personal Saga, 2002).
25
Luba: The Angel of Bergen-Belsen, as told to Michelle R. McCann, by Luba Tryszynska-
Frederick, illustrations by Ann Marshall (Berkeley/Toronto: Tricycle Press, 2003) and Jan
Hein de Groot. Martha en Luba/Luba en Martha (Korendijk: gemeente Korendijk, 1995).
26
Martin Heylen and Marc Van Hulle, Getuigenissen uit de koncentratiekampen: Vlamingen
doorbreken 50 jaar stilzwijgen (Eeklo, Belgium: Uitgeverij Taptoe, 1992), 96–105.
CHAPTER 3
Amsterdam, 1940–1943: ‘A Rather False

Sense of Security’
There was not really one ‘Jewish community’ in Amsterdam before the
Second World War. This was also true for those who worked in ‘the dia-
monds’, a sector that had gone through a difficult time in the economic
crisis of the 1930s, after a great boom at the end of the nineteenth century
and which had now recovered somewhat. The differences were great, in
religion as well as political conviction and socio-economic status. The
orthodox, like the Lehmann family, strictly adhered to all religious precepts
and rituals. Mr. Lehmann went to shul every day before and after work,
and his wife Hedwig ran a kosher household. They celebrated the Sabbath
and the religious holidays elaborately, both in shul and in the family circle.
After the First World War, the parents had immigrated to the Netherlands
due to increasing anti-Semitism in Germany. They honoured the religious
objects they had brought with them at the time, real family heirlooms, such
as a nineteenth-century Haggadah, the book one of their grandfathers had
carefully illustrated and from which they read at the Seder meal.1
1
Dawn Skorczewski and Bettine Siertsema portray Oscar Lehmann’s family life and home,
Hemony Lane 5, in Joodse Huizen 5, edited by Frits Rijksbaron, Ester Shaya, and Gert Jan de
Vries (Amsterdam: Gibbon 2019), 50–55.
Quote from the VHA interview with Greta Roselaar, under the name of Luis
Treves-Guttmann

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97707-8_3
16 B. SIERTSEMA
Others went to the synagogue only at the high holidays but celebrated
the Friday evening with a festive meal in the extended family circle, with
lots of singing and laughter. Such is one of the sweet memories of Rachel
Alleman-Cohen Rodriguez, born in 1935:
Friday night the whole family came—and we had a big family. It was really
very nice, you know. Because we had a very nice family life. My mother and
father, everybody came to them, you know. […] My grandparents, they lived
close by, and everybody came, my mother’s brothers, everything. It was really a
nice […] We had a big table, and you know, like we ate nice and there was sing-
ing. My father’s brother could sing so very nice [smiles]. You know, it was like a
big family there.
Lida Vos, seven at the time, remembers how she and her sister went
into the tub on Friday:
On Friday you had to be extra clean of course. On weekdays you could wash at
the sink, for we didn’t have a shower. But on Friday you had to be very clean
and then on Sabbath you got your best clothes on, with a big bow in your hair,
and then we went to our grandparents around the corner. And there we were
given—maybe we were given lemonade, I don’t know. But that used to be the
tradition.
The grandparents from both sides lived close by. They were not well off,
and Lida was largely raised by her grandparents. Lida’s father was a dia-
mond polisher and was often out of work; her mother worked as a seam-
stress at home and managed to keep the family going despite her deafness.
Her father was a committed socialist and somewhat less pious than her
grandparents.
Gerrit Cohensius, born in 1931, came from a real working-class family
as well and was also partly raised by his grandparents, because his mother
worked as a diamond cutter at home. Later she sometimes worked in the
Asscher factory:
She would have like a week’s worth of work, and then she wouldn’t have any
work for three weeks, that’s how it was there. You’d have to come by every now
and then to ask if there was work again. And then you could work for another
week or two. It was skimping, always ups and downs.
3 AMSTERDAM, 1940–1943: ‘A RATHER FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY’ 17
Religion hardly played a role in the Cohensius family. ‘You don’t realise
you’re Jewish, it doesn’t bother you. […] No one in that big family was reli-
gious. We were all very free.’ He only learned that he was Jewish when he
was made to wear the star. For Max Kleerekoper’s family, socialism was
more important than religion. Max’s 12-year-old brother Jaap dragged
him to parades and all kinds of activities of the youth association. Max,
aged seven, loved it all. He had a sheltered childhood and always felt pro-
tected by the presence of his big brother.
In addition to the warm family circle, the neighbourhood sometimes
functioned as a close social connection. In Greta Roselaar’s family, religion
played a minor role. Both her parents worked in the diamond industry, her
father as a splitter, her mother as a cutter, in the business of Greta’s grand-
father Roselaar. Work in the diamond industry was often passed on from
father to son, and sometimes from mother to daughter. Greta lived in a
cosy, mainly Jewish-Socialist neighbourhood close to the Amstel River.
Her parents had met each other at the Kracht en Vlugheid (Strength and
Speed) gymnastics club, of which ‘everyone’ was a member. But the social
unity of the neighbourhood also had a disadvantage: the fact that every-
one used to walk in and out of their house demanded too much of her
mother. She had a nervous breakdown and even had to go to Switzerland
for recovery. Later the family moved to a different neighbourhood in the
south of Amsterdam.
Diamond merchants and manufacturers mostly lived in that part of the
city. Politically speaking, they were, not surprisingly, more conservative
than socialist, although both currents could also be found in a single fam-
ily, as Frank Diamand, grandson of diamond merchant Abraham Asscher
tells about his background. But eating out at the Schiller restaurant or at
the Hotel Atlanta, picking up ginger buns at Verdoner’s confectionery on
the Ringdijk, and listening to opera music on the radio at work: these were
shared passions regardless of political colour or religious conviction.2 The
socio-economic upper class also reflected a wide religious diversity.
Abraham Soep, who owned the second largest diamond factory in
Amsterdam, was orthodox, like the rest of his family, while other wealthy
diamond families were decidedly secular. Judaism hardly played a role in
the life of the Elion family, for example, where it did not involve much
more than chicken soup on Friday nights. Mr. Elion was a diamond
2
These shared preferences were mentioned by Elsbeth Kars, daughter of the non-Jewish
diamond worker Joseph Kars, in an interview by the author, 19 February 2019.
18 B. SIERTSEMA
merchant and did very well. He was an outspoken anti-Zionist and a great
advocate of assimilation, which sometimes led to fierce clashes in their
circle of friends. His daughter Lize didn’t even know what that was, a Jew,
until a playmate in the street asked her out of the blue:
‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’ and I didn’t understand that at all. So I went
home and I said: ‘So and so said I’m Jewish, is that true?’ ‘Yes,’ said my mother,
‘you are Jewish.’ ‘Okay, but what is that?’ ‘Well, child, my parents are Jewish,
and my parents’ parents are Jewish too. So that’s the way it is.’ And that was that.
So, the diamond Jews were a richly varied group. After the German inva-
sion they ended up remaining more or less intact for longer than other
Jewish groups.
‘That Can Never Happen Here’

The shock and indignation at the sudden invasion of the Netherlands by
the Germans were great, especially among the Jewish population, of
course. Hearing the alarming reports from Germany about the
Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, most people had reassured them-
selves: such things could never happen here. Maurice Rabbie, born in
1932, explains:
There were a lot of German Jews in Holland, because they thought they would
be safe in Holland. Because in Holland, as it had been neutral in the First
World War, when things were going on in Germany, nobody thought it would
ever happen in Holland. And people in Holland, the Jewish people and the non-
Jewish people, were not afraid because they thought it would never happen. They
said: ‘It can never happen here.’ They really believed it can never happen here.
Such repetition is like a mantra, as it must have functioned at the time.

The threat of war was in the air, of course, but Ina Soep remembers that
Jews who moved abroad were actually considered traitors: you were
Dutch, so why would you leave your homeland? People often didn’t take
the warnings of German-Jewish refugees very seriously, and the refugees
themselves were not always looked upon with sympathy. Lize Elion, who
was nine at the time, noticed how a refugee among their acquaintances
was spoken of as ‘really a moffin’ (derogatory word for a German woman),
something that even then, as a child, she thought was strange and unjust.
Ina Soep says that they thought of the refugees from Germany more as
Germans than as fellow Jews:
As a matter of fact, when the German refugees came to Holland there was more
of an anti-German feeling. Even among the Jews. The Dutch Jews were not
terribly happy with that influx of German Jews. […] We saw them more as
Germans than as fellow Jews. They behaved very German. We got a lot of kids
in our school […] And we made fun of them. They looked different: we carried
our schoolbags in our hands, they carried them on their backs. They wore those
short little Lederhosen. They were different.
The Beginning of the Occupation

Thus, for many, the attack on 10 May 1940 was quite unexpected, and the
German advance was hardly interrupted by the Dutch army. From the
south of Amsterdam, the clouds of smoke from the bombardment of
Schiphol airport could be seen. Gerrit Cohensius and his father went up
the roof of their house to look at them. From the vantage point of his
house, without understanding why, young Oscar Lehmann saw Amsterdam
policemen searching between the lines of flapping laundry of the houses
across the street. His mother explained that they were looking for German
paratroopers who might be hiding there. When two days later it became
known that the queen and the government had fled to London, many
Jews felt the danger was acute. They panicked and hurried to IJmuiden,
on the coast, to try to leave for England by ship.
Lida Vos’s parents also wanted to flee this way, not without their daugh-
ters of course, but not without both of their parents either, who in turn
refused to leave without their other children and grandchildren. So, it was
a big company that set off on May 12. They managed to reach IJmuiden
but got stuck there in the crowd, with all those people, carrying bags and
suitcases, who all had the same plan. It seemed that several fully loaded
ships had left for England that morning, but by evening the harbour
was closed.
Richer people tried to get a place on a boat by paying a lot of money,
but even for them the escape route over sea was completely closed. Lize
Elion’s family already heard on the way to IJmuiden that it was hopeless
and that everyone was going back. Deep down, Lize’s mother did not
mind. She was very attached to her house on the Stadion Quay and to all
her beautiful furniture. Whereas Lize’s mother did not really regret that
20 B. SIERTSEMA
she wouldn’t have to leave her comfortable home behind, many others
were in despair. The wife of the rich diamond merchant Abraham Asscher,
one of the leaders of the Jewish community, committed suicide. The
neighbour of the diamond merchant Abraham Soep, a good friend of
Asscher, did the same. A total of some3 400 Jews chose to take their own
lives in those days in May, and another 400 made an unsuccessful attempt.
The threat of war urged others to gather the family around them.
Abraham Soep, for example, called his daughter Ina back from boarding
school in England in the summer of 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
Maurice Rabbie had a British mother. Maurice recalls:
My grandmother then asked my mother would she please let us two, my sister
and I, go with my grandmother to England. And my father said—this is
according to my mother—my father said: ‘Where I go, my children go.’ And my
grandmother [pauses, swallows with difficulty] left, about a week before
September 1939, when the war was declared by Britain against Germany
because of the invasion in Poland.
Later that need to keep the family together would in many cases play a role
in the decision not to go into hiding.
Even when the danger was concrete and unmistakable, the family bond
sometimes took precedence over individual safety. The Soep family was on
a list with two or three other families who had received German permis-
sion to emigrate to America, but on 11 June 1941, the eldest son Benno
was arrested in a retaliatory action after a German SS man had been shot
dead near Benno’s home. He was sent to a camp, and Abraham gave up
the family’s chance to go to America, because he did not want his son to
be left alone in Europe. Two months later they received Benno’s death
notice: the camp he was deported to was Mauthausen, near the Austrian
city of Linz. That camp became notorious for its quarry and the ‘stairway
of death’ that descended to it. Prisoners were forced to run up those stairs
with heavy rocks, injuring their feet or falling to their deaths. Guards also
chased them over the edge into the depths, an activity cynically called
‘Fallschirm springen’ (parachute jumping). Of the early prisoners from the
Netherlands, hardly anyone survived Mauthausen.
But in the summer of 1940, things were not so bad yet. The German
occupiers still had the idea that the Dutch population could be won over
3
Lucas Ligtenberg, Mij krijgen ze niet levend: De zelfmoorden van mei 1940 (Amsterdam:
Balans, 2017).
to the National Socialist cause and behaved decently. The aggression in

the streets came instead from the Dutch NSB (the National Socialist
Movement) and the W.A. (the uniformed ruffians of the NSB). At first
Oscar Lehmann, then aged seven, and his sisters had chuckled at ‘these
elderly guys’, who ‘were just sweating away and trying to do the goose step
[smiles]’, as he tells in his VHA interview. In his written memoirs he
reflects in a more serious tone: ‘But it was their way of showing allegiance
to the Germans. They were like mindless robots, displaying no individuality
and following their piper.’4 On one of those first days of the war, Gerry
Lakmaker, of the same age, saw how his Jewish downstairs neighbour, a
greengrocer, was threatened with a gun by an NSB neighbour. The man
could still mockingly shrug his shoulders about it and ride off on his bike,
laughing. But that mood would change in the months that followed. The
first anti-Jewish measures still seemed to be of a purely administrative
nature. However, when all Jewish civil servants were dismissed, the inten-
tions of the regime began to become clear. Gradually, the behaviour of the
Dutch National Socialists also became more brutal and violent.
In February 1941, street fights occurred in the Jewish neighbourhood
between W.A. fighting squads and Jewish and non-Jewish men who would
not accept intimidation without a challenge. The occupier reacted with a
brutal raid in which more than 400 young Jewish men were arrested. This
happened on a Sunday, under the watchful eye of many non-Jewish citi-
zens who liked to stroll past the merchandise on the Jewish market. The
aggression and humiliation that accompanied the raid shocked the popu-
lation; the following Tuesday the February Strike broke out, initiated by
the Communist Party. Public transport, schools, factories, businesses, and
shops all participated in a general strike in protest against the anti-Jewish
measures.
From Amsterdam the strike spread to neighbouring towns like
Zaandam, Bussum, Hilversum, and Utrecht. This spontaneous strike took
the occupying forces by surprise, but their reaction was ruthless: seven
people were arrested and executed as leaders of the strike, and the 427
Jews arrested were deported directly from Camp Schoorl to Buchenwald
and a few weeks later to Mauthausen.5 It did not take long before their
4
Lehmann, Faith at the Brink, 55.
5
See for the February Strike, the retaliations and the responses to them, chapter VI of
Barbara Beuys, Leben mit dem Feind: Amstedam unter deutscher Besätzung Mai 1940 bis Mai
1945 (München: Hanser Verlag, 2012).
22 B. SIERTSEMA
families received the first death notices.6 That summer almost all of those
young men had died, and the name Mauthausen became synonymous
with fear and horror. Later the menace of Mauthausen prevented Jews
from going into hiding: they feared being sent there as criminal cases,
should they get caught. And for many non-Jewish Dutch people the pos-
sibility that they too would have to go to Mauthausen if they were caught
helping Jews was an effective threat.
The Jewish Council

In the days preceding the first major raid and the February Strike, the
German authorities had set up a Jewish Council, headed by two leaders of
the Jewish community: the classicist Prof. David Cohen, who had worked
very hard for the Committee for Jewish Refugees, helping Jews who had
fled Nazi Germany in the pre-war years, and the diamond merchant
Abraham Asscher. Asscher was the owner of the largest diamond factory in
Amsterdam and was politically active before the war: he had been a repre-
sentative of the Liberal Party in the provincial parliament, but Dutch soci-
ety did not allow complete integration; for example, as a Jew he could not
join the Groote Club, the Amsterdam society for top businessmen and
senior civil servants. For years he had been chairman of the Committee for
Special Jewish Interests, of which the Committee for Jewish Refugees was
a subdivision. One of the other directors was the owner of the second larg-
est diamond factory, Abraham Soep (Fig. 3.1). The Jewish Council func-
tioned as an intermediary between the German occupiers and the Jewish
people, but unintentionally became more and more of an instrument in
the hands of the Nazis for carrying out their policy of persecution and
eventual extermination. That is why many called the Council ‘Jewish
Betrayal’ in a bitter pun (Joodse Raad ‘Jewish Council’, Joods verraad
‘Jewish betrayal’).7 In the Joodsche Weekblad (Jewish Weekly) the Jewish
Council announced the unending stream of ever further-reaching anti-
Jewish measures. Jews were gradually banned from more and more aspects
6
Katja Happe, Veel valse hoop: De Jodenvervolging in Nederland 1940–1945, translated by
Fred Reurs (Amsterdam/Antwerpen: Atlas Contact, 2018), 114.
7
Happe, Veel valse hoop, focuses on the role the Amsterdam Jewish Council played in the
persecution of the Dutch Jews. The wartime diary of Mirjam Bolle-Levie (2005), who
worked as a secretary for the Jewish Council, provides an inside view of the Council’s work
and dealings (Letters Never Sent: Amsterdam, Westerbork, Bergen-Belsen, translated by Laura
Vroomen, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014).
Fig. 3.1 Pre-war picture postcard of the Soep diamond factory. Note how the
English text shows the company’s international orientation. (Fotobureau J. van
Dijk & Zn, Amsterdam)
of public life. They were no longer allowed to be members of non-Jewish

associations; cafés and restaurants, libraries, parks, swimming pools, cine-
mas, woods, and beaches, step by step these all became forbidden territory
for them.
After the summer holiday of 1941, Jewish children were not allowed to
return to their old schools; they had to go to Jewish schools. Apart from
the fact that many children had to travel a much longer distance, the new
24 B. SIERTSEMA
schools created an uncomfortable situation for children who had not been
raised very Jewish. As a ten-year-old, Lize Elion had to leave the public
Spartaschool, located right behind her house, to attend a Jewish school
with only Jewish children:
And that was something terrible for me. Something terrible, because I really
was a complete outsider. I was one of the few children who knew nothing about
Jewish traditions, who couldn’t read Hebrew at all, who didn’t know what they
were talking about when they talked about Hanukkah. That was really terrible.
I wanted to do something about it then, and at the Minerva Pavilion […] you
could take Jewish classes on Saturdays. And a number of children from my class
went there, and they said, ‘Will you come with us?’ Well, come on now, I went to
take a look, and there I sat with the Talmud and so on, and I started on the first
page, and then the children said: ‘Liesje, you have to start at the back, because
we read from the back to the front.’ I didn’t know all that; it was terrible. So, it
was not such a success. […] It made me literally sick; I couldn’t handle it. I do
know that I stood there in that corridor, in the Minerva Pavilion, and just felt
nauseous. I thought, I really have to go inside. In the end it didn’t help;
I gave up.
The anti-Jewish measures not only restricted the Jews’ freedom of move-
ment and excluded them from social life, they also aimed to deprive Jews
of their livelihood. Jewish businesses were given a German administrator.
People in liberal professions such as doctors, lawyers, and pharmacists
were only allowed to have Jewish clients and patients; bank balances in
excess of 1000 guilders had to be transferred to the Lippmann-Rosenthal
Bank. In January 1942, unemployed (and forcibly unemployed) Jewish
men were put to work in labour camps in the east and north of the coun-
try. When special Jewish quarters were designated in Amsterdam and a
general travel ban on Jews was imposed in June 1942, everything was
ready to begin deportations. In early July 1942 the Jewish Council was
ordered to send out the calls to report to Camp Westerbork for ‘employ-
ment’ in ‘the east’.
The Jewish Council thus was an indispensable link in the deportation
process, and it was precisely this indispensability that also meant at least
temporary salvation for many. Those who worked for the Jewish Council
were at least temporarily exempt from deportation. Exemptions were
given not only to better-situated people such as doctors, but also to typ-
ists, hauliers, handymen, greengrocers and milkmen, textile workers and
artisans sought and often found a job with the Jewish Council as well, jobs
that made them ‘indispensable’ for food supply or education, for example.
It often happened that this was a completely different occupation from

their original work. Ina Soep remembers that unemployed men worked as
housekeepers in her parents’ home. The two German maids had to leave
due to German regulations, and these men were a poor replacement. They
were protected, because at least they had work.
We experienced funny things. I remember the man who worked for my mother.
She once asked him to vacuum the bedroom and he went upstairs with the vac-
uum cleaner. But she didn’t hear anything, so she went upstairs. She saw the
man pushing the vacuum cleaner over the floor, but he hadn’t plugged it in. He
had never seen a vacuum cleaner before! And I know of another family, where
the man had made the bed with the beautiful lace edge at the foot instead of on
top. ‘Well,’ he said to the lady of the house, ‘let the toes have a nice time too.’
Israel Kleerekoper, who held a degree in economics, joined the Central

Commission for Jewish Education, which at first fell under the ministry,
but later became part of the Jewish Council. He was in charge of adminis-
tering all the Jewish schools that were created when Jewish children were
no longer admitted to ordinary schools. He and his wife had decided that
this was no time to have children; moreover, they lived with his parents, in
the small side room of the two-room apartment. But his wife got pregnant
nonetheless, and their son was born in April 1943. It was a difficult deliv-
ery. A non-Jewish doctor from the neighbourhood did not want to help
them at first.
But when I told him what it would mean to us, he said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ Well,
I have to say, in retrospect, that man behaved fantastically. He came to us the
previous morning, the third of April, and didn’t leave until ten o’clock the next
morning. It was a bit difficult; forceps had to be used. But anyway, the child
was well and truly born; he had even let him slip out of the forceps, onto the
ground; he was all slippery.
When they got a warning that a big raid was imminent in May, friends
from Eindhoven, a mixed married couple, picked up the baby at their
place. ‘And of course that was something, just imagine what that meant to
my wife.’ He visited the baby once, as he was still allowed to travel because
of his position at the Jewish Council.
The Jewish Council had received permission to grant 17,500 exemp-
tions. That was half of what they had requested, but still covered a large
number of people. It was, as Greta Roselaar put it, ‘a sophisticated system to
give people a rather false sense of security’. It was called ‘bis auf weiteres’
26 B. SIERTSEMA
(until further notice) in the document. And indeed, soon it would become
clear how temporary the exemption would prove to be. On 21 May 1943,
when the deportations were already well advanced, the Jewish Council
was ordered to draw up a list of 7000 of its own employees who were to
report four days later for deportation to Westerbork.
The Diamond Sperre

A special group of exempted persons consisted of people working in the
diamond industry. There were more than 800 exemptions of this type,
known by the German term Sperren (sing. Sperre), about 500 for diamond
workers and 300 for merchants. But the Sperren also extended to their
close relatives, so it involved a total of almost 2000 people. The Germans
were so forthcoming to the diamond people because they wanted to set up
their own industry—diamonds were a useful material in arms produc-
tion—and for that they needed the skills of the workers, as well as the
expertise and contacts of the traders and factory owners. Obviously, dia-
monds also represented a value that Germany, with its chronic shortage of
foreign exchange, could put to good use.8
A diamond Sperre was a highly desirable document. Skilled workers
could claim it, and membership in the ANDB, the powerful diamond
union, was often used as evidence. But whether or not one could acquire
a place on the list was sometimes a matter of sheer luck. Eddy Witjas, born
in 1910, recalls how he had worked in the diamond industry for not more
than one year at the age of 16 and had kept his union booklet. He went to
the union to ask for a stamp with which he could get a diamond Sperre
from the Jewish Council:
And there I get in a queue of people, diamond workers, who were all there to get
a Sperre. […] A lot of people, and crying and a hassle and all that. And at a
certain moment there was a lady standing next to me who I knew. She had been
8
Loe de Jong offers more information about the background of the exemptions for dia-
mond Jews in Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog [The Kingdom
of the Netherlands during the Second World War], part 6 (vol. 1). He mentions the number
of 800 exemptions on p. 296 (note 1) and 297. Bies van Ede and Paul Post mention the
same number in their book De diamantenroof: Hoe hoge nazi’s met geroofde diamanten uit
Nederland en België een nieuw leven opbouwden [The Diamond Robbery: How High-Placed
Nazis Built a New Life with Stolen Diamonds from Belgium and the Netherlands] (Utrecht:
Omniboek, 2016), p. 49, but arrive at a number of 1230 exemptions in total, including fam-
ily members.
a diamond cutter. She was crying and whining to that man, ‘Give me a stamp,’
and so on and so forth. ‘No,’ he says, ‘you haven’t worked for so many years.’ He
wouldn’t give it to her. But because it was taking so long, I had taken that
booklet, I had turned that page, so I say, ‘Please [makes a move like he is putting
his booklet on a counter],’ and he doesn’t even look, and that man was like …
BANG! [makes a gesture of stamping], he gives me a stamp just like that. Those
are the sort of coincidences I experienced a lot of at that time.
When he received a summons for labour, he had to go to the office of

the Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung (Office for Jewish Emigration,
clearly a euphemistic name) to get the Sperre. At the entrance a young
man from the Jewish Council told him how he could best behave with the
notorious German head of the office, Aus der Fünten, and that an NSB
man would accept his papers.
Well, I just walked down that corridor, and I saw that NSB guy standing there
and handed over that summons. And then, well I looked, and he [Aus der
Fünten] was just having a bit of fun with a secretary. And he drank, they did
that a lot. And he didn’t even look, he didn’t look at me, that NSB guy didn’t
look at me either. He stood at attention before his boss. And all at once, hop,
stamp, and finished. Your life depends on that. That’s how it went. […] That
saved my life, in a way. And that of my daughter and my wife, the whole fam-
ily. Well, that went well for a long time. It was quiet, but I still didn’t trust it.
Others paid a lot of money to get a diamond Sperre for themselves and
their families. Greta de Jong’s father, a commissioner in diamonds, paid
something like 35,000 guilders for it. The payment could be made in cash
but was often made in diamonds too. Josephina Lewijt, born in 1915, was
married to the diamond cleaver Harry Slap. He and his family were also
active as diamond merchants. Eleven different hiding addresses were
offered to them, but hiding would mean a separation from their two
children.
And we just couldn’t stomach that. And then we, I don’t know if you ever heard
about this, for a lot of diamonds, we could buy a Sperre in your pass. And we
did. I took the diamond there myself, so it’s not a lie. It was in Euterpe Street, a
side street of Beethoven Street. And then I said: but I will take it there myself,
not my husband and not my father-in-law. Because men would be immediately
detained and locked up. So I took it myself. On one side of Beethoven Street stood
my husband, on the other side of Beethoven Street stood my father-in-law, with
ghost-white faces. I brought the diamond, I had their papers with me. Got a
stamp in the passes.
28 B. SIERTSEMA
The Puttkammer-Sperre could also be paid for in diamonds. This exemp-

tion was named after procurator E. P. A. Puttkammer, who arranged
everything: for 30,000 guilders one could acquire an exemption. In the
end, however, it turned out that it, like the other exemptions, did not
offer any real protection.
Israel Kleerekoper relates how his parents were able to do this thanks to
a very favourable valuation of his mother’s jewellery:
And so he [a cousin, BS] found people who could assess its value, but they were
actually Jews. So, the value of those trinkets was greatly exaggerated. And then
you arrived at the amount you needed. And so we got this Puttkammer-Sperre,
the four of us, Father, Mother, my wife, and me. Yes, of course you can philoso-
phise about that, whether that’s proper behaviour, and whether or not that’s
discrimination. With money, with valuables, you could stay and then others
would be transported in your place.
People who had paid with diamonds or other valuables, got a so-called
120,000 stamp. Such a Sperre, however, did not mean that you could not
be arrested; many diamond people at some point ended up in the
Hollandsche Schouwburg (the theatre used as an assembly location), such
as when a raid was held in their neighbourhood. But they would be
released a few hours or days later because of that stamp on their papers,
although sometimes they had to pay a considerable extra sum for it. On 9
August 1942 a large raid was held in the southern part of Amsterdam.
Greta Roselaar says:
It was a Sunday. And they rang the bell, and we had to get ready for departure.
That was very simple because everyone had a rucksack ready, and you took a
pair of sturdy shoes. And as I already said, it was a Sunday, so we had had lots
of visitors, and we stood in the hallway to leave and I said, ‘What luck, huh?’
And everyone looked up a bit strange. I said, ‘That we haven’t done the dishes
yet.’ And then we went across the street, to the Zentralstelle für Jüdische
Auswanderung [the deportation office, BS], and practically the whole Jewish
neighbourhood was there. And behind the table sat a German, who I didn’t
know of course, and next to him was Bram Asscher, who was one of the two presi-
dents of the Jewish Council. And everyone had to pass that table, and my father
was immediately released with my mother, because he was a diamond mer-
chant. But I had to go. And I shouted in Dutch—I didn’t speak German of
course, that was beneath my dignity—to that German that I was indispensable,
that I worked at my father’s office, I couldn’t be missed, I had to stay. And that
man gave me … he crossed out my name; I was free as well. We also got the keys
to our house back; everything was neatly labelled. My mother went to bed, and
my father and I went to do the dishes. And that night we heard that the people
who were leaving were marched off. Very rarely have I been so close to my death,
because these people were immediately sent to an extermination camp, they
weren’t even in Westerbork, because as it turned out later, Aus der Fünten (for
that had been the man I had shouted at that I could not leave) had gotten his
ass kicked by Rauter, who had come over specially for this matter that day,
because things were not going fast enough. And to satisfy Rauter, he then put
together a criminal transport and that was sent on immediately. That was one
of the times I was extremely lucky.
After the war, Greta Roselaar understood from Asscher when she met him
again that he had been completely powerless in that incident, she recounts:
He remembered very well that day of 9 August 1942, when he had stood beside
Aus der Fünten, and that he had been unable to do anything that day. And I
had such confidence, that he wouldn’t let me go. That was where I got my nerve
from to say: I can’t go! So completely false assumptions helped me save my life
at the time.
Hiding or Not?
Some predicted that the Sperren meant nothing more than a temporary
reprieve. Lida Vos’s parents went into hiding in Utrecht and placed her
with very special foster parents:
My father had a very good friend before the war. They ate at our house on
Friday evening. And the war broke out and he turned out to be an SS man, a
serious Nazi […] They were no longer friends then, of course. But he wanted
me. Because these people had no children, he wanted me to go into hiding with
them. […] My father and mother went to Utrecht to go into hiding, which cost
a lot of money. And where my sister was, I really don’t know. And yes, I went
there for a while. […] Yes, it’s very crazy, but they were terribly nice people.
But one day people saw on her jacket the traces of the star that had been
sewn on it and recognised her as Jewish. Then it was better for her own
safety for her to leave her foster parents. When her mother had to undergo
peritoneal surgery, Lida’s parents both came back, and they all went into
hiding with the Gentile grandmother on her father’s side. This
30 B. SIERTSEMA
grandmother had converted to Judaism before her marriage, which she

tried to reverse during the war. There were a number of other family
members as well. After a few months there was a raid.
And everyone had to show their identity card, and yes, my grandfather’s had a
‘J’ on it. And actually I was very smart as a kid. Because I heard them coming
up the stairs, and I hid behind the door. That was a corner, the door opened to a
corner. And I was as quiet as a little mouse. And my grandparents were
extremely nervous, of course, because they had many Jewish people upstairs. […]
They also had to show their proof of identity. And they all had to go with them.
And then they said: nobody else here in the house? No, no one else here in the
house, says my grandmother. And I stood behind that door frozen still, like a
pole. Well, then they left. Because her father had a diamond Sperre, they went
back to her parent’s home, where the family could stay another month. They had
no more money to go into hiding anymore. Such insane sums were being asked
for. Just take four people into hiding somewhere … So it just didn’t work out.
And there were very few people who helped you, very few people. Sure, well I can
say, 80% were glad we were gone. That’s how I look at it.
Eddy Witjas realised that the diamond Sperre in a way saved his life, and
that of his wife and daughter, but he had no confidence that things would
continue to go well. One day there was a raid in his street.
And I was at home—my wife wasn’t there—with Marion my daughter. And

damn it, I see them arriving in Zomerdijk Street, going door to door, don’t you
know. Go in, go upstairs, off you go! So, you couldn’t go outside and leave with
Marion, because the whole street was occupied, as it were. He asked his non-
Jewish neighbours, the Kool family, where his eight-year-old daughter sometimes
played, if she could go there. ‘I lifted Marion over the balcony while they were
walking down the street.’ He himself hid behind a roll of linoleum in a trunk
in the storage room on the ground floor. He deliberately left the door of that
room open, so that they could easily take a look inside, because if they had really
searched, they would certainly have found him. And indeed, here he comes, there
were two of them. He looks, sticks his head through the door. Well, he doesn’t see
anything and goes upstairs, like that, boom boom. The people who lived on the
second floor were non-Jewish and had to show their identity papers. The Jews
who lived on the third floor had already been taken away some time before. Now
he comes up on the other side, to Kool, who lived on the same level as us. Well, she
had studied law, he was a well-known writer. And those children are sitting
there playing on the floor, and Marion too, of course. ‘Ah, schön, die Kinder
[nice, those children],’ don’t you know, that’s what they said. […] They went
away. Well, we got through that too. That is one of those hunches you have and
then you have to be lucky too. Not much later he let Marion go into hiding.
‘Then that boy came to get her, a student, in the evening, and we closed the suite
doors, and Marion was waiting with her boots and her jacket—she wore a
cape—and a suitcase. And mother was crying, because it’s for a mother, for a
father too, but for a mother much worse. Because you weren’t allowed to know
where she was going. That’s why the boy came to get her, because it was the first
time he was in our home. You just gave her to a stranger. […] How old was she
at the time? Eight years old. And she opens the sliding door and says: ‘Mama,
don’t cry, I’m not crying either.’ And she left just like that, without shedding a
tear, with someone she didn’t know at all. […] Yes, she must have understood.
Eddy and his wife went into hiding as well when they heard that all the
diamond workers in the eastern part of Amsterdam had been arrested in a
raid. From their beautiful flat they ended up in an old goat stable in
Gelderland; it must have been quite a change. They even had to live in a
hen house temporarily, but in the end they were able to rent rooms using
false identity papers, in Haarlem, from what later turned out to be an NSB
woman. From there Witjas joined in with sabotage actions and the forgery
of voucher cards. The whole family survived the war.
Selly Elion, more than seven years older than her sister Lize, often tried
to persuade her parents to go into hiding, but in vain. When the family
was arrested to be deported via Central Station to Westerbork, she decided
to take action:
And then, at Central Station, she did something that was actually incredibly
courageous. You have to imagine, there were an incredible number of people on
the platforms there. Cattle cars were waiting, and there was an incredible
amount of surveillance. And she said to me: ‘Liesje, I’m going to bolt. She told
me: ‘I don’t want to get on that train. I’m going to bolt, and you mustn’t say
anything now. You can’t tell Mom and Dad until you are on the train.’ She hid
behind a platform, and with the help of a signalman she managed to escape
from the station. She and her boyfriend got married right away, so they could go
into hiding together.9
9
The fate of Lize Elion’s sister, Selly, and her husband Mark Bernard van der Wieken can
be found on the website www.joodsmonument.nl. Their cards in the Arolsen archives men-
tion the date of arrival in Westerbork and the barrack number assigned to them. They also
state that both worked for the Jewish Council, as a typist and an archivist respectively, and,
remarkably, that Selly had a grammar school diploma and made an intelligent impression.
Such personal remarks are rare in those cards.
32 B. SIERTSEMA
Josephina Lewijt tells how she could have gone into hiding at 11 differ-
ent addresses, but always separated from her children, something her hus-
band emphatically refused. In hindsight she also supports that choice,
because all her family members in hiding were betrayed and eventually
murdered.
But hiding … [leans forward] May I answer? May I? My parents were in hid-
ing, my sister and her family were in hiding, my grandparents were in hiding,
half the family was in hiding. Everone was taken… Because the Dutch could
betray the Jews for seven and a half guilders. That’s what they did … Yes? My
apologies, but that had to come out.
Just like most diamond people, Lize’s parents preferred the security that
their Sperre seemed to offer. With hindsight, the survivors evaluate the
choices that were made very differently. Marc and Stella Degen, for exam-
ple, born in 1941 and 1942 respectively, seem to blame their father for
stubbornly clinging to the sham protection of the diamond Sperre,
whereas their mother’s family was in hiding and all survived the war.
After the Nazis withdrew half of the exemptions, many diamond people
were arrested during the major raid in Amsterdam’s Zuid district on 20
June 1943, when 6000 people were deported in one go. Like Selly Elion,
Greta Roselaar managed to escape from the station with the help of a rail-
road official.
We were gathered at Olympia Square on the cinder track. And from there we
were taken to Muiderpoort station. The trains were already waiting: cattle cars,
of course. And at one point my father signalled to me with his eyes that everyone
was concentrated on the other stairs where people were being taken up. The stairs
near us were empty, so I went downstairs. And at the exit there were two Dutch
railwaymen, one older man and another one younger. And I have no acting
talent unless I have to, and at that moment I had to. I was freezing cold inside,
but I begged those people: ‘Don’t let me go to Poland, I’m still so young,’ and
that older man softened up, he took me to an elevator that wasn’t in use. At least
it wasn’t in use by the Germans, and I sat there for a while. Then, I remember,
someone came in. I was squatting in a corner, the man crossed over to the other
elevator exit. He activated the elevator and stepped back out and didn’t see me.
But I did find it scary. And when the railwayman came in again to see how I
was doing, I said: ‘It is so scary. You don’t know who’s coming in.’ Then he
opened the hatch at the top and I climbed onto the elevator and sat there for the
rest of the day, that is, when the elevator was downstairs, I had the whole elevator
shaft as an air supply. But when the thing was used again and it was upstairs,
I sat flat in the oil so as not to hit the ceiling, that was not really comfortable.
And later he just made it stationary and hung an ‘out of service’ sign on it. In
the evening, around eleven o’clock he said: ‘Now you have to come with me
because tomorrow at four o’clock they will start working here again, my shift is
at…’ I said: ‘yes, but they’re still working!’ He says: ‘You’re my niece, and we
will leave together.’ Of course, I’d already plucked off that star. And I just
walked out of the station holding on to his arm, because everyone was so tired
from that job with those 6,000 people that they didn’t even notice me.
Greta Roselaar also managed to escape during yet another raid and ulti-
mately fled to Brussels in a nurse’s uniform, where she joined a resistance
group and survived the war.
Gerry Lakmaker was in hiding, without his parents and older brother,
in Hoofddorp with a very poor family, whose father was paralysed. Yet he
was not completely unhappy there. One day in April 1944 his foster
mother sensed danger and sent nine-year-old Gerry away with a message
to her mother, with a detour along the dike. But for some reason, he can’t
recall exactly why, the little boy turned around when he was halfway there
and went back. Indeed, someone had betrayed them, and Gerry was cap-
tured without being truly aware of the serious situation. He was taken to
Haarlem prison and played an April Fool’s prank on a German soldier by
pretending that the water tap was busted. Via a prison in Amsterdam he
was taken to the Hollandsche Schouwburg and from there to Westerbork,
where his uncle and aunt took care of him.
Little Lion, Israel Kleerekoper’s baby, was betrayed at his hiding address
with the family’s cleaning lady. She had told her neighbours that the baby
was her nephew from a very poor family who could not take care of him
any longer. But one of her neighbours spotted the baby clothes on the
clothesline and concluded quite rightly that a poor family could never
afford such fine clothes and went to the police. The baby was sent to
Westerbork as well.10 So were Selly Elion and her husband, who were
betrayed at their second hiding address. They arrived in Westerbork on 26
August 1943, so their hiding lasted no more than two months. They were
housed in the same barrack as other diamond workers, yet considered as a
criminal case, so they were sent on the next transport to Auschwitz, where
she was killed on 3 September; he died half a year later, at 22 years of age.
10
His aunt, Elly Vleeschhouwer-Blocq, his mother’s sister, told about Lion’s hiding and
betrayal in an interview with the author, 7 July 2020.
34 B. SIERTSEMA
To sum up, disbelief of what the Nazis had in mind for the Jews (and it
is generally recognised that the ‘Final Solution’ was not yet what they had
in mind when Germany invaded the Netherlands) made many Jews less
eager to take precautions that would have offered better chances for sur-
vival than the strategy of ‘wait and see’ that seemed to prevail. Later, the
diamond Sperre created a false sense of security. Some families used the
exemption—an all too temporary one, as it soon turned out—to organise
a hiding place, but in some cases only after they had been captured and
had seen many of their colleagues rounded up and deported. Clearly those
with ample financial means were better positioned to find a suitable, safe
place. In many cases the desire to keep the family together kept parents
from trying to find a hiding place, since that was rarely possible for a whole
family to hide together. On the other hand, hiding clearly was no guaran-
tee for survival, as the many stories of betrayal and subsequent deportation
and death prove.
CHAPTER 4
Westerbork and Vught: ‘It Was a Nice Camp,

but Despair Played a Big Role Too’
Even though they were safe themselves, the people with a diamond exemp-
tion saw and heard how their neighbours and acquaintances were taken
from their homes and transported to the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the
theatre in the Jewish quarter that functioned as an assembly place. Children
saw more and more empty seats in their classrooms. The removal firm Puls
emptied the houses of the deported Jews, if looting neighbours had not
already done the job. Jack Cohen Rodriguez describes the atmosphere in
the Jewish quarter:
It was very dismal. All my friends were gone, stores were closed, it was like a
cemetery. It was very dismal, very depressing, very unpleasant. You heard voices
that were no longer there. It was not a pleasant experience.
So, the exemption was a mixed blessing. Moreover, the fact that it was
quite temporary became clear in the summer of 1943. The Jewish Council
had issued 17,500 exemptions in total. This probably contributed to the
fairly smooth way in which the deportation of all those others could be
carried out. Between September 1942 and May 1943 some 4500 of these
Quote from the VHA interview with Sieg Maandag.

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97707-8_4
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
He tulivat toiselle rannalle ja menivät kirkkoon. Poika meni
parvekkeelle. Molemmat neidit olisivat ehdottomasti tahtoneet myös
istua siellä. Mutta kun siellä oli täyttä, täytyi heidän istua alhaalle.
Tämä heitä suututti niin, että he vaikenivat.
Nyt jos koskaan toivoivat he, että heillä olisi ollut silmät selässäkin.
He kääntyivät parvekkeelle päin niin usein kuin ilkesivät. Heidän
penkissään kävi sellainen kuhina, että naapurit pitivät heidän
vieressään istumista vaarallisena. Ja mitä pappi puhui, sitä he eivät
kuulleet, — ainoastaan sen, kuinka poika lauloi virttä parvekkeella.
Itse istuivat he virsikirjat kädessä ylös alaisin…
Kun jumalanpalvelus oli päättynyt ja he olivat kotimatkalla, sanoi

poika:
— Tuo pappi saarnaa hyvin.
— Ah. niin — huokasi toinen — sehän oli taivaallisesta

rakkaudesta.
— E-oho — väänsi poika — hänhän puhui helvetistä.
— Hm! Niin! Kas, minä kuulen niin huonosti
— Lukkari ei varmaankaan ollut oikein selvä — arveli poika hetken

jälkeen.
— Enkö minä sitä jo ajatellut! Minun piti kääntyä vähän päästä

parvekkeelle katsomaan sentähden, että hän soitti niin kauhean
väärin. Se aivan loikkasi minun tunnokkaita korviani.
— Mutta hänhän kuulee niin huonosti.

— Ah, niin, minä tarkoitan. Hm.
— Minä puolestani katselin suurimmaksi osaksi alttaritaulua. Se

on niin ylösrakentava sanoi toinen neiti.
— Minusta hän katseli vain taakseen — ärsytti poika.
— Ah, niin. Hm.
Niin saapuivat he laiturilleen. He pistivät pojalle käteen

kaksinkertaisen maksun, niin että hän aivan hämmästyi ja ajatteli,
että kyllä ne ovat sentään kaksi oikein vanhaa hupakkoa.
Sitten he ajattelivat poikaa koko viikon. Ja kun he vaan mainitsivat

hänen nimeään, joutuivat he riitaan.
He saivat tietää, ettei poika tulisi ensi sunnuntaina soutamaan,

vaan se toinen, liikkaava ja ruma. Toinen tulisi pappikin
saarnaamaan.
— Luulen, etten minä aamulla menekään kirkkoon — arveli toinen.
— En minäkään — sanoi toinen.
— Ei, minä en pidä pastori Larssonista. Hän on körttiläinen.
— Ja sitäpaitsi ei Oskari tule soutamaan, tarkoitat sinä.
— Siitä minä en välitä en pikkuistakaan.
— Marakatti!
— Niinkö sinä sanot, vanha noita!

Niin riitti hammasten kiristystä koko päiväksi.
Seuraavana sunnuntaina tulisi poika taas soutamaan. Mutta

körttiläispappi saarnaisi nytkin.
— Me menemme kuitenkin aamulla — sanoi hän, joka ei pitänyt

pastori
Larssonista.
— Vai niin, sinä tahdot kuulla häntä kuitenkin?
— Oh, niin, pitäähän olla suvaitsevainen.
— Ja Oskari tulee soutamaan!
— Ah, sitä minä en lainkaan ajattele.
— Kyllä, sen kyllä uskon. Sinä, joka olet häneen rakastunut

niinkuin —
— Niinkuin sinä!
— Ole vaiti, vanha tekopyhä!
— Riivinrauta, äkäpussi, hampaaton krokodiili!
Sinä päivänä he eivät enään puhelleet.
Mutta seuraavana aamuna istuivat he taas venheessä ja

keikailivat eikä heillä ollut lainkaan kiire kirkkoon. E-oho!
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NUORTA JA
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The Rescue of Belsens Diamond Children Bettine Siertsema Full Chapter

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The Rescue of Belsen’s Diamond

Children Bettine Siertsema

The Rescue of Belsen’s

More information about this series at

ISSN 2731-5711 ISSN 2731-572X (electronic)

natural-­sounding English. Having a linguistic editor of such quality, who

1 A Brief Overview of the History 1

3 Amsterdam, 1940–1943: ‘A Rather False Sense of Security’ 15

5 Bergen-Belsen: ‘Everything Fell by the Wayside’ 61

7 Beendorf: ‘It Is a Miracle That I Survived’101

10 Post-War Lives: ‘Crying Doesn’t Help’153

11 The 1995 Reunion: ‘A Time to Heal’167

12 Testimony: A Valuable Yet Tricky Source177

A Brief Overview of the History

From the sixteenth century onwards Amsterdam was home to a diamond

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

The Diamond Exemption

that the Jewish diamond traders were essentially completely disenfran-

Bergen-Belsen and Beyond

The use of survivors’ testimonies as a historical source is less controversial

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 7

Studies and Trauma Studies,11 as Cathy Caruth did,12 proved a fruitful

posture, coughing, tears—while all these elements may not necessarily

Amsterdam, 1940–1943: ‘A Rather False

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 15

‘That Can Never Happen Here’

Such repetition is like a mantra, as it must have functioned at the time.

The Beginning of the Occupation

to the National Socialist cause and behaved decently. The aggression in

The Jewish Council

of public life. They were no longer allowed to be members of non-Jewish

It often happened that this was a completely different occupation from

Israel Kleerekoper, who held a degree in economics, joined the Central

The Diamond Sperre

When he received a summons for labour, he had to go to the office of

The Puttkammer-Sperre could also be paid for in diamonds. This exemp-

grandmother had converted to Judaism before her marriage, which she

And I was at home—my wife wasn’t there—with Marion my daughter. And

Westerbork and Vught: ‘It Was a Nice Camp,

Quote from the VHA interview with Sieg Maandag.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 35

Kun jumalanpalvelus oli päättynyt ja he olivat kotimatkalla, sanoi

— Tuo pappi saarnaa hyvin.

— Ah. niin — huokasi toinen — sehän oli taivaallisesta

— E-oho — väänsi poika — hänhän puhui helvetistä.

— Hm! Niin! Kas, minä kuulen niin huonosti

— Lukkari ei varmaankaan ollut oikein selvä — arveli poika hetken

— Enkö minä sitä jo ajatellut! Minun piti kääntyä vähän päästä

— Mutta hänhän kuulee niin huonosti.

— Minä puolestani katselin suurimmaksi osaksi alttaritaulua. Se

— Minusta hän katseli vain taakseen — ärsytti poika.

— Ah, niin. Hm.

Niin saapuivat he laiturilleen. He pistivät pojalle käteen

Sitten he ajattelivat poikaa koko viikon. Ja kun he vaan mainitsivat

He saivat tietää, ettei poika tulisi ensi sunnuntaina soutamaan,

— Luulen, etten minä aamulla menekään kirkkoon — arveli toinen.

— En minäkään — sanoi toinen.

— Ei, minä en pidä pastori Larssonista. Hän on körttiläinen.

— Ja sitäpaitsi ei Oskari tule soutamaan, tarkoitat sinä.

— Siitä minä en välitä en pikkuistakaan.

— Niinkö sinä sanot, vanha noita!

Seuraavana sunnuntaina tulisi poika taas soutamaan. Mutta

— Me menemme kuitenkin aamulla — sanoi hän, joka ei pitänyt

natural-sounding English. Having a linguistic editor of such quality, who

1 A Brief Overview of the History 1

3 Amsterdam, 1940–1943: ‘A Rather False Sense of Security’ 15

5 Bergen-Belsen: ‘Everything Fell by the Wayside’ 61

7 Beendorf: ‘It Is a Miracle That I Survived’101

10 Post-War Lives: ‘Crying Doesn’t Help’153

11 The 1995 Reunion: ‘A Time to Heal’167

12 Testimony: A Valuable Yet Tricky Source177