On this date 77 years ago ...

     On October 14, 1946, Rozette Lopes Dias -- then with the last name Lazer -- married Louis Van Thyn in war-weary Amsterdam.

    We are still grateful 77 years later.

The wedding photo: 1946

    Who knew on that day -- a Monday and a trip to City Hall for the wedding ceremony -- how long their lives would go, and how far they would travel.

     They'd known each other for little more than a year. And they had been through so much in the previous half-dozen years, some horrific experiences -- certainly not of their choosing.

     They each had lost so much, and they had precious little family remaining.

     So, who knows how deep their love was then. But they knew they needed each other.

      Their stories -- their combined story -- has a beautiful ending, of course: Almost 62 years of marriage, the last 51-plus in two homes they owned.

       And such good fortune: Two children they never expected -- me and my younger sister Elsa --  and from that, five grandchildren. From there, to the present-day nine great-grandchildren (but only a couple born while Louis and Rose still lived).

       Plus, a journey of almost 5,000 miles and two weeks from the wonderful place where they grew up (Hup Holland!) to the country  where Mom always dreamed of living, the result of how well American military personnel treated her and other women Holocaust survivors upon rescue in early 1945.

      And what culture shock -- from a busy center of a million people to a state and city of which they'd never heard (Louisiana? Shreveport?).

    They could not have known, did not know, how accepting, how helpful, those people in Shreveport would be. First, the Jewish community, but soon far beyond that, from all over. 

      It was a perfect fit, certainly moreso than it could have been in, say, the New York City melting pot of millions.           

      In 1 1/2 years, they were home owners. In five years, they became U.S. citizens ... and darned proud of it.

      Parts of their hearts, though, was with the few family members and many friends they left behind in The Netherlands. And also with the friends -- and eventually some family -- in Israel, the Jewish-dominated state created in 1948.

       That included the very couple that had introduced them to each other in the summer of 1945. Those two people were the only married couple housed -- in an attic room -- at the former factory converted into a safe shelter for women Holocaust survivors who had returned to Amsterdam.

     The man knew Dad from boyhood days in Amsterdam. The woman was Mom's best friend at Auschwitz; they had been in elementary school together and had reunited while standing in line after they got out of the cattle-car transport to the concentration camp.

     After they survived the Holocaust, that couple moved to Israel, specifically to Narahija.

      Which brings us to today, to this past week and Hamas' invasion of Israel. 

       Because -- as I've been asked repeatedly this week -- we do have distant connections in Israel.

      That couple's granddaughter is now on active duty with the Israel military.

      A grandson and granddaughter of Mom's favorite first cousin (Maurits) in Amsterdam, and the granddaughter's husband (a tank driver) are reservists called to active duty. 

      Maurits' son married an Israeli girl; they live in Jerusalem. And Maurits' daughter, who lives in Antwerp, Belgium, has four children living in Israel, but -- because they are Belgian citizens -- none are in the service. 

     (Maurits' children are our second cousins, once removed. At least, that's the best we can figure.)

---  

      Can tell you this: Grateful that Mom and Dad are not around to endure this latest invasion of Israel. They would have been extremely concerned.

      Because that's how they were in 1967 (the "Six-Day War" and 1973 (the Yom Kippur War) when Arab military forces invaded Israel.

       Television news then wasn't 24-7 -- Shreveport had only three TV stations and three networks -- but Mom watched (and worried) every report. Dad was working at the pipeyard, but I know he and the people there were paying attention.

       I think about this now because we've had the news on constantly here. 

      Thought about writing about baseball -- how much I've watched this Texas Rangers' season -- or football (LSU, Louisiana Tech and the Dallas Cowboys are always topics of interest in this apartment). 

      Wanted to say how good the Rangers have been and how good it feels for their fans. Same for the Houston Astros and their Yankees-like dynasty of the past seven years.

       But writing about athletics just didn't seem right this week. (Maybe if a certain team had recaptured its glory of so many decades I might be more involved, but that hasn't happened in 14 seasons. So there.)

        No, there is sadness here for all those deaths and injured in Israel, in Gaza. Not only the Jewish people, but the thousands of innocent Palestinians. They, too, are victims of Hamas, and Israel's penchant -- determination -- for revenge.

       No winners in this. None. No end in sight.

       Sad.

       And when I heard on TV someone say that "people died just because they were Jewish," I thought, yes, that's how it was for our grandparents, uncles and aunts, Mom and Dad's first spouses, plus their many uncles, aunts and cousins.

      Even through many good times, Mom and Dad never forgot. Nor do we ever forget, and we shouldn't.

      We want Israel to survive and thrive. But we, too, want the Palestinians to have peace and good times.

      We are for peace, period.

      I know those two people who took those wedding vows -- who committed to each other -- on October 14, 1946, would approve of that.

      They were blessed, and so were we. We wish the same for millions of others.          

          

Sixty years in America: a day, a trip, to remember

       Sixty years ago today -- Jan. 7, 1956 -- we got our first look at the Statue of Liberty. It was a moment to remember, and to treasure.
       We arrived in the United States that day, the boat trip from The Netherlands at its conclusion after 10 mostly seasick days.
       It was Dad and Mom -- in their mid-30s -- and my sister Elsa and me. None of us spoke much English, just a few words Mom had learned from a book -- and I had no clue what the Statue of Liberty meant or represented.
       She welcomed us. She held her torch high.
       I do remember my mother telling us, in our little cabin, that we needed to go upstairs on the deck to see the Statue of Liberty. OK, Mom, whatever.
       On Jan. 7, 2016, I can tell you it was one of the great experiences of a lifetime.
       I have written about this previously, in the first year of my blog (2012), but today I present my mother's version of the trip from Holland and our first week in the United States. 
       She wrote this in January 2006, on the 50th anniversary of our arrival, and read it as part of her speech to a group in Shreveport that honored my parents then. There are details in it that I remember differently, but Miss Rose sometimes didn't let the facts get in her way.
        It's lengthy, but I think it's touching and it's neat, so bear with it ...
 ---
        "We applied for an American visa but the immigration laws were so strict we had to have a relative sponsor, and we didn't. In 1953, this country made a special law for Holocaust survivors called the Non-Quota Law. We could come, but we had to have a work sponsor. The HIAS (Hebrew International Agency for Survivors) found us a family in Shreveport, Louisiana, who were willing to sponsor us. They also had a job for Louis in an oil pipe and supply company. They were responsible for the first five years we were here. The owners were Abe Gilbert and his two sons-in-law, Lazar Murov and Neal Nierman. They were what we call in Yiddish real "menschen," which means exceptionally good people.

The earliest photo I have of us in the United States, spring
1956, in front of the duplex on Jordan Street. That's me, Elsa
and Dad with Janet Vandenberg (Mom took the photo). Janet
and her father, Ed, were the first people of Dutch heritage we
met in Shreveport and they were wonderful friends.

       "We had gone in Amsterdam to the American consulate to learn about Shreveport. We knew that we would live a complete different life, but we were determined to adjust. Our friends in Holland didn't understand why we would go to a place where we didn't know anybody. To us, it was a challenge. The 10 years we had lived in Holland (after World War II) were extremely difficult. It probably would have been easier to give up. But how many people get a second chance on life? And if you are fortunate enough to get that chance, then you must try hard to do the best you know how.
      "... We got a visa to come to this great country. We have never regretted it one second that we came here.
      "Someone asked me the other day if I remember where I was New Year's Eve 50 years ago. Yes, I remember it well.
      "We had booked with the elegant, beautiful ship of the Holland-America line. The date was 28 December 1955. All our friends had passes to come on board with us to say our last goodbyes. We all shed some tears. It was very emotional. I realized that nobody made us leave.
      "We were informed that there would be some great parties on board celebrating New Year's Eve 1956 and lots of entertainment. I had made an evening dress of champagne-colored taffeta for Elsa, our 4-year-old daughter. Our very observant son, Nico, who was 8, wanted to know what the brown paper bags on the railing were for. I told him I hoped we never needed them. Just wishful thinking.
      "We went from Hoek of Holland (a city on the North Sea) to Marseille, France, through the English Channel to Southampton. Up till then, the trip was enjoyable. We had a nice cabin with two bunk beds and a great view of the North Sea. The people we met were interesting and amicable. The food in the dining room was scrumptious. Our children were having a good time, which was very important to us. The sea was calm and nobody was seasick.
     "The trouble started going in to the Atlantic Ocean. The ship went east to west and the waves from north to south. Not a very pleasant feeling.
     "Our 4-year-old daughter, who always got carsick, was doing great. She would go by herself to the dining room and told the steward there that the three of us were seasick. She would bring back apples for us, which were supposed to make you feel better. No such luck. We weren't able to take part in any of the parties.
     "If you ever plan a trip to Europe on a ship, don't go in January. After 10 days of misery, we landed in Hoboken, N.J. I kissed the ground, not only to be glad to be in America, but also to be off the ship. I swore I would never go on a ship again, not even a rowboat.
     "There were several people to welcome us; we had known them from Holland and Belgium. Some of them had come to America before the war or right after the war was over. They were all diamond polishers and offered Louis a job. He didn't accept, and I was delighted. I had enough of snow and ice and temperatures far below freezing. We were invited the next day (Sunday) for dinner by some of our friends. They were living on Long Island.
     "Our friend, Sally, picked us up from where we were staying. The HIAS had brought us there. It was on Lafayette Street (in New York City). The building used to be an old school. It was now a place for immigrants. There were people there who had lived there for years. It was nothing to compare with the Hyatt. Fortunately, we had to be there for a few days.
     "We had a wonderful time with our 'old' friends talking about 'the good (?) old times.' After dinner, Sally dropped us off at the railroad station. We took the train to Great Neck, N.Y., where we had to change to New York City. It was the first time we were on our own. Not knowing exactly where we were, not speaking the language well, with two children to whom it all was different and strange. It was sort of stressful.
      "Back in New York, we took a cab to Lafayette Street. The next day we took the subway to Broadway to see the Rockettes dance. It was maybe the only chance we would get to do that; we probably would never come back to New York. It was fabulous except for the ice cold, freezing, snowing weather.
     "Tuesday, we again took a cab to Penn Station to catch the train to Chicago. There, we had to change platforms and another train. We waited three hours for the train, which would bring us, hopefully, to St. Louis. It was Thursday, 12:30 a.m., when we arrived in St. Louis.
     "We left there with our two tired, sleepy children at 2:45 a.m. At 5:50 a.m., we stopped in Hope, Arkansas, where we had to go to another platform. The station was closed. There was not another train coming until 6:40 a.m. We sat outside on the two suitcases we had, not very comfortable. At 7:30 a.m., Jan. 12, we arrived in Shreveport.
      "The Jewish Federation director was there to welcome us. He was very kind. His name was Maurice Klinger. We were impressed with the car he was driving. It was a 1956 Chevrolet two-toned, grey and pink. In our eyes, it looked like a limousine. In Holland, you wouldn't see cars like that. Everybody drove small cars, like little toy cars.
      "We had an address on our papers for a hotel downtown, the Caddo Hotel. The Jewish Federation had rented a room there for us for two weeks. Mr. Klinger brought us to Jordan Street, to a two-story house. I said to Louis in Dutch, never seen a hotel like this. It turned out to be a duplex; it was nicely furnished. There was some food in the refrigerator, among other things, a chicken. Our first meal in Shreveport was chicken soup, of course.
     "The next morning we found an elementary school in the neighborhood. Louis and I thought the faster Nico would go to school, the faster he would learn English. Afterward, we came to the conclusion it was a big mistake. We should have given him time to acclimate. He had a very difficult time in the beginning. He became good friends with the rabbi's youngest son, who was a tremendous help to him and us.
     "There were no public kindergarten schools, only private, and we couldn't afford that. With the help of Nico, I tried to teach Elsa at home. There was one word she was familiar with: 'cute.' Everything was 'cute," from toys to cars to flowers. Even some food. She heard that word over and over again because that was what people would say to her.
     "Friday night, we went to Shul (Agudath Achim, on Line Avenue). It was about three blocks from where we lived. It was quite an experience. They made us all feel welcome -- something we really needed. Until then, we hadn't met many people.
     "The next day, we walked around the neighborhood to get familiar with our surroundings. On Sunday, we walked all the way to Kings Highway, about an hour from Jordan Street. There we took the city bus to the Mansfield Road where Gilbert Pipe Co. was located. We wanted to see how much time Louis needed to go to work.
     "The next day Louis went from diamond polishing to the oil pipe and supply business. He was hired for six weeks and stayed for 28 years. He learned the business from the bottom to the top. He not only liked the work, he did what was even more important -- he liked the Gilbert family and so did I.
      "... We are blessed in so many ways having come to Shreveport, meeting so many people and making so many good friends. All of them showed us love, care and kindness. We can't thank everybody personally, but we want you all to know how much we love  you and appreciate you."
---
     It is 10 years since she wrote that and gave the speech. She's gone, Dad's gone, and they had more than 50 years in this country. Elsa is in New Jersey, and I'm in Texas. There are now six Van Thyn great-grandchildren.
     And we're grateful.
     The Statue of Liberty stands in that harbor and it might be debatable to some, but not to me: She is a welcome sight still.
     It's 60 years and counting for us. Seems like a lifetime.      

Mom's memories: Wearing the yellow star

    We were pleasantly surprised last week to see Mom's picture on the Amsterdam page of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum web site.
    My sister Elsa, researching in advance of training to become a docent at the Holocaust museum in Cherry Hill, N.J., found the photo by Googling "Amsterdam" and "Holocaust."

    The first link is ushmm.com, and it had this photo caption: Rozetta Lezer Lopesdias-Van Thyn, left, and a friend, with the compulsory Star of David on their clothing. Amsterdam, the Netherlands, May 1942-1943. 
    Hey, Mom.
    I posted on Facebook and sent e-mails  telling of the photo with the link to the page. We received many nice comments in reply, and we appreciate that.
    I have a few details to share, answers to some questions I received, and a quote from Mom about wearing the yellow star, which is the significance of the photo and -- although I did not receive verification in a message to the Holocaust museum -- almost certainly the reason it was selected for that page.
    It is touching -- two young Jewish women, wearing that star, posing happily, not knowing of the horror that was ahead.
      Among the comments we received was "amazing" and "you must be proud" and "were you aware that this photo existed?" and "who was the other woman?"
      (Some thought that might be my mother's older sister. It is not.)
      Yes, it is amazing. Yes, we're proud. Yes, we have seen the photo before. It is here in our album of dated Van Thyn and Lopes-Dias family photos; in fact, when I went to look for it earlier this week, it was on the very first page.
      On the bottom of the photo, Mom had written "Amsterdam, 1940." So that is a discrepancy from the museum-page caption ... and it's not the only discrepancy (see below).
      Also, I felt that I had seen the photo published previously -- and I found it. In I remember the difficult times ... (subtitle) World War II recollections from Shreveport, Louisiana, Chapter 7 is entitled "It's The Best Country In The World." It's the story, Holocaust-related, of Louis and Rose Van Thyn.
      (The book, published through the R.W. Norton Art Gallery and written by Gary D. Ford with Phil Lynch -- director of the Oral History Project -- as the interviewer, was graciously sent to us by former Centenary College President Dr. Donald Webb.)
      There are four family photos included in the chapter, and this photo is on page 93 with this caption: "Jews had to wear the Star of David. Rose Van Thyn, left, walks arm in arm, with her friend, Lena Green, as they enjoy a stroll in Amsterdam in 1941. 'Lena, Rose says, did not survive the concentration camps.' "
        That is a tough last sentence.
       Lena Green: one of the six million Jewish Holocaust victims.
       We are certain that Mom provided the family photos for this book, and I am fairly certain (but not verified) that she provided the photo for the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
        Several people noted how beautiful Mom looks in this photo. She is about 22 (if it is 1941) and while later in life she would have laughed at being called "beautiful," I think it is one of the best photos of her.
---
     In her 1996 interview on the Holocaust for the USC Shoah Foundation, Mom talked about the yellow star and I find it significant that she refers to being "marked," which is also the term Dad used in his interview when asked about having a number tattooed onto his arm.
     The interviewer asked Mom: " Do you remember the first time you put the yellow star on and you walked out on the street?"
     "I sure do. I sure do," Mom answered. "And I felt almost inferior, I really did. This was ... I was marked. ... The Jews in Holland had been regarded as first-class Jews. I mean there was no job you couldn't get. Every job you were capable of doing -- in government, city or state government, you could get. [When the Nazis took over] this was over with, and you felt mistreated.
     "It was terrible."
      Interviewer: "Did it create fear?" 
      "Oh, absolutely, absolutely," Mom said. "Not as much as that we would eventually leave Holland, but still, you were marked. In the neighborhood, [it] was at least 75 percent Jews, [and the Nazis] started having raids. ... We lived on a main street, and there was a highway and they would put up barricades and they would stop all the people wearing Star of Davids and ask for your ID because on your ID you had a 'J.' People would say to me, 'Why did you get a 'J' on your ID?'

      "But it was really too dangerous not to [wear it] because when the Germans came in, they went to the City Hall and to the Jewish Community Center in Amsterdam ... so they had all the lists of all the names and if they would stop and you were not wearing your Star of David or (didn't have) your identity card with a J, you would go to prison.
      "[We were] not even thinking yet of a concentration camp."

       In her interview, Mom talked about "no rational explanation" why she survived the concentration camps and so many -- including most of her family -- didn't and she cited one neighborhood raid when the Nazis were arresting people.
      "They stopped all the people with a Star of David," she recalled, "and I walked through. They never stopped me. I walked through and the [German] soldiers were there, checking people. I walked through without ever being stopped. That's not by accident you know. This, for me, was a sign, really."
       That was one day of survival. There were many more, even through her two-plus years of captivity in the camps and the woods of Poland and Germany.
---
       In the caption on the U.S. Holocaust Museum page, her name reads Rozetta Lezer Lopesdias-Van Thyn. Let me explain and confess.
       Lezer was her first married name. Lopes-Dias -- two words, hyphenated, not one word combined -- was her maiden name. She never used Lopes-Dias and Van Thyn together. And her first name was Rozette, not Rozetta.
       The confession: In her obituary, I mistakenly wrote it as Rozetta. She always pronounced it that way, and I assumed that's how it was spelled. It was one of the worst cases of checking-the-facts in my life. Found it a few days later as Rozette on her U.S. citizenship paper.      

     But there is Rozetta again. Maybe they got it from the obit.      Mom kept a yellow star at home, through the post-war years in Amsterdam and then Shreveport. I don't think it was her original yellow star -- don't see how that's possible -- but it was a replica. 
     Mom wore it for a 1995 photo with Dad to accompany a story in The Shreveport Times. That same photo was part of The Times editorial page column entitled "Van Thyn's work must continue" two days after Mom passed away in 2010.
        The yellow star: a haunting memory. But Rose lived to show it off for decades long after she was forced to wear it.
         Page link: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005434.

 

Rose wanted to live in the palace

     She left us five years today. She was Oma Rose to our family, "our dear Rose" to some of her closest friends and supporters, and Mom to Elsa and me.
     I don't intend to honor her memory each June 27, but this fifth anniversary is special, and of course, so was she.

One of my favorite photos of Rose Van Thyn (Mom):
reading to a class during a lesson on the Holocaust.

     If you follow this blog or my Facebook posts regularly, you know that I have written about Rose Van Thyn frequently as part of my family's history and my parents' remembrances of their Holocaust experiences.
     She became a celebrity of sorts in Shreveport-Bossier and beyond with her role as a speaker and educator on the Holocaust.
     Perhaps, as I mentioned in my speech in Shreveport at the annual Holocaust Remembrance Service a couple of months ago, that helped give her -- and Dad -- a sense of entitlement.
     I don't mean to exaggerate that, but there were times when that surprised some of the family and maybe irritated or exasperated us. I will cite a couple of examples in a moment, but I want to stress this: Mom and Dad basically were humble people, and they were particularly humbled by the honors they received.
     Of course, they were pleased to be honored. But Mom took those honors in stride (most of the time). Over the 25 years or so that she spoke publicly on the Holocaust, she did not do so to receive attention; she did it because she felt it was her "mission," it was important to let people know -- especially young people -- what could happen if a country went out of control, if prejudice turned into evil.
     But a sense of entitlement, well, I wrote about that in a blog piece three years ago:
http://nvanthyn.blogspot.com/2012/05/dr-rose.html.
     This concerned the honorary doctorate she received from Centenary College, making her Dr. Rose, a title she loved. She was proud of that.
     And so one day, this was late in her life when she was quite infirm, barely could walk, could not keep up with her mail and her bills (she buried some of them in drawers).
     She was looking at some address labels and she was quiet, but she didn't seem too happy. After a few minutes, while I was on the phone doing an interview, she somehow got herself off the couch and, using her walker, made her way over to the kitchen table where I was sitting, tapped me on the shoulder, threw down the labels and exclaimed, "This says Rose ... I want it to say Dr. Rose!" And she slammed down the walker to emphasize it.
---
      We could say "old age" was responsible that day. But 12 years earlier, during her USC Shoah Foundation interview about her life and the Holocaust, that sense of entitlement also emerged late in the 2 1/2-hour video.
      She was talking about her return to Amsterdam after almost three years and the harrowing days in the Auschwitz concentration-camp and then the "Death March" in the brutal cold of a German winter.
      "Now I had nothing," she told the interviewer. "I mean my parents had some money in the bank, but I couldn't touch that because it was all frozen. I had the clothes I had on my back, I had no home, no place to go, and I always said, when we came back to Holland I was very, very disappointed in the welcome we got.
      "Here was Holland, here was Amsterdam, we had two palaces in Amsterdam, and they put us in a rinky-dink hotel in the red-light neighborhood, and we had to work in the kitchen there, which we refused to do, and we stayed there a week and we all complained and then they put us in what used to be a diamond factory, where they cut and polished diamonds, and they still had the diamond mills in there, where they polished, but no one was in there.
      "They put cots in between those mills. Food was catered in; we had no privacy, no bathroom. There were some faucets in there where we could wash.

      "... All of us were very upset with how we were treated. They could have opened one of the best hotels in Amsterdam, where the queen stayed, and should have let us in there. They could have opened the palace for us, which they should have. Not because we had to be treated different than other ones, but we were. They owed us that, I felt."
 ---
      Yes, she wanted to be in the palace -- like the queen, or maybe just a princess.
      Some people might look at that video and say that Mom was just kidding; she was capable of that. But I don't think so; I think she was indignant. She felt entitled to royal treatment.
      And you know what? She might not have received that royal treatment in Amsterdam in 1945, but my view is that she -- and Dad -- were treated royally and honored by so many people for many, many years.
       Were they "entitled" to that? No, but thank goodness, it turned out the way it did. We -- their family -- are so grateful and thankful. After what they had been through, it was right that they got a lot of breaks.
       She lived to be almost 89, having outlived almost all her family of origin and her early years friends by some 65 years, going from a devastating time in Europe to a comfortable -- and meaningful -- life in America.
       I think Mom would have loved to know that she and Dad have five great-grandchildren (it will be six soon). There were two when she left us.
       I think she would have loved watching her only great granddaughter color and write and read ... just as that girl's mother once did at Oma and Opa's house. She would have loved those great grandsons; she might have hugged them and squeezed them, saying, "What a body, what a body," as she once did her beautiful blond first grandson.
       We do miss our dear Rose. But she left us great memories and I believe she knows we were proud of her.


The two great grandchildren she lived to see: Josie and
Jacob on visits to the house on Schaub Drive in Shreveport.

     

        

Rose and her 'camp sisters'

Jannie and Rose: Reunited in Shreveport, 1977
 (The Shreveport Times photo)

       For my mother (Rose Van Thyn), out of the horrors of the Holocaust came some beautiful relationships, ones that lasted for the rest of her life.
       A few minutes after she stepped off the train -- the cattle car -- at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, she found perhaps the greatest friend she ever would -- Marianna van de Kar.
       Everyone close to her called her Jannie. Like my mother, she was from Amsterdam.
       She was the first of what Mom forever would call her "camp sisters." And, as you will see, she played a critical role in my mother's future.
---
       When she went to Auschwitz, Mom had an older sister, Anna (called Annie). What she didn't know then, what she wouldn't know until much later, was that Annie went to the gas chambers the day she and her husband (Nico Fierlier) arrived at Auschwitz.      
       Mom often said she and the others would not have survived 2 1/2 years in Auschwitz, in the cruel medical-experimentation program, without the support of her "sisters."
       Two other women -- Hilda Meier Kretsenstein (a German native who had married a Dutch citizen) and Trees Suttendorf Van Praag-Cigar (also from Holland) -- were in the group of four who suffered that time together in Block 10.
        The "sisters" group grew to 10 on the horrific "Death March," a couple of months of walking in the middle of nowhere in Poland and then Germany, from one concentration camp to another, in the middle of a typical brutal European winter.
       This, as my mother told it, with rags for clothing, some with shoes but some (such as Mom) with pieces of wood tied to their feet with string, and with less food than clothes.
        How? How did they survive all that?
        "You were really dependent (on others); you couldn't go through that yourself," Mom said in her 1996 Shoah Foundation interview about her life and the Holocaust. "You had to have people close to you. And we took care of each other."
         Through the dire circumstances in Block 10, the women somehow became Holocaust survivors ... and bonded forever. 
         The interviewer asked my mother: "Did you, among yourselves, the four women, talk about this?"
          "Oh, sure," Mom answered. "I always said when you spend almost 2 1/2 years, or over a year and a half, with women 24 hours a day, you know more about them. I spent more time with them than I spent with my own family. We knew everything about each other.
          "We knew everything about each other," she repeated, "and at night when the guards would leave -- and I know this sounds just crazy -- we would sing songs, and since my father taught us all kinds of songs, I knew songs the other women had never heard. And the four of us, we were very, very close."
          But to the very end of their lives, it was Rose and Jannie who were the closest. They each would wind up with their families far from The Netherlands -- Mom in the U.S., Jannie in Israel -- but they always remained in touch.
         There were joyful reunions in Nahariya, Israel, and in Shreveport -- and a 1977 story in The Shreveport Times about that, a subject I will return to in this piece.
          I cannot verify this, but I believe they lived longer than any of the "camp sisters." Mom died June 27, 2010; Jannie died April 26, 2013.
          Kitty Wiener, Jannie's daughter who lives in Israel, told me in a letter that although her mother was having memory issues near the end, "she kept telling what happened to them during the war and how their friendship actually saved their lives. They supported each other and that meant everything to them."
          Kitty added, in another note, "She could never stop talking about her terrible years in Block 10, but she kept talking about Ro as the sister she had during these years."
--- 
          The day in 1942 before they were "arrested" by the Nazis and sent to the Westerbork transition camp in eastern Holland, Jannie married Abraham "Appie" van de Kar -- who had grown up in the same (mostly Jewish) neighborhood as Louis Van Thyn and Rozette Lopes-Dias. (My mother had married Moses "Mo" Lezer in the same time frame; they also were sent to Westerbork.)
          Louis and Appie knew each other. They were in Auschwitz, or nearby camps, at the same time. They met again just after the Russian Army came in to find the prisoners in the camps the Nazis had abandoned in 1945. At one point, both Dad and Appie wore Russian Army uniforms they'd been given.
           Now here is the connection.
           Jannie and Appie, reunited in Amsterdam as survivors, were housed in the same diamond-cutting warehouse turned into barracks for displaced Holocaust survivors. Because they were married, they were given a separate room in the attic. Rose was among the women sleeping on cots on the bottom floor, and men were on the other side of the building.
            Dad had traveled back to Belgium, where he lived from 1936 to '42 and had married Estella (who died during the war), and had seen Appie, who suggested he come to a get-together of survivors.
            And so Jannie knew Rose, Appie knew Louis -- and they were introduced. They had grown up two blocks apart (Dad was two years older), but only knew of each other.
             They began dating, they married, and the marriage lasted a mere 62 years.
             It began because of the van de Kars.
---
             The first day at Auschwitz, Sept. 16, 1943 (Mom knew that date) ...
              "So when I came out of the car, in the car next to me was a woman my age," Mom said in her Shoah Foundation interview. "I had gone to school with her, to kindergarten, elementary school, high school, and then we lost track of each other. She went with another group [of friends] and I went with a group."
             That woman was Jannie.
             "Then when we got out of the cattle cars, she grabbed my hand," Mom said, "and we were waiting with those hundred women and she said, 'I don't know what's going to happen to us, but whatever is going to happen, we are going to stay together.'
          "...  And we walked about 15 minutes and we came to the gate of Auschwitz with the sign, 'Arbeit Macht Frei.' And then we went to the sauna, Block One. We went in there, we had to undress, the SS was in there with us, and they shaved us, our hair everywhere, and they sprayed some disinfectant spray or powder on us, and then they gave us ice-cold showers.
           "And we were really upset. Still didn't register where we were. Ice-cold showers, I mean in the middle of September. No soap, no towels, no nothing. They threw us some clothes. We had no striped clothes. I had, for example, a navy-blue, polka-dot dress which came to my ankles and my friend, my childhood friend who was -- and still is -- a very good-looking woman, 5-foot-10, very tall, had a very short dress. So we changed. And the SS was in there and they were making fun of us, the way we went in and the way we got out."

"Camp sisters" -- that's Rose Van Thyn (bottom left)
 and Jannie van de Kar (top row left)

---
      Here is how close Rose and Jannie were. The number tattooed into my mother's left forearm by the Nazis was 62511. Jannie's number was 62506.
      That fact was in the story done by The Times when Jannie and Appie visited with my parents in Shreveport in 1977. A copy of that story is posted below, and the photo of Mom and Jannie was taken that day by a Times photographer.
      Kitty Wiener provided the group shot of nine of the 10 Dutch "Death March" sisters (right).           
      In her Shoah Foundation interview, Mom said, "I was very close to my sister, but I'm closer with them [the camp sisters] because what we went through, and the bond we had -- all survivors have a bond. I knew their families, although I didn't know them personally, I knew, I knew who they were, I knew where they came from. We are so close.
          "It's like one of the 10 women I was with went back to Holland and moved to South Africa. I had not seen her in 40 years. She came here and it was like I had talked to her the day before. It was like 40 years didn't mean anything. We really picked up right where we left off."
            But the Van Thyns and the van de Kars, that was a special bond.

The infamous Block 10: An unpleasant memory

       There are millions of stories within the big story (the Holocaust), and within the many stories that my mother told, the most gripping part -- in my opinion -- was about the medical experiments.
      Gripping, and another description, disgusting.
      The infamous Block 10 at Auschwitz was where Mom (Rozette Lopes-Dias Lezer) was imprisoned for nearly 2 1/2 years and where the Nazis used women, men and children as medical guinea pigs. 
      Bottom line was this: They tried to sterilize her. They failed. Thankfully. Which is why, after she met my Dad and became Rose Van Thyn, eventually I came into this world and so did my sister Elsa.
      "They told us, the women who were there, how fortunate we were to be in this block, to be used for medical experiments," my mother said in the 1996 interview she did for the USC Shoah Foundation. "And in a way, probably we were fortunate because that saved our lives."
      If you read on from here, be aware. There are a few uncomfortable moments.
---
      In her interview, Mom talks extensively on life in Block 10, where she was known not by name but by the number tattooed on her left forearm (62511). This article will deal only with the medical experiments.
       The most famous -- and I use that word loosely -- doctor to work in Block 10 was Dr. Josef Mengele, known mostly for his obsessive (and maniacal) research and treatment of twins and children. But my mother said she never heard of Mengele then and was not aware of the twins research ... not until well after World War II had ended.
       The name to remember here -- the one she remembered -- is Dr. Carl Clauberg.
       "The Dutch women were used mainly for sterilization experiments and other experiments," Mom told the interviewer. "I had, for example, hundreds of shots in my chest. They didn't tell me what it was and I doubt very much if they knew what it was.
      "I gave a lot of blood for the German soldiers," she continued, "because my veins are right on top of my skin, and they really enjoyed doing that."

      Interviewer: "Who did the experiments?"

      Mom: "Dr. Carl Clauberg. He had done experiments in Raavensbruuck and then he went to Auschwitz and set up this Block 10. ... He had an assistant who in civilian life was a barber. ..."
      From the Jewish Virtual Library:
      "Carl Clauberg experimented with sterilization in the camp. Part of Block No. 10 in the main camp [at Auschwitz] was put at his disposal. Several hundred Jewish women from various countries lived in two large rooms on the second floor of the building.
      "Clauberg developed a method of non-surgical mass sterilization that consisted of introducing into the female reproductive organs a specially prepared chemical irritant that produced severe  inflammation. Within several weeks, the fallopian tubes grew shut and were blocked. Clauberg's experiments killed some of his subjects, and others were put to death so that autopsies could be performed."
---
       Here is my mother's recollection of the methods and the results:
       "The experiments were (pause) ... were terrible," she told the interviewer. "They had a whole laboratory downstairs where they had renschen (?) apparatus, and they would give us internal shots, and they would tell you the night before. They would come up and they would say, '62511, you can't go out on commando tomorrow because you have to be used for experiments.
       "And then they would give you those shots and the doctor would be there, and the assistant would be there, and they would make X-rays, and then they would be upstairs again, and (the shots) were very painful."
       The interviewer asked her: "Did you have to undress when they did the experiments?"
       Mom: "Ya, we undressed from the, uh, bottom, you know."

       Interviewer: "Would you care to describe how the experiments went?"
       Mom: "You were put on a regular operation table, and then they would put the renschen apparatus on top of you and then they would give you a shot internally ... in your vagina."

       Interviewer: "Do you know what the shot was?"

       Mom: "No, never found out. And I still hope that when the Russians got hold of them [the Nazis], that eventually when the wall came down and they found all those records and eventually that they might find out.
       "Now, again, we are very blessed. I'm one of the few women who could have children after the war. And I had the same shots. ... I went with other women at the same time and they couldn't have children.

        "Then we would go upstairs, and no medicine, no nothing. ..."

        Interviewer: "What happened? What did you feel after you ... ?"

        Mom: "Oh, burning, pain. I didn't know then because I'd never had children, but it was like labor pains. Terrible. ...  I had three shots, three shots into ... like I said, most of the women, most of those who came out (of the camp) were sterilized, couldn't have children."

---

       No reason to think that Mom concocted or exaggerated this story. But Dr. Robert Jay Lifton wrote extensively on  Clauberg in his book, The Nazi Doctors, and here is one section (page 273):
       Descriptions by women experimented upon begin to tell us in human terms what Clauberg was really up to: A Czech Jew named Margita Neumann told of being taken into a dark room with a large X-ray machine:
        "Dr. Clauberg ordered me to lie down on the gynecological table and I was able to observe [nurse/main assistant] Sylvia Friedmann [described as Clauberg's top assistant], who was preparing an injection syringe with a long needle. Dr. Clauberg used this needle to give me an injection in my womb. I had the feeling that my stomach would burst with the pain. I began to scream so that I could be heard through the entire block. Dr. Clauberg told me roughly to stop screaming immediately, otherwise I'd be taken back at once to the Birkenau concentration camp. After this I had inflammation of the ovaries."
---       

      The Shoah Foundation interviewer asked my mother: "Why did you keep menstruating?"

      Mom: "I don't know, my body probably was so healthy. I don't know. There were more women who kept menstruating. Not a whole lot ... Two other women were pregnant and gave birth. Same way."

       In addition to these experiments, and the shots she received in her chest ("every four weeks or so, ten at a time; altogether about one hundred shots") and the blood she gave ("I don't know how much ... but a whole lot ... about every five weeks"), there was this ominous threat.

       "They had trucks lined up twice to take [people] to the gas chambers because of sabotage in the block, sabotage in the sewing room," she remembered. "We were put out, outside the block and they would bring trucks. Commandant (Hess) would come in and say, 'Let the rabbits go back in the block." Yes, they knew it was Hess: "We knew him. He came in quite often."

      And so the interviewer asked, what else going on in this block?

      "Strange things," my mother answered. " ... People would disappear and never came back. We didn't know where [they went]. Only thing we could figure they were going to the gas chambers."

 

 

One last glimpse of Abraham

      I thought of my grandfather Abraham last week, and of my mother, as I watched a BBC (British Broadcast Corporation) video tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
      A good friend sent me the link to the video, which was done as part of the recent 70th anniversary of the camp's liberation.
      My mother and father were among those who survived the Holocaust and their time in Auschwitz. My grandfather -- and the rest of my parents' families -- did not survive.
      Tough video to watch, just to see the ruins of the camp -- preserved much the way it was in the early 1940s. One scene was a little extra harrowing.
      When the camera-equipped drone flew over the space (a "courtyard," I think it was called, as if a concentration camp had a courtyard) between Blocks 10 and 11, it brought to mind a story my mother included in her USC Shoah Foundation interview in 1996.
      That space is where she said she last saw her father, where -- as a prisoner in the infamous Block 10 women's medical experimentation block -- she caught a glimpse of him.
      She didn't know, and he didn't know, that soon he would be sent from Auschwitz to Warsaw, Poland, where his life ended.
      "He went to Warsaw and they [the group of men he was with] had to dig ditches," my mother told the Shoah Foundation interviewer. "I heard this after the war from somebody who had come out, who was in the group with him, who had known him before.
      "Then they shot him and they buried him in the ditches."           
---

Mom's family: her father Abraham, her mother Rachel,
older sister Annie -- and Rose (top right)

      In the records of the Dutch Jewish victims of the Holocaust -- the records at the memorial center in Amsterdam, where all my family lived before World War II, Abraham Lopes-Dias is listed as having died on Dec. 31, 1943. He was 50.
      He was married for 25 years to my paternal grandmother, Rachel (our daughter is named in her honor). Her death is listed as Sept. 10, 1943.
      My mother was 22 at the time. Her sister Anna (called Annie), some two years older, died Sept. 30, 1942, sent to the gas chambers not long after arriving at Auschwitz on the cattle-car train.
      Rozette -- Rose, as everyone knew her -- loved her mother and sister. She adored her father. That is clear from her Shoah Foundation interview and the family history she wrote for us.
      "What do you remember about him most?" the interviewer asked Mom.
      "He was wonderful," Mom replied. "I don't think anybody could have had parents like I had. He was so funny. He was well-liked. ... He was the life of [any] party. He knew all kinds of songs, he would perform, he was just an all-around wonderful man."
       In the family history, she wrote, "Both of my parents had a terrific sense of humor; Daddy really could keep an audience."
       They each loved amateur acting, opera and plays.
       About those songs, the songs Abraham taught his daughters ...
       In her Holocaust interview and her talks to groups over the years, Mom often mentioned that in the years at Auschwitz, she would teach -- or try to teach -- her "camp sisters," as she called them, those songs or would sing them for entertainment or to kill the time.
       They were sung in Dutch, of course. When Elsa and I were kids, we got to hear the great majority of those songs ... when we weren't rolling our eyes or trying to escape the room. Mom wasn't a bad singer (like me), but still ...
---
       The oldest of seven children in his family, her father began working, Mom said, "when he was 10 years old, went to school until he was 14; that was required by law. He was a self-taught man, [and] was well-educated. In addition to working hard, he gave bridge lessons, and also learned and taught Esperanto, a language designed to be universal."

       Founded by Dr. L.L. Zamenhof in the late 1880s, Esperanto was popular in Europe, but never became what its founders -- and my grandfather -- hoped it would be.
       "He spoke very well," Mom said of her father. "... He learned the language and taught it to other people, and corresponded with people all over the world. We had people from all over Europe who came and stayed with us. This was one of his great hobbies. ... Esperanto was a language formed by different languages; it had some French, some Polish, some German, a mixture. ... We really didn't have a choice, we had to study it a little bit. But as children, I had enough. I said, 'I don't want to do this.' "

       In the 1930s and early 1940s, leading up to and after the Nazi Germany occupation of The Netherlands, my grandfather was the manager of a company that bought and repaired second-hand burlap sacks.
       And he was very interested in politics and labor unions.
       He was, my mother said, "the non-salaried president of a union of manufacturers in Amsterdam -- the 'Factory Labor Union.' He strongly believed in better working conditions for people and in the 40-hour work week; he worked very hard for that.
       "He could debate for hours with people about his favorite labor party."

       He was, Mom said, "a Social Democrat," a member of the board of that party in Amsterdam. "He and my mother both worked very hard on getting [fair] laws for children working. At that time, children would work when they were [as young as] ages 8 or 9. They helped pushed through a law -- and my father wanted this -- that children could nt work until they were 14, and they wanted to limit work (for everyone) to 40 hours a week.
       "When that passed, that was frosting on the cake for him."

       Interviewer: "Did you understand what they were doing?"

       "Oh, yeah, we were very involved," Mom answered. "We were in youth groups as children, the Social Democrat youth group. First of May, there were big celebrations and we had a big red flag -- Social Democratic party -- by our house, and an Esperanto flag. Everyone knew who my father was by his Esperanto flag."

---
       My grandfather, Mom said, was not a devout Jew.
       "He was not involved in Jewish affairs," she said. "I always said [one of Mom's favorite expressions], as far as that was concerned, he was ahead of his time. He was a reform Jew.
       "Before the war, there was no reform temples in Holland. It was strictly, strictly Orthodox, the men separated from the women ... and he felt hypocritical if he would go to shul and sit there and listen to things he really didn't believe in. Even his father already, he never learned Hebrew. He would go to shul if it was necessary, like for a wedding, or a funeral; he used to kid and said, 'I have a head for funerals and weddings.' "
       That did not matter to the Nazis when the "arrests" began in 1942.
       Abraham continued to work at his job, but Mom said that the company "was taken over ... by the Germans, and they put a Nazi in [charge]." In April 1942, my grandfather "was picked up and sent to a work camp in Holland."
       There is a lot to the story, and Mom details it in her interview. Here's a condensed version:
       My grandmother, with her husband gone, "got very depressed and very scared"; my mother and her sister each married because, with the curfews in place, it was the only way they could see their then-fiances.
       "My husband and my father didn't come home from work," Mom recalled. "We didn't know where they were."
       Abraham was first sent to a labor camp in Holland, then to Westerbork (the "transit" camp the Nazis established in the eastern part of Holland).
       "And then we got a card from him from the labor camp," Mom said. "My husband we didn't know; we never heard from him.

       "Then my sister and my brother-in-law were picked up in July and ... my mother had a nervous breakdown. In August, I was fired [from her sewing job]. All the Jews had to get out."

       Did you hear from your sister and brother-in-law?     

       "Never."

        Do you know if they ever met your husband and your father?
        "I don't know. (softly) I don't know."
---

       But there was a reunion with her father. When my mother and grandmother were picked up and sent to Westerbork, they saw Abraham again.
       "When we came there, the tracks from the train didn't go right to Westerbork, it went outside of Westerbork to what they called Hooft-Haaren, and my father helped lay down the railroad," Mom said. "Now my father had worked for a Jewish company and one of the bosses, who was hidden later, put money in a factory in Westerbork, in a mattress factory, and he put my father in charge of this mattress factory. That's why he could stay. He had a stamp, we were spared."
        One side story: My grandfather knew friends who were working in the underground and who had gotten papers for my parents to leave the city of Groningen, where they were [at one point], to go into hiding." But my mother said Abraham and Rachel did not want to leave their kids, so the plan never developed.
        My mother's parents were sent to Auschwitz on Sept. 7, 1943.
        "My mother went straight to the gas chambers," Mom said, "and my father was picked out with another group of people. ...I saw him because a week later my husband and I went [to Auschwitz]."
        "I was in Block 10," she said. "I don't know if you've ever been to Block 10 ... on the right side was Block 11; that was for punishment. We had shutters [on that side], although we could see on the street and we could hear on the other side."

        The interviewer asked her to explain that.
        "Between the blocks, they had streets, and this Block 11 was the punishment block," Mom  said. "And we could hear the screams and we could see through the holes in the shutters, and we would see killings, shootings, we could hear them scream.
        "On the other side, between the blocks, was a street, and the group my father went with, before they got sent to Warsaw, they were there and we could see out and I saw my father with this group."

        Interviewer: "Did you have a chance to talk to him (her father)?"

        "No, I don't know if he saw me. I saw him, you know."

        With that, she smiled at the thought. Maybe it was a rueful smile, but maybe -- this is the way I like to think of it -- it was a knowing smile, a smile that remembered "a wonderful man." A man named Abraham.