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
Louis Wijsenbeek with wife and son, circa 1939-1940
The nephews and nieces of the Van den Bergh family, circa 1926
The home of the Van den Bergh-Zeehandelaar family in Nijmegen radiated with family pride. The dining room featured almost life-size portraits of two forefathers, formally dressed ‘with long black dress coats and standing collars, plus the usual moustache and sideburns.’9 In addition, the walls were adorned with Chinese dishes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which were scattered across the walls ‘like insect stains.’10 The interior was fairly typical for the well-to-do circles of the period, with a lot of Biedermeier and Wilhelmina-style furniture. For the children, the windowsills in the house were especially attractive: with built-in seats on either side of the windows where you could hide behind giant velvet curtains. Louis’ nursery was also an island of tranquillity, where the adults’ constraining words and looks did not seem to exist. The nursery room’s walls were adorned with delightful little portraits, and he could make funny faces at his reflection in a giant, gold-framed mirror.
One by one, Jacob and Rika van den Bergh’s five children flew out of their parental nest in Nijmegen. Between 1907 and 1914, they each married and started their own families. More
and more children appeared in the family photographs, mostly posing obediently, at times dishevelled or calling and waving. One extraordinary detail was that three of the Van den Bergh sons were married to three sisters, the daughters of the flour merchant Friede Knurr.11 Not only did the family grow, but the business in Oss also thrived, with continual expansions and investments.12 For example, in 1915, the firm erected a textile mill and a few years later, a power plant was installed on the factory grounds. The success also led to the construction of a new headquarters – a monumental villa completed in 1919, which still stands proudly amidst a recently renovated quarter of the Brabant city. By 1920, Jacob van den Bergh, the elderly Pater Familias, had retired as managing director of the family business. His four sons took over the responsibilities and continued the factory under the name ‘NV Gebroeders van den Bergh’s Industrie en Handelsmaatschappij’, which included the units of the cotton wool and kapok factory as well as the textile mill.13 The Van den Bergh brothers soon made so much profit that they were able to invest in benefits for their staff, such as a pension and widows’ fund.
Meanwhile, their father, Jacob, sat at home with nothing to do under the disciplinary regime of his wife, Rika. Grandson Louis Wijsenbeek felt sorry for him: ‘He was seldom allowed in the salons because he was a heavy smoker, and my grandmother could not stand the smell of cigar smoke. He was banished to his room and only came out to visit his friends or take the dogs for a walk. His last years were not very pleasant for him...’14 Suzan only knew her great-grandparents from old photographs and stories: the Van den Bergh-Zeehandelaar couple died in the 1920s. From then on, their eldest son, Bram, was the head of the family.
GOLDEN YEARS
According to his nephew Louis Wijsenbeek, Bram van den Bergh was a born manager with a kind heart for his staff members.15 No matter how many workers the company took on, he knew every person by name and remembered the little personal details they had shared with him. In 1907, Bram married Betje Knurr, the eldest daughter of the aforementioned flour importer, Friede Knurr. The couple lived at Spoorstraat 9 in Nijmegen, nearby his parents’ house. Old postcards of the neighbourhood exude prosperity and peace; they show wide, leafy streets lined with grand mansions and villas. On 5 March 1908, Bram and Betje’s first child was born, a boy with dark hair and green eyes. The future standard-bearer of the family, Jacob van den Bergh (1908-1958), had been named after his grandfather.16 This baby, Jaap for short, who
cried out with terror at birth, would later become the father of Suzan and her sisters. When he was one, a younger brother arrived: Fred, short for Frederik Carsten van den Bergh (19091976).17 The boys spent a portion of their childhood in a chaletstyle villa on the Burgemeester van Schaeck Mathonsingel in Nijmegen.18 A 1930s photograph shows a fairy-tale-like house among the greenery and two figures at a window, making us curious about the life and events within the house’s walls. Bram van den Bergh was deeply fond of animals, just as his eldest granddaughter Rosemarie would be later. He kept an aviary in the garden, had several dogs, and often went out for rides in his horse-drawn carriages.
Whether at work or leisure, the Van den Bergh family was deeply dedicated to each other. There were birthdays and anniversaries to celebrate, and joint holidays were planned for summers in Noordwijk aan Zee in the Dutch province of South Holland. With all these get-togethers, Louis got to know his four uncles Van den Bergh very well. Bram’s younger brother, Isaac, was viewed as the family’s business mastermind.19 From 1921, he lived with his family in the distinguished Statenkwartier in The Hague, in ‘a large house that still looks as haunting as it did then.’20 Isaac’s wife, Lily van den BerghCorper, seemed almost merged with the divan in the library; with one leg elegantly raised, she would hold soirees for her friends. The Hague couple led a lively social life and organised large gatherings, which Louis frequently attended as a student and where he could keep in touch with ‘numerous dear and amiable female friends.’21
Louis found it more difficult to connect with his third uncle, Joseph van den Bergh.22 Although a gracious man, Joseph was usually lost in thought with his nose in his books. A fateful accident in 1920 changed his life: he had fallen three metres down a walkway in a factory hall, and he hovered between life and death in hospital for weeks.23 After his recovery, he increasingly immersed himself in spirituality and aesthetics. According to Louis, he developed a keen interest in modern art and was a generous patron for contemporary artists. From 1928, Joseph van den Bergh lived in Paris with his wife, Alida Knurr and their many children. ‘I have fond memories of this family, who had a pleasant and loving life together,’ said Louis.24
Louis Wijsenbeek’s favourite uncle was his mother Rosa’s twin brother Simon van den Bergh, who lived in Rotterdam: ‘We frequently took afternoon walks together on Sundays, during which Uncle Simon would share his reflective and optimistic view of the world with me.’25 Simon’s wife, Seraphina Knurr, attracted much attention because of
her looks: ‘Aunt Zus really was a striking woman, she had a Spanish-like beauty that suited her temperament very well, leaning towards delicate.’26 She was musically inclined and could have had a career as a mezzo-soprano, but her marriage prevented that from happening. Both sides of the family found it unacceptable, as it would be offensive, ‘that the wife of a Van den Bergh takes to the stage.’27 Seraphina was always singing. In her fantasy, she may have bowed to a wildly enchanted audience in a concert hall, but, in reality, keeping the household running was her actual responsibility. Unfortunately, she was terrible at it. For example, her staff walked all over her: ‘She had made her life very complicated by surrounding herself with more servants than I had ever seen in a house, and those servants did exactly as they pleased.’28 Simon van den Bergh was involved in the founding of a synagogue in the west of Rotterdam in the late 1920s.29 The family’s youngest son, Herman, wrote in his 2005 memoirs that the family was rather traditional in religious terms.30 The family was ‘well-assimilated in Rotterdam’, and the children would have noticed little of the society’s developing antiSemitic tendencies.
The four Van den Bergh brothers had one sister, Rosa –Louis’ mother.31 She enjoyed a happy childhood with brothers who spoiled her and a large group of school friends. The girl’s lust for life and wit disarmed even her dominant mother Rika. Rosa wed the notary Siegfried Salomon Wijsenbeek. It was a mariage de convenance – a choice that pleased her family, as her husband was admired and an extrovert.32 The couple threw themselves into a full social life, giving grand receptions at their home on the Mathenesserlaan in Rotterdam. At these soirees, the children would eavesdrop on the guests with delight, except when one of them was accidentally trapped between two bars of a stair baluster and needed to be freed by force.33 The Wijsenbeek family home was filled with art and books: Siegfried collected porcelain and antiquarian books and was also a passionate museum visitor, but it was Rosa who introduced her son to the world of modern art. At the time, music practice was also an appropriate pastime in the upper circles. Louis was required to rehearse on his violin every morning; his parents thumped on the floor of their bedroom as soon as the scratching of his instrument stopped a room below. The parlour where Louis battered the violin daily also held a grand piano, which Rosa adored playing. Her husband Siegfried almost exclusively slammed on the ivory and ebony keys during marital quarrels. He would then tease his wife with a score by Robert Schumann, ‘Er, der Herrlichste von allen’, about the dedication of a wife for her husband.
The family Van den Bergh at the 75th anniversary of the ‘N.V. Gebr. van den Bergh’s Industrie and Handelsmaatschappij’. From left to right: Alida van den Bergh-Knurr, her husband Joseph, Fred, Bram, his wife Betje, Lily (standing), her husband Isaac, Jaap, Simon, his wife Seraphina, Frits. Oss, 1931
‘THE CURRENT ECONOMIC SITUATION’
During the Interbellum, the Van den Bergh family initially lived in abundant prosperity; money was not an issue. As Herman van den Bergh, the youngest son of Simon and Seraphina, recounted in 2005: ‘These were the golden years after the First World War. My father could afford almost anything; I grew up in a house with many domestics. Until 1929, we had a cook, a nanny and three servants.’34 During the autumn of that year, the family had a rude awakening. In October 1929, share prices on the Wall Street stock exchange in New York plunged. The stock market crash resonated worldwide and signalled the economic crisis of the 1930s. Trade and production collapsed in industrialised countries while unemployment explosively rose.35 The family business Gebroeders Van den Bergh also struggled. In 1931, the company celebrated its 75th anniversary. A newspaper article about the corporation had a desperate tone: ‘In its mind, it already sees the light at the end of the tunnel, which will without a doubt one day banish the gloom that overshadows the current economic situation of our society.’36 In actuality, the family must have had grave
Design by Fred C. van den Bergh (number 3881), 1929-1931
doubts whether things would ever improve; the Van den Bergh brothers endeavoured to keep their business afloat. The men searched for new markets and products and intervened in business operations with modest success.
The economic misery caused tension. It was an era in which social status, family honour and self-respect were undividable. Bram van den Bergh was discontented by the extravagant lifestyle of the Rotterdam branch of the family and ordered them to tighten their belt.37 Simon, the youngest of the brothers, was indebted to the company and had to be frugal. The excess at home was finished, ‘unfortunately’, his son Herman later wrote.38 A shadow also descended over Rosa van den Bergh’s family, possibly prompted by the economic crisis. Louis Wijsenbeek recalled that his once radiant mother suffered from mental issues in the 1930s and didn’t leave her bed for days on end. The physician had no way of getting her up with any attempt, which led to forceful intervention by her family: ‘One time I saw her brother Isaac come to her bedside, give her a smack and pull her out of bed. That harsh approach put her back on her feet for months.’39 Near the end of the decade, Rosa coped a bit better and devoted her time to charity work.
Meanwhile, modifications were implemented in the management of the family business and the next generation was ready to take over the wheel.40 It was agreed that each of the Van den Bergh brothers would be permitted to incorporate two sons in the company. In 1933, that moment had arrived for Jaap, Bram van den Bergh’s eldest son and his younger brother Fred was next in 1936. Their cousins, Frits and Herman, also climbed to the top of the family business.41
AN ATTRACTIVE CANDIDATE FOR MARRIAGE
For further details of the family history, it would have been wonderful if Jaap, like his cousins Louis and Herman, had left memoirs. But Suzan never found any personal notes from her father and knows little about his childhood in Nijmegen. At 17, Jaap left his parental home. He headed to Enschede for an education that would prepare him for a future as a textile manufacturer.42 In 1928, he travelled to Tourcoing in northern France, a bustling centre of textile production. ‘My grandfather Bram sent Jaap to a French colleague to learn the trade in practice’, says Suzan. ‘He was thrown into the deep end, placed in a foreign environment, to learn to stand on his own two feet as quickly as possible.’ Help from afar was not on offer, as Bram van den Bergh quickly made clear to his son: ‘Jaap sent a telegram to Nijmegen: “Where is the money?” His father replied with only three words: “Money stays here.” A severe approach, but it certainly worked.’
Jaap van den Bergh, 1937
Ellen Elias in the time that she was engaged to Jaap, circa 1933
As the offspring of a well-to-do family, Jaap van den Bergh had favourable prospects, which included those on the marriage market. Around 1933, he was engaged to Ellen Alice Elias, a young woman who, like him, came from a family of affluent entrepreneurs with Jewish roots.43 Ellen was the daughter of Isidore Elias, who in his lifetime had been the owner of a booming textile factory in the city of Tilburg. ‘Ellen was a perfect match; she came from the appropriate background and was a resilient, intellectual and artistic woman,’ says Suzan. A 1933 photograph shows her mother as a young adult, flaunting a radiant look and a brilliant white smile. Her light irises contrast with her dark, wavy hairstyle. It was a time of crisis, but for twenty-somethings on the brink of a new life, there was plenty of space to dream. Ellen lived with her mother, widow Rosa Elias-Andriesse, on the stately avenue of the Baronielaan number 2 in Breda. The home was filled with music, as Rosa was a gifted pianist: ‘It was Chopin that she played especially beautifully, in the romantic manner that was fashionable at the time.’ Ellen shared a fondness for the piano, but her mother demanded that she take violin lessons so they could make music together.
‘Ellen was not a writer,’ according to Suzan, ‘she too did not leave her memories on paper.’ However, her mother did occasionally recount stories from her own childhood. One story Suzan was always delighted to hear involved her parents’
