I A FAMILY TAPESTRY
EELKE MULLER
Camille Pissarro, detail of The Girl Lying in the Grass (Le Repos, paysanne couchée dans l’herbe), 1882
This is the story of three Dutch girls, Rosemarie, Marianne and Suzan van den Bergh, three sisters from a once-fortunate entrepreneurial family from the province of North Brabant. The girls were cradled to sleep by the same mother, lifted into the air by the same father, so high they shrieked with excitement and joy. Each of the children was the apple of their grandfather’s eye and was given special treats by their grandmother. Three pairs of little hands clasped the same tea set, depicting a rabbit and delightful ducklings: ‘Careful there, the cups are breakable! Give Mama a sip.’ In light frocks, they scurried through the grass under their family’s watchful eyes. The two youngest daughters had golden hair with a touch of ginger; the eldest was dark blonde. The three children were forever connected, yet they were never all in the same place at the same time and they never for a moment played together. Time did not allow it. Nor would time permit them to replace the doll’s crockery with coffee mugs, look upon the world as adults, exchange news or resolve minor quarrels. Suzan never knew her two older sisters, because they were dead before she was born in 1947. Rosemarie and Marianne were murdered in Auschwitz. Suzan was a post-war baby, a Freedom Child, the hope for a better future. She was the girl who was supposed to make everything right. But she could not save her broken parents’ marriage.
‘For me, this book is a tribute to my father and mother and my sisters. It is the tiny bit of life that I can breathe into Rosemarie and Marianne,’ says Suzan.1 Many of our conversations are by telephone. We sense her discomfort about meeting in person and the fear that her emotions will take over if she were to sit with us. So we fumble with our iPhones, fiddle with chargers, pulling at an unwilling cord. Suzan is filled with memories; she can recount hundreds of stories about her childhood and her origins. However, there are also huge gaps in what she remembers. Like so many after the war, her parents preferred to keep silent rather than tell, and they died at a young age. Much of what Suzan knows, she pieced together from stories shared by family friends – people who knew fragments of her family history and shared their own interpretation of it. Reality and conjecture are woven together, and this book will not succeed in untangling the knots entirely. It will, however,
Industrial looms in the factory hall of the textile company Gebr. Van den Bergh, Oss, 1917
attempt to tell the history of the Van den Bergh sisters based on interviews, archival documents and photographs.
FACTORY SMOKE
Rosemarie (1936-1944), Marianne (1939-1944) and Suzan (born 1947) are threads in a family tapestry that was once tightly woven and strong. The girls came from a lineage of Jewish textile manufacturers from Oss, where their greatgreat-grandfather, Daniël van den Bergh, founded a wadding company in 1856.2 From a local home, rags were ground into ‘grey cotton wool’, a filler for clothes, blankets and furniture. This modest enterprise was the foundation for the later carpet factory owned by the Van den Bergh family. Following Daniel’s death in 1866, his son Jacob van den Bergh took over the factory and expanded the enterprise considerably.3 The company covered a large area in Oss and focused on processing kapok in addition to cotton wool production. The expansion was not to everyone’s content. Neighbours complained that when the machines were running, ‘the furniture in the house shook’ and ‘the walls vibrated so that the objects hanging
From left to right: Rika van den Bergh-Zeehandelaar, Alida van den Bergh-Knurr and Sientje Jacobs in the front yard of their house at the Stationstraat, Nijmegen, 1926 (detail)
on them rattled.’ Then there were fire hazards and garden vegetables made inedible due to the waste products emitted by the factory.4 But the municipality prioritised other interests and made way for growth. Jacob wisely opted for a healthier living environment, free of factory smoke and dusty kapok seed pods. In 1903, he was registered at Spoorstraat 20 in Nijmegen, where he lived with his wife, Rika Zeehandelaar, and their five children: Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, and twins Simon and Rosa.5 The eldest son, Abraham, also called Bram, was the grandfather of Suzan and her two sisters.
Suzan knew her grandfather Bram but never met her four uncles or her aunt Rosa. But the colourful descriptions we have of this generation of Van den Berghs we owe to someone else: Dutch museum director Louis Wijsenbeek.6 He was a son of Rosa, the sister of Suzan’s grandfather Bram. ‘Louis was my second cousin, but I called him uncle because he was much older than I was’, says Suzan, ‘I once visited him with my mother when he was director of the Municipal Museum in The Hague; I liked him very much.’ According to memoirs written by Louis, his grandfather, Jacob van den Bergh, was a kind man. Grandmother Rika, with her robust physique and severe expression, was more difficult to engage with: ‘She was a very domineering woman who also demanding of her sons.’7 All four Van den Bergh boys were expected to participate fully in the business. Those who dreamed of a different future, such as the youngest son, were out of luck: ‘His mother forced him to join the Van den Bergh factories. He regretted this his whole life, but he was never courageous enough to break loose.’8
‘WE WILL HIT THE JEWS’
EELKE MULLER
In late 1939, Jaap and Ellen van den Bergh and their children moved from Nijmegen to Heemstede in the province North Holland, a prosperous town just outside of Haarlem. Their new home was on the Heemsteedse Dreef, a broad street built in the first half of the 1930s to give the commuter town extra allure.1 Jaap and Ellen’s daughters were still young: Rosemarie was three and Marianne a chubby eight-month-old baby. The year after they arrived in Heemstede, the family moved again: the municipality of Heemstede registered them at Franz Schubertlaan nr. 71 in October 1940. This house was in the so-called composers’ quarter, a beautiful neighbourhood with two squares, water and greenery, and schools within walking distance, making it an ideal location for a young family.2 For someone as dedicated to classical music as Ellen, it must have also been nice to see the names of illustrious musicians on street signs during her walks. ‘Whether my mother ever played Schubert herself or had any special association or bond with it, I don’t know, but she definitely loved his work. My mother’s family was so very musical,’ says Suzan.
The Van den Bergh family’s home on the Franz Schubertlaan was the middle edifice of a three-house terrace block. Their neighbours at number 73, the right corner building, were engineer Herman Ballot and his wife Kicky with their three young children – a family that had lived in the Dutch East Indies for many years and had returned to the land of cold winters and stew in the late 1930s.3 One of the family photos features Kicky Ballot seated on a wicker chair. Her legs are so long that could not be fully captured in the picture. Her head slightly tilted, she reads to her two daughters and infant son, an adorable threesome with neatly kempt hair with side parts, the girls with the at the time unavoidably gigantic bows in their hair. This family, especially the mother Kicky, would play a critically important role in the Van den Bergh family’s life during the occupation.
The sisters Marianne (left) and Rosemarie (right) van den Bergh, circa 1941
A WARNING SIGN
The arrival of the Van den Bergh family in Heemstede had everything to do with the tense political situation in Europe, a tension that rapidly increased in the late 1930s and finally led to a devastating world war. The eventual murder of nearly six million Jews during this war cast long shadows ahead. The Van den Bergh family had received an ominous forewarning in 1933. On 30 January that year, Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. Within three months, the German commercial agent of the Van den Bergh brothers’ company in Cologne reported that he had been asked whether the Dutch company was Jewish-owned. The agent had confirmed this while noting that one must not forget to ‘make distinctions’; in other words, not all Jews are the same.4 He wondered how to react to such questions in the future. The company’s directors responded: ‘For us, there exists only one answer to this question, which is that we are a Dutch company.’5 The only matter of relevance, the directors believed, was the factory’s respected name and reputation of excellence: ‘Our company has existed for more than 77 years and holds an exceptional position, for which the predicate “Royal” ... is likely the best proof.’ The Van den Bergh
German soldiers before the town hall of Haarlem, May 1940
Heemstede, Franz Schubertlaan 71-73, 1938. The Het Ballot family lived at no. 73; in October 1940, the Van den Bergh family was registered at no. 71 (partly visible in the photograph)
family did not yet realise how little such arguments impressed National Socialists.6
Once in power, Hitler was able to turn his long-held political ideal into reality. As could be read from 1925 in Mein Kampf, he dreamed of a great German empire in which Jews had no place. National Socialism was an authoritarian ideology characterised by deeply rooted racism. Nazis glorified the ‘Aryan race’ as the source of all civilisation and saw it as their duty to purge the German population of ‘inferior races’.7 After the 1933 political takeover by the National Socialists, the hatred of Jews intensified in Germany. On 15 September 1935, Hitler’s government gave the rapidly increasing discrimination against Jews a legal foundation with the proclamation of the Nuremberg Race Laws, which defined who could be identified and categorised as a Jew. This gave the Nazis a means to deprive a part of the population of its rights and exclude it from economic and social life. The Anti-Jewish measures in all of Germany followed in rapid succession; in addition, there were the insults and violence on the street that made life for Jews increasingly agonising. On the night of 9-10 November 1938, an outburst of violence occurred: the infamous Kristallnacht or November pogrom.8 Encouraged by the German authorities, Nazis across Germany and Austria destroyed homes, shops, synagogues and cemeteries of Jews.
III A TIME OF INVISIBILITY
EELKE MULLER
Anka Nienhuis-Szymelmic sewing a Jewish David star on her coat, Amsterdam, 1944-1945. Photograph by Cas Oorthuys
In the first years following Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, anti-Jewish legislation in Germany focused mainly on emigration. The Nazi government spared no effort to drive the Jewish population out of the country. Over time, the anti-Semitic government policy escalated even further, and extermination was chosen as a strategy. During the war, German forces in Poland and the Soviet Union were followed by SS death squads that liquidated Jews and other persons considered undesirable on a large scale. The victims of these massacres were buried in mass graves, and even today, not all of them have been discovered. ‘Holocaust by bullets’, a French researcher called it.1 On 20 January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, 15 prominent Nazi officials led by SS chief Reinhard Heydrich discussed the implementation of the Endlösung der Judenfrage. 2 This so-called Final Solution entailed the systematic extermination of Jews in camps created and arranged as killing factories.
In the Netherlands, as well, the Nazi administration was in full preparation for mass extermination: starting in 1942, the Jewish population was concentrated, deported and then murdered on a large scale.3 Part of this process was that Jews from the Dutch provinces were forced to evacuate to Amsterdam, after which their abandoned household belongings were confiscated by order of the occupying forces. This also occurred in Jaap and Ellen’s hometown.4 In the spring of 1942, policemen in Heemstede passed by the houses of Jews to assess their belongings; the owners were no longer permitted to take items of value from their homes. In late April and May 1942, Jewish residents were forced to leave the municipality. Nearly 140 people departed. A city historian wrote: ‘With a suitcase, holding only a blanket, some clothing and bread for a day, they were ordered to gather in the Haarlemmerhout. Here, trams stood ready to transport them to Haarlem station. From there, they went by train to Amsterdam ...’5 The police reported to the German authorities that the evacuation had occurred ‘in an entirely routine manner’. The deserted houses were closed, sealed and at a later stage emptied.
Homes of deported Jews looted and made inaccessible at Waterlooplein 64-78. Of the 114 former residents, only ten survived the war. Amsterdam, Augustus 1944
IV ‘A GRAVE IN THE CLOUDS’ 1
EELKE MULLER
Watch tower Camp Westerbork, date unkown. On 15 July 1942, the first transport departed the Dutch transit camp for Auschwitz
The Van den Bergh sisters could no longer stay at their hiding place in Katwijk. After the war, Jaap van den Bergh reported to a policeman that ‘Mr Visser was afraid for trouble, so the children had to leave.’2 Whether there was a reason for the mounted fear at that time is not clear. Nonetheless, a new hiding place for the children was urgently needed. Once again, Kicky Ballot leapt into action. She said that Dick Lijnzaad, her neighbour, ‘would come up with an address within 24 hours.’ The situation was so pressing that Jaap agreed to his plan. Lijnzaad brought the girls to the town of Driebergen in the province of Utrecht without telling their parents the exact shelter location. At Arnhemse Bovenweg 40 in Driebergen stood a large villa built just after the turn of the century. It was a children’s boarding house called De Viersprong. This was the Van den Bergh sisters’ new hiding place.3 Their care in the boarding house cost 200 guilders a month, a fee their parents paid through Lijnzaad.
LIFE IN DE VIERSPRONG
The move to the boarding house was quite a change for Rosemarie and Marianne. From a location where they may have been the only children, they were tossed right into the hustle and bustle and discipline of a group home. According to Jaap, Dick Lijnzaad had falsely suggested that his daughters were going somewhere where there were only ‘1 or 2 halfJewish children’. Even later, Dick is said to have reassured him: there were virtually no Jewish children at the new shelter. After the war, however, it came to light that there were 13 other Jewish children in hiding in De Viersprong.4 The oldest was Keetje van Zanten from Rotterdam, born in 1930. In a portrait photograph, she smiles at the camera, a girl with big eyes and a hairpin in her short, curly hair.5 There were the twins Sophia and Hadassa Wijzenbeek who were three years older than Rosemarie. A 1942 photo shows the girls with their friend Lies in the Agnietenstraat in their hometown of Utrecht.6 Eyes squinting against the light, they grin, their blonde hair parted to the side and on their coats and dress the Star of David with
Camp Westerbork, main road, circa 1944. Starting in 1942, the deportation trains departed east from this central road in the camp, also called 'Boulevard des Misères' by the prisoners
CHILDREN WITHOUT PARENTS
In the book Een hemel zonder vogels, Janny Bolle described her first impressions of Camp Westerbork in wintertime. The De Viersprong children will have experienced it in the same manner: ‘It was already dark when we arrived, so I couldn’t see much of the camp. Over sandy grounds with occasional puddles of mud, we walked to a barrack. Inside was a long corridor, with, at the end, two rooms set up as offices.’45
Everyone was registered: ‘Behind the desks sat mostly German Jews, who asked us all sorts of details. Why, when, where and by whom we had been arrested. And also, whether we were carrying anything of value.’ This last question facilitated the confiscation of the prisoners’ remaining valuables. Everyone who arrived was frightened. After the war, an employee of the Jewish Council wrote poignantly about the ‘astonished faces,
Children in Camp Westerbork, circa 1942-1944
often twisted with fear and fatigue’ that emerged from the darkness and suddenly had to get used to the bright hall light.46 This employee helped with the initial reception of new camp residents and, over time, saw many thousands of roundedup Jews enter: ‘Slowly the large hall filled up with people dishevelled by the journey, young and old, small and large, humble and well-to-do, all mixed together. Soon, the room was filled with a clamour of voices accompanied by the ticking sound of typewriters and the crying and moaning of saddened or upset women or men.’ After what Janny Bolle called the ‘red tape’, it was time for the medical check-up: ‘Completely naked, I had to stand before the doctor on duty. My heart and lungs were examined, and my hair was checked.’47
The transports to Westerbork included unsupervised children. Historian Jacques Presser quoted an eyewitness: ‘Those children without parents! Babies in baby baskets, full nappies, hungry, thirsty, crying. Often already sick. Then, bigger children of every age. Partly anxious and shy, partly deadened and drowsy from overtiredness.’48 At the camp in Barrack 35, there was an orphanage run by Otto and Hennie Birnbaum.49 When transports arrived, Otto picked the parentless children out of the crowd and took them under his care. The orphanage also took in Rosemarie van den Bergh and her sister Marianne.50 This location had a separate girls’ and boys’ room with bunk beds stacked three beds high. There was a separate sleeping room for babies and small children up to five years old, with fairy tale drawings on the walls. Additionally, the building structure had a central hall alternately used as a dining room, a school, a recreation room and a synagogue. To provide some entertainment, a
V IN SEARCH OF THE SISTERS
EELKE MULLER
Poster for the tracing of Rosemarie and Marianne van den Bergh on an advertising column. Berlijn, 1946. Photograph by Walter Sanders
In the early morning of 6 June 1944, a commander of the 3rd British Parachute Brigade jumped from a war aircraft over Normandy. Some of his fellow combatants drowned after landing in the floodplain of the river Dives, pulled under the water by the weight of their heavy military gear. This paratrooper was fortunate, landing in flooded marshland, in an area where the water only reached his waist. The tea supply he had stuffed into the legs of his trousers was useless after the jump, but he was still alive. Bombs exploded close to where he landed. As he threw himself onto his side, he rolled onto a dead comrade. The man’s severed leg lay at a distance, in the middle of a path. This narrative is one of innumerable eyewitness accounts recorded by historian Antony Beevor in his book DDay, the military offensive that marked the start of the liberation of Western Europe.1 On this day in early June, Western Allies carried out a massive sea and air assault on German troops along the coast of Normandy. French beaches were coloured red with blood as soldiers from the United States, Britain, Canada, Poland and other countries battled the German army metre by metre. Meanwhile, Hitler’s army in Eastern Europe had been losing ground against the Soviet Union for more than a year and in the West, Rome had fallen into the hands of the Allies.
In August 1944, the Allies achieved a major victory after surrounding German forces near the medieval French town of Falaise. General Dwight D. Eisenhower recorded the battlefield of Falaise as one of the largest ‘killing fields’ of the war: ‘Forty-eight hours after the closing of the gap, I was conducted through it on foot, to encounter scenes that could only be described by Dante. It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.’2 The victory at Falaise gave the Allies the upper hand in the battle, and on 25 August, they entered Paris. The advance was so quick that it seemed only a matter of days before the Germans would also find defeat in the Netherlands. On 5 September 1944, Dolle Dinsdag (Mad Tuesday), the Dutch brought out their stowed-away national flags and orange banners to welcome the Allies in the streets.3 But it turned out to be too early for this. The liberation of the Netherlands did not begin until a week later, with the Americans advancing
SINGING AT BERGEN-BELSEN
On 15 April 1945, the British army arrived at the entrance gates of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany.15 What they found on the premises was far beyond their comprehension. Emaciated and deathly-ill people stumbled past mounds of bodies; the living and the dead were at times barely distinguishable. ‘We are trained soldiers. We have seen a great many things since D-Day. Including horrid injuries. But what we see here, we are not trained for,’ said one eyewitness.16 Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp, but enormous numbers of people perished there during the war due to the many hardships. The victims of BergenBelsen included Anne Frank and her sister Margot. The British found an estimated 60,000 survivors in the camp; around 14,000 of whom turned out to be in such decrepit shape that they would still succumb in the days and weeks after their liberation.
‘Slowly, it became evident what an appalling catastrophe had occurred among the Jews of Europe,’ wrote Herman van den Bergh.17 He saw the images of the concentration camp in British newspapers and longed to head for northern Germany to search for his family immediately, but the army commanders refused to accommodate him. It was only when he threatened with desertion that he was permitted to travel to BergenBelsen. On 1 May 1945, Herman set off with an army rabbi and his driver. Once they arrived at the camp, he was astounded to see piles of clothing lying on the grounds: ‘Why had those clothes been thrown there so carelessly? When I looked more closely, I realised that those were all emaciated corpses, dead people just lying there on the ground.’18 Although he had been somewhat prepared by the journalistic accounts, it was still a profoundly overwhelming shock for him: ‘I will never forget it, even though they are images you would prefer to put away deeply.’19 There were still SS men around who had been tasked with the disposal of the bodies, and for a moment, Herman played with the thought of emptying his loaded rifle at them, but he refrained from doing so. He searched the camp for his parents, Simon and Seraphina van den
Concentration Camp Bergen-Belsen, shortly after the liberation, May 1945. The 7-year-old Simon ‘Sieg’ Maandag from Amsterdam walks with averted eyes past victims not yet buried. Photograph by George Rodger
PUBLICATION
Waanders Publishers, Zwolle in cooperation with Rijksdienst voor het
Cultureel Erfgoed/National Cultural Heritage Agency and Kunsthalle Bremen
AUTHORS
Eelke Muller
Annelies Kool
Dorothee Hansen
Brigitte Reuter
Rudi Ekkart
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Rudi Ekkart
TEXT EDITOR
Nathalie Dufais
Rudi Ekkart
IMAGE EDITING
Annelies Kool
TRANSLATION (Dutch English)
Claire van den Donk
Emily O’Shea (editor English)
TRANSLATION (German-English)
Jessica Glanz
DESIGN
Gert Jan Slagter
Frank de Wit
LITHOGRAPHY
Benno Slijkhuis, Wilco Art Books
PRINTING
Wilco Art Books, Amersfoort
© 2024 Waanders Publishers b.v., Zwolle, de auteurs
All rights reserved. No part of the content of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The publisher has made every effort to acknowledge the copyright of works illustrated in this book. Should any person, despite this, feel that an omission has been made, they are requested to inform the publisher of this fact.
Copyright on works of visual artists affiliated to a CISAC organisation has been arranged with Pictoright in Amsterdam. © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2024
ISBN 9789462625945
This publication is also available in a Dutch edition: 9789462625938
www.waanders.nl