18. Back to Amsterdam

My mother’s unexpected arrival brought our stay in the children’s home to an end. We then lived with Aunt Mieke in Eerbeek for a few more months.
Of course, our situation had changed somewhat. We were no longer in hiding, our illegal status had changed to legal, it was no longer necessary to hide and we could go wherever we wanted, that is, as far as was permitted. After all, the Netherlands was occupied.

Added to this chapter:
Postscript ‘Our neighbours on the third floornze buren van drie hoog in de Scheldesraat ‘.

It took some getting used to, but after a few days I was already going out with the neighbourhood children again as if nothing had happened. And I also had to go back to school in the village.
However, it was clear that our stay in Eerbeek would be temporary, so after a few weeks my mother went to Amsterdam to look for a house.

Back to Amsterdam

Scheldestraat omstreeks 1935

In September 1943, the time had come and we said goodbye to Aunt Mieke. We took the train back to Amsterdam. A five-room house with a large hall and a bathroom in Scheldestraat became our new address. It was in the Rivierenbuurt, a popular neighbourhood at the time, where many flats were available for rent due to the deportation of the Jewish residents.

Until a few months before our arrival, a Jewish tailor and two lodgers had lived at our address. The tailor had been deported to Westerbork by the Germans. As usual, the tenants’ household goods and other possessions had been confiscated and the house had been emptied.

It was clear that a tailor had lived there because we continued to find pins for months after our arrival and received mail for him until years after the war. Letters with advertisements for worsted yarn, sewing machines and other tailoring supplies.
In any case, the house first had to be made suitable for habitation. My mother had hardly any money. We needed carpeting, beds, furniture, in short, all the things you need to live somewhere. With the help of Uncle Jan and Uncle Gerrit, this was accomplished in a week. Fortunately, when we left in 1940, they had stored the contents of the house on Mercatorstraat in their workshop. I still remember the feeling of coming home when I saw that furniture again on Scheldestraat.

New to me was the hiding place in the hall. There was a hatch in the floor through which you could hide in the space between the ceiling of the downstairs neighbours. With the help of my uncles, a hiding place was created in case Fred needed it later during the war. From time to time, the Germans carried out raids, looking for boys between the ages of 18 and 21 to work in German factories.

While the house was being furnished, my little brother and I stayed with Uncle Jan on Hoofdweg for a week. Only when the family had finished the work did we move into our new home.
Number 101 on Scheldestraat had three floors. We lived on the first floor, with a floor of attic rooms at the top and a shop with a pastry chef below us, who had given his business the beautiful name of Maison Verhaak.
In hindsight, I have sometimes wondered whether we were at risk in that location. In July, the Fokker factories in Amsterdam-Noord had been bombed by the Allies. It was not a precision bombing, if such a thing exists, and more than a hundred residents of the neighbourhood where the factory was located were killed.

In our neighbourhood, work was also being done on orders from the German armed forces. One of the places was the garage on Scheldeplein, where some kind of part was constantly being manufactured on lathes. A second was the hall complex of the old RAI on Ferdinand Bolstraat. On several occasions, I saw aircraft wings and fuselages standing outside. I don’t know what was supposed to happen to them. In any case, it was something that took place in the halls. They seemed to me to be an attractive target for bombing. In hindsight, I am not sorry that this did not happen.

No. 101 above the Redjeki restaurant around 2003

The Scheldestraat

When we moved there, Scheldestraat was a shopping street that ended at a square with an obvious name: Scheldeplein, a real square with a small lawn in the middle. In those days, grass was still something of a sacred cow. It was forbidden to walk, sit or lie on it almost everywhere. Playing and football were completely out of the question. To be on the safe side, the municipality had placed low iron fences around it. Not only around our square, but also around all the other parks and gardens in the city. Every few years, they were given a maintenance treatment with green paint. I don’t remember how they mowed the grass. It’s quite possible that it was still done with a scythe.

Our street was on the outskirts of the city. At that time, there was hardly any through traffic, the Utrecht bridge did not yet exist, nor did the road leading to it. Traffic from Amsterdam East to West or vice versa ran via Noorder-Amstellaan. As with most streets in Amsterdam South, the middle of the road was paved with cobblestones. Large stones that would not have looked out of place on the famous cobbled streets of Northern France.

From our house, we looked out onto the square. Behind it was a piece of reclaimed land intended for future housing development. Ultimately, however, the RAI complex was built there in the 1950s. Further away were the ring dyke and the Buitenveldert polder.
I don’t remember much about the shops. Next door to us was the greengrocer, next to him was Simon de Wit, the baker was around the corner, the butcher was halfway between our house and Amstellaan, and there was a chemist’s with a small post office whose owner was nicknamed ‘hammer and pliers’ because of her pronounced nose and chin. The pharmacy was on the corner of Deurlostraat. On the corner opposite us was a café that is still there today. The milkman had a shop around the corner but still came to the door in the morning to deliver milk.

Family doctors were apparently underrepresented in the neighbourhood. We had to visit Dr Cuperus, who lived and practised on Ceintuurbaan.

In my mind, I can still see the regular passers-by on our street. In the mornings and afternoons, the children from the nearby orphanage on their way to school; on Wednesday afternoons, a group of Catholic schoolboys with their black-coated brothers on their way to the football fields on Zuidelijke Wandelweg; those cute twins, one girl with black hair and the other with blonde hair; at half past four, the little waiter who went to work in the café on the corner, the eccentric man who walked a fox on a leash twice a day on the reclaimed land.
As I already wrote, we lived on the first floor, above us Mrs Venema with her daughter and on the third floor the Karelsen family. Eddie Karelsen was Jewish, just like the previous occupant of our floor, but married to a non-Jewish woman. That saved his life because the Germans had established an exception rule for mixed marriages. Provided there were children in the family, the men were allowed to stay in the Netherlands. In the spring of 1944, he was nevertheless transported to Westerbork, where he arrived on 12 January 1944. Eddie remained there until liberation and was one of the small group of Jewish residents of Amsterdam Zuid who survived the Final Solution.

His brother Dolf, who was also in a mixed marriage and worked as an arranger and composer for the AVRO radio programme ‘ ‘ until 1940, had already been transported to Westerbork in 1942 and from there to Auschwitz. Dolf died in one of the extermination camps in Poland in the spring of 1944.

After my mother passed away, I found the rental contract for our house among her papers, dated 31 August 1943. The rent for the house was fifty guilders plus seventy-five cents for water. A considerable amount for that time.

The neighbors

Eddie and Rini Karelsen had three children, a girl and two boys about my age, and they welcomed us with open arms. Dolf and Robbie became our friends and played an important role in the ten years after our arrival in Scheldestraat.

Two Jewish men were in hiding with the Karelsen family. Because the last remaining Jewish people from the south were deported to Westerbork in the autumn of 1943, one of them, Elie Fränkel, moved to a safer hiding place. He was lucky and survived the five years of war. After the liberation, he resumed his pre-war life and made a name for himself as a leader and organiser of show ballets.

The second guest, a judge who had fled Germany, slept in one of the attic rooms. Unfortunately, he did not live to see the end of the war and died in the winter of 1944-1945. This friendly man, who spoke broken Dutch and whom we called Herr Biemar, knew a little about chess and tried to teach us the basics. But there was always something tragic about him, which was not surprising. After fleeing Germany, he had lost contact with the rest of his family. With nothing else to hold on to, life had little to offer him and, as already mentioned, he died at the beginning of the hunger winter.

And so began life in the city. The transition from the countryside was immense at first, but we quickly got used to it. With the exception of my eldest sister, who started her first job at a studio, we all went back to school. My eldest brother went to ETS, my youngest sister went to MULO, and my youngest brother and I went to primary school.

Back to school

The Dongeschool, located in a large school complex close to home, was our first choice because the Karelsen children also attended there. My youngest sister and I went to this school in the morning to enrol. The headmaster’s reception was not exactly friendly. After my sister told him that we had been in hiding in various places around the country for three years, he shook his head and said there was no place for me. I thought that was strange because the departure of numerous Jewish families in the neighbourhood meant that a lot of children had disappeared from school. We had to enrol at the other school in the school complex. There, the reception was much friendlier and I was able to start immediately in the fourth grade with Mr Bloksma. The Meerhuizenschool, as my new school was called, was nice and close to home, but that changed after only six months. A school building on Meerhuizenplein, which had been requisitioned by the German Wehrmacht, was vacated by the Germans. They had used it for more than three years as accommodation for a group of soldiers.

One of the schools in Dintelstraat, opposite the Grafische School, was also used as barracks by German soldiers until the end of the war. If you walked past it at Christmas , you could always hear Christmas music and the soldiers singing. Oh Tannenbaum was number 1 on their list of favourite songs.

Periodically, the commander of this group would get restless and the men would have to march or practise on the reclaimed land, firing blanks. After such an exercise, we would always search the area for cartridge cases they had forgotten to take with them.
The relocation of my school meant that instead of five minutes, it took me half an hour to walk to school. I could still walk the route from Scheldestraat blindfolded today. Starting at Geulstraat, past the Dongeschool, the Grafische School and the MTS to Maasstraat. There I would hesitate for a moment about which way to go. Turn left past Ko Klotz’s sports shop or go straight on? Was Klotz already there in 1943? No, he only arrived in 1948, so I walk straight on into Jekerstraat until I reach the gate to Noorder Amstellaan. Along the way, there are whitewashed inscriptions on the walls here and there. Not graffiti, but texts such as ‘V is Victory because Germany is winning on all fronts’ and ‘Mussert or Moscow’. These clearly came from the NSB camp. The resistance tried to persuade the undecided among the population to choose the right side by sticking illegal newspapers on lampposts and walls.

I am almost halfway there and a few hundred metres further on I cross Waalstraat. On the other side of the road, in the central park, the female figure on the Wilhelmina Drucker monument is already waiting for me. With her arms spread as if she wants to catch me, but I have to move on. Mr Bloksma does not like latecomers, so I run up the low steps along the houses. I jump up the three steps, pause for a moment, then jump down again and continue to the next porch. Eight or nine times in a row. I feel as if I am flying and floating by the skyscraper over the tram tracks to the other side. Under the gallery, past the office supply shop with those covetable drawing supplies in the window. I actually want to stop and look, but there is no time; I still have to cross Rijnstraat. The Amstellaan lies ahead of me. A hundred metres further on, I turn left into Vechtstraat, then right at Meerhuizenstraat and there is Meerhuizenplein. Everyone has already gone inside, but the door to my school is still open. Dutch language is on the programme today. The difference between restrictive and expansive clauses. Phew, I’ll have to leave home a little earlier tomorrow.

That’s how it went twice a day. In the beginning, I saw groups of Jewish people walking once or twice in the morning, on their way to a tram stop on Rijnstraat, from where they were taken to the Hollandsche Schouwburg on Plantage Middellaan. The gateway to Westerbork and ultimately Auschwitz.

The trial of Jan Dieters and my father

At the end of August, my father was transferred to the prison in Scheveningen, nicknamed the Oranjehotel. On 24 August 1943, the trial against him and Jan Dieters took place in a special session of the Obergericht, which acted as a Sondergericht in the Supreme Court building in The Hague. Both the judges and the lawyers were German. Both were sentenced to death. I have never been able to understand the occupiers’ approach of, on the one hand, having members of the resistance sentenced by a court and, on the other hand, sending people to concentration camps without any form of trial ( ).

After the court’s ruling, De Telegraaf newspaper expressed its satisfaction with the verdict in an article on the front page. But that was hardly surprising from a newspaper that had already called on the population of our country on 11 May 1940 to accept the German occupation with dignity. As far as the Germans were concerned, my father’s position, which he expressed in the Amsterdam city council in 1935, did not help his cause. At the time, he protested against an incident in the city in which the municipal police were deployed to arrest opponents of NSB propagandists. However, his words that the Netherlands was certainly not waiting for the introduction of concentration camps, forced labour and the pogrom against the Jewish population in Germany were laughed off by the rest of the city council. The general opinion was that things would not get that bad.
In hindsight, this was not surprising. Germany was a friendly nation and it was important to avoid provoking it in word or deed. With regard to the many Jewish refugees from Germany, the policy was that they would only be admitted if their lives were in danger. Moreover, they were not allowed to cost the state any money. In 1939, a reception camp was set up in Westerbork at the expense of the Jewish community. It was located as far away from civilisation as possible, so that the refugees had to walk eight kilometres to reach it. The German occupiers later expanded this camp into the Durchgangslager of the same name. The Dutch Railways cooperated by constructing a railway line that ran to the entrance.

These are not the most pleasant pages in our history.

Card from the Oranjehotel

I do not know whether my father and Jan Dieters were pressured to make a confession prior to the trial. However, the statements they made during the trial are such that I can hardly imagine they were made voluntarily. Perhaps this was done on the advice of their solicitor in order to avoid the death penalty. In any case, the following statement appeared in all newspapers in 1943.

Two communists executed

Monday, 18 October 1943 – The death sentences handed down by the German Obergericht on 24 August against communists Louis Jansen and Jan Dieters have now been carried out, following consideration of the question of clemency. Jansen and Dieters were prominent communists who were appointed to the party secretariat in 1938.

When the CPN was banned in 1940, a few months after the occupation, the convicted men continued to run an illegal communist organisation, which continued to receive instructions directly from Moscow, as both have confessed. Their organisation called for a strike, “an incitement that had some success on 25 and 26 February.”

After Germany declared war on Russia, the two set up so-called murder centres on instructions from Moscow, which carried out at least sixty attacks. As the war progressed, Jansen and Dieters received instructions from Moscow that the Netherlands had to be prepared for Bolshevik rule and that people who did not fit into this ‘ ‘ had to be removed. The two communists were unscrupulous enough to accept the attitude of certain Dutch people who believed that they were committing sabotage out of love for their country.

The trial took a dramatic turn when Jansen and Dieters declared that they had renounced communism. They had become disgusted with their own lives and clearly realised that their path would in no way lead to a better future for the Dutch people, and in particular for Dutch workers. They were also certain that the criminal path they had once embarked upon would inevitably lead to their own destruction.
So much for the official report of the court hearing.

I have in my possession three letters that he wrote during his imprisonment. I have included a few excerpts from them in this story. I have placed the complete letters in a separate appendix.
What struck me was that two of them were written in ink on official prison paper. The farewell letter, dated the day of his death, was written on ordinary paper. In pencil.
The above detail comes from the letter he wrote after the German court’s verdict.

At the end of this letter, he returns once more to the possibility of requesting a pardon from family members, among others, and mentions the name of Jo Grote. What is remarkable about this is that this man, his brother-in-law and married to one of his sisters, played a more or less prominent role in the NSB. My uncle Gerrit then made the journey to Jo Grote with leaden feet to ask if he could do anything to change the sentence. However, Jo Grote responded negatively, stating that he had no influence in such matters because he was only a small cog in the wheel.
The requests for clemency were ultimately declared inadmissible by Seyss Inquart on 6 October 1943.
Early in the morning of 9 October, both were informed that their requests for clemency had been rejected. As a last wish, they were allowed to write a farewell letter and smoke a cigarette. The sentence was carried out at half past seven by a German firing squad on the Waalsdorpervlakte.

Cemetery of honor Loenen

Some time after the war, they were moved from their final resting place in a small cemetery in Wassenaar to the cemetery of honour in Loenen, Gelderland. They lie side by side there under a simple white stone.

My father’s gravestone bears the inscription ‘Bearer of the Resistance Cross’. After the war, Queen Wilhelmina awarded a limited number of these crosses to the relatives of prominent members of the resistance.
I will tell you more about how that cross came about in the next chapter.

With my father’s execution, I felt that our period in hiding had truly come to an end.

Memories

While writing these chapters, I wondered a few times whether I had described the events of those three years too matter-of-factly. Whether I had succeeded in making it clear that it was a period of terrible events during a terrible war. I don’t really have an answer to that. You have to take into account that almost seventy years have passed since then. Of course, there was always the fear in the background that we would be discovered. Like that time my brother and I went with my mother from Eerbeek to Arnhem. By train. On the way back, two German soldiers got on the train. Two older men who wanted to chat with us and three other passengers. I can still picture the cautious relaxation that ensued. After they got off at the next stop, the conversations did not continue. Everyone remained silent. I think it was because people didn’t know whether the others could be trusted.

Was there much talk in the family after the execution about my father, the resistance and the period in hiding? That is not an easy question to answer. I can remember little else other than that the process of coming to terms with what had happened was not really experienced as a family event. What had happened in the previous three years was processed and accepted by everyone individually.
How did we deal with communist ideology? During the resistance, the CPN had gained growing popularity among the population. However, the emergence of the Iron Curtain and developments in Russia, Hungary and East Germany meant that the initial post-war growth of the communist party declined fairly quickly.

This was also reflected in our family. There was no affinity with the party or the post-war developments in the Soviet Union. In addition, the events of 1943 with the flight of Paul de Groot will have played a role.
For a relatively short period, the family had one practising supporter of Jozef S.’s club. My eldest brother had joined the CPN as a member. I can no longer ascertain how long that lasted – he has passed away – but it must have been between five and ten years. He was trying to fulfil his father’s wish. However, for a number of reasons, the party had no need for him. Perhaps he knew too much about certain events that had taken place during the war. When I realised that I was being thwarted, I stopped,’ he told me in the last phase of his life. Another factor may have been that Dieters and Jansen were no longer mentioned soon after the war as a result of the statements they had made in 1943 before and during their trial. They had been removed, as it were, from the party’s list of people who were cited as examples of the resistance.

*It should be noted that my eldest brother’s widow initially objected to the mention of his activities with the CPN in the website version of this story. She believed it could cause problems for his children. Moreover, she claimed it was not true. She knew nothing about his membership of the CPN, nor had the subject ever been discussed in their family.
She never mentioned it again.

As for myself, I can still clearly remember the first few months after the liberation, when Karelsen’s boys wanted to tell everyone about our resistance activities and the role my father had played in them. They didn’t really score any points with that. The Nieuwe Zuid at that time had few supporters of the red religion, and so I even heard the curse ” ” (damn the communists) that they should have killed us all. And that while I just wanted to live a normal life.
The absence of a father also played a role in this, of course. My mother’s temporary relationships could hardly compensate for that. I think that’s why I locked away my family’s experiences during the war and my father’s execution in a closed box. I felt no need to talk about it with friends and acquaintances. That only changed many years later.
More importantly, I gradually realised what I had missed as a child when I became a father of three sons myself. I had never had a father who played football with me, who stood on the sidelines during matches to cheer me on. Who inspired me in my hobbies, who gave me a good telling-off when necessary.

My father’s farewell letters

While writing this story, I finally found some comfort in my father’s farewell letter. It was written in pencil on thin paper, as if it had been written in a hurry at the last minute.
In it, he writes that we had a happy time during the occupation years thanks to the help of friends, with Auntie in particular coming to mind. I have printed the relevant part of the letter below. By Auntie, he meant Auntie Mieke, of course.
As matter-of-fact as I try to be when looking back on that period, I still get emotional every time I read that letter.
I have included the complete letters at the end of Chapter 6, My Father’s Century.

Details about his arrest and trial in 1943 are included earlier in this chapter and are included as an afterword in Chapter 15, The Vosveld Case.
The reason why my father and Jan Dieters disappeared from the public eye after 1945 is described at the end of Chapter 10, The February Strike.

I sometimes think that we, humanity in general, learn little from such periods in history. A quick glance at the daily newspaper pages filled with misery only shows a repetition of events, some of which I happened to have experienced myself.
In that respect, my father was a lot more optimistic than I am.

More about the Karelsen family

Every now and then, events from the past come back to haunt us. In early 2010, for example, one of my acquaintances gave me a document he had stumbled upon in the Amsterdam municipal archives. It was a police report drawn up at the end of 1942.
The report shows that the Karelsen family from Scheldestraat 101 (also our home address) provided assistance to Joseph Cohen, a concert pianist by profession. The man in question had been arrested on 2 December 1942 in Tolstraat because he was not wearing a Jewish star and was also in possession of a forged identity card in the name of Carel Jenssen from Rotterdam. Cohen, who had lived in Groningen until mid-1942, had fled from the labour camp in Staphorst where he had been put to work. He was then taken in by the Karelsen family, acquaintances of his parents, in exchange for boarding costs of 17.50 guilders.
Cohen was handed over to the head of the Jewish Affairs Office. He was probably sent to Westerbork and then to one of the Vernichtungslager.

The fate of one of the Jewish Dutch in a nutshell.