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FEATURE
MAY, 2020//
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Courage in Dutch migrant honoured for family’s heroics in Tracey Johnstone THIS is Gerry Zwart’s story. His parents received a prestigious award, but it really belongs to the whole family who willingly harboured Jewish children and dozens of resistance fighters. It’s been a long time since World War II, but the defining moments of Gerry’s youth remain crystal clear. The youngest of 12 children, Gerry was just 11 when the war started for the Netherlands, and his family’s world turned on its end. As the 90-year-old sits in his cosy loungeroom at a retirement village in Nambour accompanied by his doting wife, Valerie, Gerry shares a haunting picture of how the war impacted on all the family, who became accidental heroes by turning their home into a “safe house’’ for
BRAVERY HONOURED: Gerry Zwart (OAM), 90, with the medal he accepted from Israel, on his parents’ behalf, after a woman his family saved tracked him down 75 years later.
Gerry Zwart's father, Marinus.
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“I remember the first day of the war: it was May 10, 1940,” Gerry said. “All of a sudden we heard on the radio that the Germans had invaded.” Nobody expected this news. Before then the Germans had come as far as France. But on that fatal May date the German army invaded Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Gerry said the family’s first response was to head to a neighbour’s cellar. Only a week later the Dutch army capitulated and the German occupation forces arrived in town taking over public buildings and schools. Initially life didn’t change too much, Gerry said. The children went about their normal activities. But when the general army was joined by the SS, that’s when things did change. Gerry, who was the
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The people were taken to a concentration camp. Of the three, only one made it back.
youngest of the Zwart children, learnt very quickly to keep quiet when confronted by the Nazis. “When the SS came, you had to make sure you didn’t say the wrong thing,” he said. He watched as the SS rounded up any local men and women aged from 16 to 45 to move them by train to Germany to work in the factories. His artist father missed the cut; he was too old. His mother was also left alone. Gerry remembers the Jews within the Blaricum community were hardly noticeable until early 1941, when the word came through that the Germans had started rounding them up in Amsterdam. With that news, Gerry’s sisters came home from school and asked his parents if two of their Jewish friends, both named Bela, could hide in the house, which was already home to eight of the Zwart family. His parents readily agreed. In the next village his much older brother Hank had also taken in a whole Jewish family. Soon after, “as things got tougher”, Gerry said his brothers built several hiding places in the Zwart house, in the roof, under the floor and behind false walls. They also started keeping the doors to outside locked at all times. His mother, Maria, also told everyone to use a particular knock when they came to the front door. If the knock was different, it meant there was a German
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The Righteous Among The Nations medal given posthumously to the Zwart family by Israel for providing a safe house for Jews.
people hiding from the Nazis. As the weather cooled, many of the Zwart family of 12 were relaxing inside their small house in the Dutch village of Blaricum, listening to the radio.
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