UvA students saved hundreds of Jewish children in World War II
Acting as if it were their own babies in the prams or simply taking children by the hand: Amsterdam students smuggled hundreds of Jewish children to hiding addresses. Researcher Anna Boogaard is writing a book about the women who resisted the Nazi-regime.
Only a few seconds UvA student history Hanna van Loghem has to rescue the baby from the Jewish nursery in 1943. With the baby pressed to her chest, she sprints from the kindergarten to tram line 8. The stationary tram keeps her out of sight of the German guards for that one moment. When the very busy tram starts moving, Hannah has to run along in the shelter of the vehicle, for her life and that of the Jewish baby.
Hannah is one of nine female students featured in the book that UvA researcher and modern history lecturer Anna Boogaard will release next November. The UvA students managed to get hundreds of Jewish people, mainly children, into hiding during World War II. “The Germans simply often did not think of women as members of the resistance,” Boogaard explains the contribution of what she believes to be underexposed: the women in the resistance.
Resistance plan
The female students were needed to implement the resistance plan of German-Jewish Walter Süskind, director of the kindergarten Henriëtte Pimentel and law student Piet Meerburg. In 1943, resistance member Meerburg, Hannah’s fiancée, made contact with Süskind, director of the Hollandsche Schouwburg in Amsterdam. Jewish people were gathered at the theatre before being taken - unaware of their gruesome fate - by tram line 8 and then on the train to concentration camps.
The resistance work was as follows: Süskind convinced desperate parents to put the fate of their children in the hands of Meerburg and other students, who would smuggle them to hiding addresses. Süskind and an associate secretly ensured that the children’s identity cards disappeared from the archives so that their disappearance would not be noticed in the German administration. The theatre’s guards were happy to see the noisy children leave temporarily for the kindergarten opposite, whose Jewish staff helped with the smuggling.
Over the hedge
From the kindergarten, the work of the female students began. The children were hoisted over the hedge of the neighbouring nursery school by the kindergarten workers, put into the milkman’s burlap sacks, and on walks through the neighbourhood, often someone would suddenly ‘lose’ a child. “The women would then put the children in prams or hold them by their hands, as if they were their own children,” says Boogaard, “Something the men - who never went out alone with children in those days – couldn’t do.”
Those children then had to go as quickly as possible to hiding addresses that UvA student Meerburg and his study friends, but often the women themselves, had found. Boogaard: “That was enormously dangerous work. Just once the little kids didn’t have to listen to their fake non-Jewish name or start calling for their real mum and the students would get caught.” This put the female students in particular at real risk of discovery, which could easily lead to their execution by the occupying forces. “Hannah, for example, travelled with several Jewish children all the way to Tienray in Limburg.”
One of those probably smuggled out of the nursery was Jewish Rachel Sluijs (82). She was less than nine months old when her mother handed her over in 1943. “I was told I was hidden in a backpack as a baby. Students then took me to a hiding address in Nieuwegein near Utrecht,” she says now. Whether that was done by Hannah or one of her friends, for example, no one knows.
No memories
Rachel’s parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews were all killed during the war. She later found one great-aunt and one great-uncle. “That was all the women with whom I was placed knew, she told me. There was a student at her doorstep on the day with me in her arm, she told, and that was it.” Little Rachel found shelter with a childless non-Jewish woman who already had three Jewish children in the house. Her husband had therefore divorced her, though he never told her about his ex-wife’s dangerous activities. “We were presented as children of fictional relatives who would have perished in the Rotterdam bombing.”
Rachel Sluijs never had any memories or emotions about that student smuggling operation or the period with her foster mother. “I suppressed everything. I have been depressed almost all my life. I can only talk about those traumas with distance.”
After the war, no one wanted to look back at the unprecedented grief. “None of my family came back from the war. And I was not allowed to stay with my foster mother because she was a divorced woman.” When her foster sister returned to their new foster family one day, Rachel, now three, was no longer there. “Through children’s homes, I was placed with a Jewish foster family in Amsterdam. There I had a good childhood, but the war was not talked about.” What her parents looked like, what their characters were like or whether she resembled her grandfather or grandmother, Rachel Sluijs has never been able to know. Nor is she necessarily grateful for her rescue by the students. “Should you be grateful if you were not murdered like the rest of your family?” So she also did not seek contact with the students who brought her to Nieuwegein as a baby, if she had known exactly who they were.
Kriterion
After the war, those resistance students jointly founded the still-existing cinema Kriterion. Anna Boogaard, who was director of the cinema in 2020: “There was little talk there about the courageous work of the female students. Hannah refused any awards. Meerburg sporadically mentioned “the girls” in interviews.
Hannah, the other UvA students and the other members of the resistance around the Amsterdam child smuggling operation managed to save at least five hundred children during the war. Survivor Rachel Sluijs found her love with whom she still spends her days. “And we have three beautiful children and a whole bunch of sweet grandchildren.” The former hider stresses that the people who let her go into hiding were “incredibly brave”. Yet she has never been able to be truly happy that she was saved from the Holocaust, partly because of the students. “Oh, if only I had been spared all this misery.”
