Holocaust Memorial: My Mother’s Story
DAVID TASKER
Saturday 27 January is International Holocaust Memorial Day. I am putting together a commemoration service at the White Rock Theatre in Hastings. The centrepiece of the service will be a miraculous story of survival.
My 90-year-old mother, who now lives with me and my wife in Pett Level, was born as Emma Van Dam in the town of Apeldoorn, Holland in 1933. Her parents, both Jews, ran a bakery and kosher lunchroom catering for the Jewish community of the town. By 1940, when the German army invaded, three younger brothers had been born – so there were four children of the family, all under the age of eight. For the next five years, they and their parents experienced at first hand the horrors of the Nazi regime in Holland, under which Jews were first discriminated against, pilloried and robbed, then within two years found themselves subject to deportation en masse to death camps in Germany and Eastern Europe.
In total, 105,000 of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands at the start of the war were murdered, including about 90 of Emma’s relatives – her maternal grandparents, several uncles, aunts, and cousins. In Apeldoorn, a town of 80,000 people at the start of the Nazi occupation, 1,549 were registered as Jews. Of those just 150 returned alive at the end of the war, either from the camps or, like Emma and her immediate family, because they had managed to hide successfully for the duration.
In September 1940, an edict was issued to the effect that anybody who was fully or partly of Jewish blood was henceforth prohibited from being employed in any position in the civil service or at public or private schools, save those attended only by Jewish students.
On 10 January 1941, the registration was ordered of all Dutch Jews, including all those who had just one Jewish grandparent.
In July 1941, all Jewish documents had to be marked with the letter ’J’. Over the following months, measures were introduced which limited Jewish movement by either private or public transport. Even bicycles had to be turned in. A curfew was instated, and Jews could only do their shopping between certain designated hours. Jews were banned from having a telephone and from entering the homes of non-Jews.
During this period, Emma’s father was imprisoned for the trivial misdemeanour of opening the bakery outside permitted hours. The lunchroom had to close. Through a combination of the efforts of the Dutch resistance movement and local police, he was released not long afterwards. But the family were now in great danger. Emma’s youngest brother Max , not yet two, was handed over to the care of a Christian family.
From 3 May 1942, the Nazis obliged all Jews over the age of six to wear a badge on their clothes: a six-pointed yellow Star of David with the word ‘Jew’ in the middle.
The summer of 1942 saw the beginning of mass deportations of Jews to a transit camp at Westerbork, from where they would be sent regularly to Auschwitz, Sobibor and other death camps. Usually on arrival they would be herded straight into the gas chambers.
The only chance for most Dutch Jews to survive the war was to go into hiding. Unlike the Frank family, whose tragic experience was famously diarised by Anne, four years older than Emma, the Van Dams felt that their best chance was to find separate hiding places apart from each other.
Initially, Emma was sent with one of her brothers, Simon, to live with the family of a gamekeeper. Another brother, Freddy, stayed with another family nearby.
But bounty hunters roamed the Netherlands during the German occupation. They were paid five Guilders by the authorities for every Jew they brought in, the equivalent of a week’s pay for unskilled labourers. One day, two of these men appeared at the door. The gamekeeper’s wife told them that Emma and Simon were her sister’s children.
A couple of days later, the men came back; this time the children had to hide in the bedroom. The home of the gamekeeper was clearly no longer safe. They were taken first by bicycle and then by train to Rotterdam.
On arrival, Emma and Simon were separated from each other and sent to stay with different families. Emma stayed with a butcher who was married with five young boys. She remembers the regular bombing of the allies and constantly being hungry. The population was subjected to a food embargo by the Nazis, forcing them to live on rations of 400-800 calories per day. As a result, people resorted to eating grass and tulip bulbs to survive.
When the war finally ended, Emma remembers joining other children to run after a group of women wearing headscarves to cover the fact that they’d had their heads shaved in ritual humiliation as collaborators. She also remembers food parcels being dropped from the sky.
But best of all, she remembers being told that she was finally going home. She was first reunited with her brother Simon, who had been hiding with a greengrocer’s family nearby. Another brother was eventually found after putting an advert in a newspaper. At Apeldoorn, her father was waiting for the children to arrive. Her mother had gone to Leeuwarden to look for her parents, sisters, aunts, and uncles. Unbelievably for her, they had all been murdered.
After the family had been reunited, Emma’s father worked briefly as a cook for a captain in the Canadian army, stationed in Apeldoorn, but they then moved to Leeuwarden, where they took over the business which her mother’s murdered relatives had run before the occupation.
In 1954, at the age of 21, Emma emigrated to Israel, where she met and married my father, who was from Liverpool. He returned with my mother to England, where I and my two brothers were born.
I have a photograph, taken at the 60th birthday of my Dutch cousin, Mary Ann, the eldest child of Emma’s brother. It includes 15 people who are alive because Emma and her brothers survived the war. There are another nine family survivors not in the photo – so that’s 24 people who are living now because Emma and her brothers survived the Holocaust. That’s the miracle which I wish to share with the people of Hastings on this day.
People wishing to attend the service on 27 January should check the following link:https://www.hastings.gov.uk/news/latest/hmd-2024/
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How very moving and life-affirming was the Holocaust Memorial Event at the White Rock Theatre. Thank you, David, for an excellent and powerful presentation of your mother’s miraculous story of survival. Never again.