Facebook Messenger note, APR 27, 2020, 8:24 PM:
"My name is Joe Sanders. I am the son of Leen Sanders. I just read an article that you wrote about my father and his actions as a prisoner in Auschwitz. Things I was never aware of. I am not much of a reader, but I really enjoyed reading your story about my father.
"Thank you so much.
Joe Sanders"
---
Life, as it does, has presented challenges for Joe Sanders.
Being the child of a Holocaust survivor (or survivors) is different. Hard to capsulize in one sentence or paragraph.
Joe experienced it -- as many have, me and my younger sister included -- so he knows, as we know.
To hear from Joe, some 6 1/2 years since I first wrote about Leen Sanders was quite a surprise. Never realized that Leen had a "second family" because -- to be honest -- I did not research much of his post-World War II life for that blog piece.
That was published January 25, 2014, as part 15 of the series on my father's "story" and subsequently became Chapter 16 of the 2017 book on my parents and family.
I described Leen as one of Dad's heroes. The details are in the blog piece (if you care to read it again):https://nvanthyn.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-boxer-leen-sanders-my-dads-hero.html
Look, many people who knew Louis Van Thyn knew him as a hero, too -- and still do. But he wasn't a national hero. Leen Sanders was.
He was a star, a Dutch boxing champion through the 1920 and '30s, and a behind-the-scenes champion at Auschwitz who through sacrifice, selflessness and -- honestly, some thiefery -- made miserable existences a bit better for fellow prisoners.
This blog will be about "the rest of the story," his final 4 1/2 decades. Much of the information below was supplied by Joe Sanders, and some of it is from a November 1985 "Rotterdam Jewish Heritage" webpage article available online.
There was much glory and much travail in Leen Sanders' life.
---
When contacted by Joe Sanders, it was reminiscent of a follow-up of another blog piece involving another chapter of Dad's story. Jacqueline Frankenhuis, daughter of one of the three men with Dad in the Russian Army-uniform photo, sent a note 2 1/2 years after my original piece (in July 2014) and we subsequently did a Skype session that led to a blog about Jack Frankenhuis' post-WW II life in Amsterdam.
So now more correspondence with Joe, and the follow-up on Leen Sanders and his second wife, Joe's mother ...
In the Nazis' destruction, the murdered included Leen's firrst wife and two sons (ages 10 and 8) -- all killed not long after arriving at Auschwitz -- plus seven of his siblings (including the older brother (Bram) he had followed into boxing.
And before that even, when the Nazis bombed Rotterdam -- where Sanders' family lived -- their house was destroyed and everything -- medals, cups, scrapbooks included -- burned.
So emptiness on his return to Rotterdam after survival of Auschwitz and a "death march." But soon -- like my parents in Amsterdam -- a new start.
Leen married a friend of one of his deceased sisters, Henriette van Creveld, on July 4, 1946. (The sister's name was Rosette -- same name as our mother, slightly different spelling).
Joe and "Jetty" were together nearly 47 years -- nomadic in a way, with much happiness and much sadness, bitterness mixed in, with U.S. citizenship and then a return "home."
The journey, from 1946: A brief time in Rotterdam; a move to Aruba, a Dutch-influenced island in the Caribbean Sea; a move to the United States -- the Los Angeles area (first in Culver City, then Canoga Park) for 31 years; and finally a return for the final decades in Rotterdam.
Leen died at age 83 in April 1992. Henriette outlived him by almost 22 years; she died in January 2014 at age 101.
Joe was born in Aruba in 1949. But he eventually became a California surfer dude.
And here is a we-can-identify start: tension, some anger, in the home, no love -- at all -- for the Nazis and Germany.
"I think the best place to start is what it was like growing up with my parents," Joe wrote. "As a child I was curious about the war and how it was for them." (Henriette was hidden during the war, and survived it.)
"Both my parents were willing to tell me, but after a few years I realized it caused a lot of tensions between my parents. They would become angry thinking about the horrible things the Germans did to them and their families."
There is a reason that Joe describes his father as "a pressure cooker." There were times when the old boxing champion's aggressive nature surfaced.
"They would say things to each other," Joe related, "and before they knew it, a violent argument ensued. So I knew some facts, but not all.
"They never hit each other, but the yelling and screaming at each other was horrible for me to witness. They would cool off and make amends to each other and that is the way it was until [I was] in high school.
"I was now bigger and quicker than my father and I told him not to take his anger out on my mom any more. Although things cooled down in the house, the rage in my father's head stayed with him until the day he died."
But, Joe added, "Life was not always like that. There were plenty of good times." More on that in a moment.
---
After liberation from Auschwitz, at age 38, Leen boxed two more bouts -- and won -- against the same opponent. The war had taken its toll, and he knew it was time to retire as a boxer.
With a new life and a new wife, he also needed a new career in a new place.
The bad memories in Rotterdam haunted him, just as they haunted my mother in Amsterdam. Especially how hard he had tried to save his wife and two boys.
As a Dutch soldier, the Nazis had taken him as a POW (same as my Dad), but he escaped and found his wife and kids hiding in a barn.
For two years -- as the Nazis began their cruely campaign against Jewish people -- Leen did subterfuge resistance work, distributing illegal magazines and stolen identify documents to help fellow Jews. Then in August 1942, he and his family went into hiding, only to be discovered four months later ... and the Nazis sent them to the camps.
Three years later, he could tell people that "I really owe my life to a Polish kapo (prisoner guard) who gave me extra food in exchange for boxing lessons."
But no Selly, Josua ("Joopie") or David. Only their memory, and his sorrow, and a place that no longer felt like home.
Henriette was the new life, Aruba the new place, boxing trainer the new job. And "he wanted to try a second time in having a family," Joe said.
The job fizzled, so Leen opened a bar in the town of St. Nicholaas. Then in 1954, when Joe was 4, their application for immigration to the U.S. was accepted.
In 1959 (Oct. 9), they became U.S. citizens. My family can identify with that big step.
In Los Angeles, Joe noted, "My mom and dad did whatever kind of work they could get to support themselves."
Leen was a truck driver, then had a government job as a cleaner in schools, which led to his one-man cleaning company during the 1960s.
"I was an only child, so I was as close as I could be with my parents," Joe wrote. "They always seemed to be working. So I was a latch-key kid."
His old sport was now a distant memory for Leen. "He never got back into boxing," Joe recalled, "other than to teach me. Although we would watch an occasional match, he did not appreciate the fighting styles he saw. It was more fighting than boxing."
(Boxing encyclopedias refer to Sanders as a defense-minded, punching stylist, willing to outwit and outpoint his opponent, rather than slug with him. So his "old school" form didn't jive with many of the 1960s fighters he observed.)
Joe wasn't interested. "I had developed a passion for surfing," he said -- in Southern California, remember -- "and had no passion for boxing. He thought I was a beach bum. But when I pointed out how his parents disapproved of his boxing, he was a lot more understanding."
After leaving Rotterdam in 1946, Leen had made only one return trip in 1952. The next visit was 19 years later. But in the 1970s, it became a trend; they made several trips back to see what family and friends remained there.
And Rotterdam -- a city bombed to shreds by the Nazis in 1940 and totally rebuilt and modernized, one great Dutch success story -- began to grow on them again.
Leen, in the 1985 Rotterdams Niewsblad interview,
explained that he liked talking to people anywhere and everywhere, "and that was difficult in Los Angeles because you hardly see people on the street there. Besides, my wife and I grew older and we couldn't take the heat so well in the summer. ..."
So, in 1978, they packed it all up and went back to live in Rotterdam -- The Netherlands' major port city.
"I am glad I came," Leen said in the '85 interview. "I was born here and I still have many acquaintances in Rotterdam."
Joe, now totally Americanized, surf-crazy, and with a family, remained in California. He made three trips to visit the folks in Holland, and Leen and Jetty made a return visit or two to Los Angeles.
Joe went through a variety of jobs, and one he liked and stuck with was as a micro photographer/artwork cutter.
"The flexibility of the job worked great with my passion for surfing," he wrote. "Surfing has been a major part of my life. My closest friends that I've gotten to know are from surfing. It is how I met my wife (Diane), who was also a surfer."
But the business faded, and later work included carpentry. And in June 2006, his wife was diagnosed with cancer. Joe and their two sons watched her decline over 3 1/2 years; he quit work at the start of 2009 to care for her. She died in mid-December 2009 at age 58 1/2.
Joe: "It was devastating, very depressing ... life was nerve-wracking."
But he drew inspiration from a familiar source: "There was Dad. Although he had passed away ... he showed me the way. If he was able to survive the things he went through, so could I."
And there was Jetty, in Holland. "My mother was always on the nervous side, so Diane and I kept her condition from my mom. I was always lying to my mom. She wanted to know why we wouldn't fly to Holland and visit."
Life, he admits, "was a series of extreme highs and extreme lows. Surfing during the day lifted my spirits to euphoric highs. Being home alone at night was so depressing."
Ten months after Diane's death, he attended a Breast Cancer Awareness fund-raiser, and he met a girl.
She soon became his girlfriend -- it's been a decade -- "and I feel so lucky to have her in my life now."
His and Diane's oldest son served as a U.S. Marine in Iraq and is now a computer tech. The younger son is a structural engineer, working at University of California-San Diego in the testing lab.
The grandsons of boxing/Auschwitz hero Leen Sanders.
And the man is not forgotten in The Netherlands. A little more than two years ago -- May 4, 2018, the day of a national sports commemoration in Amsterdam -- the president of the Dutch Boxing Association placed a garland of flowers in Sanders' honor near a statue outside the historic 1928 Olympic Stadium.
In the 1985 interview, Leen said, "We have a beautiful flat in Bijdorp, and we hope to have a few more pleasant years."
And they did. They had long, memorable journeys.
"I love both my parents," Joe summed up. "They were not well educated, but they taught me a lot. To think about what they had to live through, they did very well for themselves and me."
"My name is Joe Sanders. I am the son of Leen Sanders. I just read an article that you wrote about my father and his actions as a prisoner in Auschwitz. Things I was never aware of. I am not much of a reader, but I really enjoyed reading your story about my father.
"Thank you so much.
Joe Sanders"
---
Life, as it does, has presented challenges for Joe Sanders.
Being the child of a Holocaust survivor (or survivors) is different. Hard to capsulize in one sentence or paragraph.
Joe experienced it -- as many have, me and my younger sister included -- so he knows, as we know.
To hear from Joe, some 6 1/2 years since I first wrote about Leen Sanders was quite a surprise. Never realized that Leen had a "second family" because -- to be honest -- I did not research much of his post-World War II life for that blog piece.
That was published January 25, 2014, as part 15 of the series on my father's "story" and subsequently became Chapter 16 of the 2017 book on my parents and family.
I described Leen as one of Dad's heroes. The details are in the blog piece (if you care to read it again):https://nvanthyn.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-boxer-leen-sanders-my-dads-hero.html
Look, many people who knew Louis Van Thyn knew him as a hero, too -- and still do. But he wasn't a national hero. Leen Sanders was.
 |
| Leen Sanders, in 1985 (photo from Rotterdam Jewish Heritage) |
This blog will be about "the rest of the story," his final 4 1/2 decades. Much of the information below was supplied by Joe Sanders, and some of it is from a November 1985 "Rotterdam Jewish Heritage" webpage article available online.
There was much glory and much travail in Leen Sanders' life.
---
When contacted by Joe Sanders, it was reminiscent of a follow-up of another blog piece involving another chapter of Dad's story. Jacqueline Frankenhuis, daughter of one of the three men with Dad in the Russian Army-uniform photo, sent a note 2 1/2 years after my original piece (in July 2014) and we subsequently did a Skype session that led to a blog about Jack Frankenhuis' post-WW II life in Amsterdam.
So now more correspondence with Joe, and the follow-up on Leen Sanders and his second wife, Joe's mother ...
In the Nazis' destruction, the murdered included Leen's firrst wife and two sons (ages 10 and 8) -- all killed not long after arriving at Auschwitz -- plus seven of his siblings (including the older brother (Bram) he had followed into boxing.
And before that even, when the Nazis bombed Rotterdam -- where Sanders' family lived -- their house was destroyed and everything -- medals, cups, scrapbooks included -- burned.
So emptiness on his return to Rotterdam after survival of Auschwitz and a "death march." But soon -- like my parents in Amsterdam -- a new start.
Leen married a friend of one of his deceased sisters, Henriette van Creveld, on July 4, 1946. (The sister's name was Rosette -- same name as our mother, slightly different spelling).
 |
| Jetty and Leen Sanders greeting his former sparring partner, Rinus Krijger, on a 1975 visit to Rotterdam. (photo from boksen.nl) |
The journey, from 1946: A brief time in Rotterdam; a move to Aruba, a Dutch-influenced island in the Caribbean Sea; a move to the United States -- the Los Angeles area (first in Culver City, then Canoga Park) for 31 years; and finally a return for the final decades in Rotterdam.
Leen died at age 83 in April 1992. Henriette outlived him by almost 22 years; she died in January 2014 at age 101.
Joe was born in Aruba in 1949. But he eventually became a California surfer dude.
And here is a we-can-identify start: tension, some anger, in the home, no love -- at all -- for the Nazis and Germany.
"I think the best place to start is what it was like growing up with my parents," Joe wrote. "As a child I was curious about the war and how it was for them." (Henriette was hidden during the war, and survived it.)
"Both my parents were willing to tell me, but after a few years I realized it caused a lot of tensions between my parents. They would become angry thinking about the horrible things the Germans did to them and their families."
There is a reason that Joe describes his father as "a pressure cooker." There were times when the old boxing champion's aggressive nature surfaced.
"They would say things to each other," Joe related, "and before they knew it, a violent argument ensued. So I knew some facts, but not all.
"They never hit each other, but the yelling and screaming at each other was horrible for me to witness. They would cool off and make amends to each other and that is the way it was until [I was] in high school.
"I was now bigger and quicker than my father and I told him not to take his anger out on my mom any more. Although things cooled down in the house, the rage in my father's head stayed with him until the day he died."
But, Joe added, "Life was not always like that. There were plenty of good times." More on that in a moment.
---
After liberation from Auschwitz, at age 38, Leen boxed two more bouts -- and won -- against the same opponent. The war had taken its toll, and he knew it was time to retire as a boxer.
With a new life and a new wife, he also needed a new career in a new place.
The bad memories in Rotterdam haunted him, just as they haunted my mother in Amsterdam. Especially how hard he had tried to save his wife and two boys.
As a Dutch soldier, the Nazis had taken him as a POW (same as my Dad), but he escaped and found his wife and kids hiding in a barn.
For two years -- as the Nazis began their cruely campaign against Jewish people -- Leen did subterfuge resistance work, distributing illegal magazines and stolen identify documents to help fellow Jews. Then in August 1942, he and his family went into hiding, only to be discovered four months later ... and the Nazis sent them to the camps.
Three years later, he could tell people that "I really owe my life to a Polish kapo (prisoner guard) who gave me extra food in exchange for boxing lessons."
But no Selly, Josua ("Joopie") or David. Only their memory, and his sorrow, and a place that no longer felt like home.
Henriette was the new life, Aruba the new place, boxing trainer the new job. And "he wanted to try a second time in having a family," Joe said.
The job fizzled, so Leen opened a bar in the town of St. Nicholaas. Then in 1954, when Joe was 4, their application for immigration to the U.S. was accepted.
In 1959 (Oct. 9), they became U.S. citizens. My family can identify with that big step.
In Los Angeles, Joe noted, "My mom and dad did whatever kind of work they could get to support themselves."
Leen was a truck driver, then had a government job as a cleaner in schools, which led to his one-man cleaning company during the 1960s.
"I was an only child, so I was as close as I could be with my parents," Joe wrote. "They always seemed to be working. So I was a latch-key kid."
His old sport was now a distant memory for Leen. "He never got back into boxing," Joe recalled, "other than to teach me. Although we would watch an occasional match, he did not appreciate the fighting styles he saw. It was more fighting than boxing."
(Boxing encyclopedias refer to Sanders as a defense-minded, punching stylist, willing to outwit and outpoint his opponent, rather than slug with him. So his "old school" form didn't jive with many of the 1960s fighters he observed.)
Joe wasn't interested. "I had developed a passion for surfing," he said -- in Southern California, remember -- "and had no passion for boxing. He thought I was a beach bum. But when I pointed out how his parents disapproved of his boxing, he was a lot more understanding."
After leaving Rotterdam in 1946, Leen had made only one return trip in 1952. The next visit was 19 years later. But in the 1970s, it became a trend; they made several trips back to see what family and friends remained there.
And Rotterdam -- a city bombed to shreds by the Nazis in 1940 and totally rebuilt and modernized, one great Dutch success story -- began to grow on them again.
Leen, in the 1985 Rotterdams Niewsblad interview,
explained that he liked talking to people anywhere and everywhere, "and that was difficult in Los Angeles because you hardly see people on the street there. Besides, my wife and I grew older and we couldn't take the heat so well in the summer. ..."
So, in 1978, they packed it all up and went back to live in Rotterdam -- The Netherlands' major port city.
"I am glad I came," Leen said in the '85 interview. "I was born here and I still have many acquaintances in Rotterdam."
Joe, now totally Americanized, surf-crazy, and with a family, remained in California. He made three trips to visit the folks in Holland, and Leen and Jetty made a return visit or two to Los Angeles.
Joe went through a variety of jobs, and one he liked and stuck with was as a micro photographer/artwork cutter.
"The flexibility of the job worked great with my passion for surfing," he wrote. "Surfing has been a major part of my life. My closest friends that I've gotten to know are from surfing. It is how I met my wife (Diane), who was also a surfer."
But the business faded, and later work included carpentry. And in June 2006, his wife was diagnosed with cancer. Joe and their two sons watched her decline over 3 1/2 years; he quit work at the start of 2009 to care for her. She died in mid-December 2009 at age 58 1/2.
Joe: "It was devastating, very depressing ... life was nerve-wracking."
But he drew inspiration from a familiar source: "There was Dad. Although he had passed away ... he showed me the way. If he was able to survive the things he went through, so could I."
And there was Jetty, in Holland. "My mother was always on the nervous side, so Diane and I kept her condition from my mom. I was always lying to my mom. She wanted to know why we wouldn't fly to Holland and visit."
Life, he admits, "was a series of extreme highs and extreme lows. Surfing during the day lifted my spirits to euphoric highs. Being home alone at night was so depressing."
Ten months after Diane's death, he attended a Breast Cancer Awareness fund-raiser, and he met a girl.
She soon became his girlfriend -- it's been a decade -- "and I feel so lucky to have her in my life now."
His and Diane's oldest son served as a U.S. Marine in Iraq and is now a computer tech. The younger son is a structural engineer, working at University of California-San Diego in the testing lab.
The grandsons of boxing/Auschwitz hero Leen Sanders.
 |
| photo from eubcboxing.org |
In the 1985 interview, Leen said, "We have a beautiful flat in Bijdorp, and we hope to have a few more pleasant years."
And they did. They had long, memorable journeys.
"I love both my parents," Joe summed up. "They were not well educated, but they taught me a lot. To think about what they had to live through, they did very well for themselves and me."
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