Friday, July 24, 2026

Looks mattered.

"In the early days of my time in Vaassen, my mother would visit the Van Deelen family once a month. That's how I knew she was alive, loved me, and under the circumstances was doing reasonably well. She didn't look Jewish, so she was able to move about with relative ease. Much later I found out that Mother had a false identity card even with a name vaguely resembling her own."

"At school, no one except the principal knew my true identity. That was very much to my advantage because the son of the leader of the local NSB -- the Dutch Nazi party -- was in my class.

I used to bike to school. There was a checkpoint along the way, where the police occasionally asked to see my ID, but --as it lacked the necessary J-- it always went quite smoothly. Whenever necessary, I'd tell them I was Mr. Van Beek's nephew."

"During my years underground, I couldn't be seen naked -- not in front of the boys and certainly not in front of any girls! Swimming would have been a problem, too, were it not for the fact that the farmer had been good enough to add real changing stalls to his homemade swimming pool."

"In the late summer of 1944, shortly after the Allies had been defeated at the Dutch town of Arnhem, My mother came to live with the van Beeks as well. Around the same time, the school next to our house was confiscated by a company of Dutch volunteers in the Waffen-SS. It soon became clear that we hadn't merely acquired a group of SS soldiers as neighbors but that some of them were also moving in with us."

"I was forced to address my mother as 'aunt.' I didn't even think of it as a problem: I simply did it. I had to if I was to survive."

" I never once saw my father. He had gone underground in the small town of Hattem. He looked more Jewish than either my mother or me, and so for him, it was better never to be seen at all. He was forced to be 'cellular' as we used to call it then: locked up inside his house."

Page 32 - 36 

"We All Wore Stars: Memories of Anne Frank from Her Classmates by Theo Coster"| Goodreads

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11450811-we-all-wore-stars

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