Born November 23, 1941, in The Hague, Netherlands
Listen to Al Münzer discuss the difficult decisions his parents made shortly before his birth »
Alfred Münzer was born on November 23, 1941 in The Hague, Netherlands. His father, Simcha, owned a men’s tailoring business and his mother, Gisele, remained at home to look after Alfred and his two older sisters, Eva and Leah.
On May 21, 1942 Alfred’s father was ordered to report to a German labor camp but evaded the order by checking himself into the hospital for a hernia operation. By September it became apparent that the entire family would need to go into hiding. Simcha faked a suicide attempt in order to be committed to a psychiatric hospital near The Hague. Meanwhile, Gisele sold the family’s possessions and settled her children with friends and neighbors before joining Simcha at the hospital as a nurse’s assistant.
Eva and Leah were placed with the friend of a neighbor, but in early 1944 the woman’s husband denounced her and the girls to the authorities. All three were arrested and sent to Westerbork. On February 8, 1944 eight year old Eva and six year old Leah were deported to Auschwitz where they were killed three days later.
Alfred was put in the care of a friend named Annie Madna, who placed him with her sister. However, after a month Annie’s sister became too nervous to keep him. Annie then placed Alfred with her ex-husband, Tolé. For the next three years Alfred remained in Tolé’s home, looked after by their housekeeper, Mima Saïna, who became his surrogate mother. The Madnas treated him as one of their own children, but he was not allowed to leave the house for fear that someone might see him and become suspicious. Despite their difference in appearance, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Alfred had no sense of being different from the rest of his Indonesian-Dutch family and he was too young to question why he was hidden in the cellar when the Gestapo came to the house.
In early 1943 Alfred’s parents were deported to Vught and then a year later to Auschwitz where they were separated. In January 1945 Simcha was sent to Mauthausen and a number of other camps before being liberated at Ebensee. He died two months later at a nearby convent where he was receiving medical treatment. Gisele had been sent from Auschwitz to work at one of the Telefunken factories near Reichenbach. After the factory was bombed in the summer of 1944 she was marched to a series of concentration camps, ultimately arriving at Ravensbrück. In the spring of 1945 she was evacuated by the Swedish Red Cross and in August she was repatriated to Holland.
When Gisele returned for Alfred, the four year-old had no memory of who she was. In order to ease the transition, Gisele invited Alfred’s surrogate mother, Mima, to continue to care for him. However, a few months later Mima died. When Alfred was six years old his mother opened a cosmetics store in Holland. In 1952 they moved to Belgium where they lived until they immigrated to the United States in 1958. Today, Alfred is an internist and pulmonologist and lives in Washington, DC. He still maintains a close relationship with Tolé’s children.
