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"And know that most likely you never see your parents again." | |||
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Hetty d'Ancona Deleeuwe Born 1930 Amsterdam, the Netherlands 
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It's impossible for people to understand how hard it is to just leave your home, your parents, and know that you most likely never see your parents again. Leave everything that was everything to you, just behind, just close the door behind you. There's an...it's hard to explain how difficult that was, and being a parent myself now, I don't know how my parents could have done it. It's...it's...it's so painful. It's so painful to say goodbye to your one and only child, and don't know where she is going to. My parents didn't know where I was going. They had this connection with the man who I later found out saved two hundred and fifty Jewish children, and who perished himself in Bergen-Belsen. He was caught at the end of the war and he perished himself--not being a Jew, but being treated as a Jew because he helped the Jews. And he found a place for me all the way on the other side of the country and...I will see...showed my parents the picture of a lady who's gonna come the next morning to take me away. And I had to take all the stars off my clothing, and this stuff was very yellow, and very poor quality. Was no quality--you can't even call that quality--and it ran through all your clothes. So you had to be very, very careful that people couldn't see that a star had been on my coat and a star had been on my dress, and...uh...had to brush it off very, very carefully. So when I left the house early in the morning, I was scared to death, of course, that my neighbors were going to see me leave the house. I don't know how I made it to the...to the tram because we went on the tram to the railroad station. And there she handed me over to a young man in his very early twenties, and with this young man was a young boy, maybe eleven, ten, something like that, and the two of us went on the train. Uh...it was awesome. It was very, very scary because I had no name. I had no papers. I didn't know who I was. I didn't know who the man was that was taking me. I didn't know the child that was with me. I didn't know anything. | ||
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Helene Herta Katz Wohlfarth Born 1909 Offenbach, Germany 
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Helene, called Herta, was born to a Russian-Jewish father and a German-Jewish mother in a town on the Main River, near Frankfurt. Her father had immigrated to Germany from Russia in 1890. Her mother had automatically taken on her husband's Russian citizenship when she married. In 1914 Russia and Germany went to war, and Russians living in Germany were considered "enemy aliens."
1933-39: Herta married Siegfried Wohlfarth in 1933 and could change from being "stateless" to taking on his German citizenship. The Nazis were in power and Siegfried had been fired from his job because he was Jewish. Now that Herta had citizenship, she could get a German passport and leave the country. In 1934 the couple left for Amsterdam. There Herta gave birth to a daughter, Doris, and by 1937 had become an interior decorator. 1940-44: The Germans occupied the Netherlands in May 1940. When the Wohlfarths were told to report to the train station at 1:30 a.m. on July 15, 1942, to go to a work camp, Siegfried and Helene decided to go into hiding. For a year they had prepared for this by not kissing or hugging their daughter so she wouldn't miss them when they left her with Christian friends. Aided by the Dutch underground, Helene and Siegfried hid together in several locations until August 25, 1944, when they were both arrested. Herta survived deportation to Auschwitz and was liberated in the Kratzau work camp by Russian troops on May 9, 1945. She and her daughter emigrated to the U.S. in 1947. |
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Yennj Baehr Born 1886 Doernbach, Germany 
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Yennj and her husband Heinrich were two of a few Jewish residents in Ruchheim, a small town in the Rhine River valley. Yennj helped Heinrich run their dry goods store that was on the first floor of their house. In the summer she liked working in the garden out back. Their son, Kurt, had emigrated to America after World War I. Ida, their daughter, helped them in the store until she married.
1933-39: The Nazis have come to power, and many Jews have decided to leave Germany. Our niece, Luise, recently sailed for America. She used to visit us every summer and was like a younger sister to our Ida. Heinrich and I have thought about leaving Germany, but can't do it without taking Ida and our granddaughter, Freya. Anyway, Ida's husband doesn't want to leave his business. And who would sponsor us all to come to America? 1940-42: Heinrich and I, with Ida and her family, have already been deported to two detention camps in southern France. When we arrived at the first one, Gurs, it was winter--cold and rainy--and we had only straw to sleep on. Six-year-old Freya came down with a high fever and severe earache and almost died. Now, at Rivesaltes, there's a chance to get Freya out of the camp to safety through an aid society (Children's Aid Society) that arranges to hide children with French families in the countryside. We all say goodbye to Freya. In September 1942, a few days after Freya left the camp, 55-year-old Yennj, her husband and her daughter were deported to Auschwitz, where they perished. Freya survived the war. |
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| Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. | ||||
