The Story

Three sisters, 1935–1939

Once long ago and far away there were three sisters, daughters of a soda factory owner in Holland. Two of them married well. Ella married a doctor and Berthy (Bertha Davida), a professor and both had families. The third rebelled against the bourgeois middle class life and damp climate and moved to Tel Aviv to help with the labor movement. Perhaps it was not as glamorous as she thought for when a distant older cousin, Derek, a traveling salesman, she had never met before visited her in Israel to deliver a package from another family member, she fell in love, returned to Holland and married in July, 1935 and my father was born in April, 1936. She wanted to quickly have a family like her sisters, her friend saying she was hoping for twins.

Derek traveled to Germany and saw what was happening. He had also traveled to California. Caroline, never that fond of Holland was not too hard to convince to move to sunny California and both of them convinced their parents to join them. Ella and Berthy would not move. Ella’s husband, the doctor felt that he had a duty to stay and serve his community as a doctor if war was coming. Perhaps it would have been too difficult for Berthy’s husband, a professor in the provincial capital Leeuwarden, to reestablish his career if he moved.

Occupation, 1940–1942

Hitler invaded Holland in 1940. Life became increasingly hard. The first deportations started in Leeuwarden in April 1942. On July 20th, 1942 Berthy gave her youngest son, David Jan to the nurse to take and hide and she and her husband killed themselves and their 4 children, Pauline, Esther, Hanna and Abraham ages 13, 11, 7 and 5. In August mass deportations from Leeuwarden began and almost all of those deported perished in concentration camps.

Hiding, 1942–1945

When Ella heard of her sister’s and family's suicide she made the decision to send her family into hiding. The parents, the 11 year old daughter, Leny, and the 9 year old son Hans were each hidden separately. The parents and daughter survived but Hans was betrayed. A request to the International Tracing Service (ITS) collection held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum yielded the following:

“According to the documents, Hans Fritz Cohen was residing at Keizerstr. 5 and Boedekerstr. 7 at Deventer. He was deported to Westerbork Collection Camp on September 23, 1943. On February 8, 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz where he was murdered immediately after the transport arrived on February 11, 1944.”

Hans was born on Sept 14th, 1932 so he was 11 when he died.

After the war

Leny moved to California, married and had children. She has recorded a number of accounts of her time as a hidden child, including a 1998 video testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation, and is active in the peace movement. In 2020 she spoke to Girl Scouts about her experience (Davis Enterprise).

Ella, Leny’s mother survived the war, but never recovered from losing her son and the other traumas and committed suicide in 1951.

Caroline, my grandmother, lived with the survivor guilt. She divorced her husband around 1950 and died of cancer in 1959. Accounts from the family were not of a happy person and her children suffered for it.

David Jan

The baby, David Jan, survived in hiding with his nurse. After the war they went to Canada and then to the US where he joined my father and his two brothers and was raised by Caroline. When DJ was 21 years old he set off to take a trip to Holland. He was killed by a train in NY before he reached Holland. My father Philip writes the following:

“He [David Jan] was at an Amtrak station in Westchester Co. NY where there were four passenger train tracks, 2 each northbound and southbound. He crossed one track behind a train which had just left the station and was hit by a train on the second track. He was apparently killed instantly. The police called it an accident, of course. No one will ever know what was in his mind. He was scheduled to go to Holland, including Leeuwarden, for the first time since he had come to the US after the war. There he would see that his parents and siblings all died on the same day. Did he already know that his parents had killed all his sibling and then committed suicide? Did he suspect something? If his death was a suicide, no one can known whether it related to his family or to something else.”

My family always had kind things to say of DJ and I think his death was very hard on my father. In my research I found the letter he wrote for conscientious objector status for the draft board. Here is an excerpt:

“In War the force of Love, does not prevail. It destroys the potential to Love. A tragedy is that is so often stems from the desire to preserve something such as an ideal. But war can not do this. Recognizing that war—any act which reduces or destroys the capacity to Love—is destructive of something divine in man, I would, by participating in any manner, be destroying something in others and in myself, which I hold as sacred.”

The story continues on Shamanic Journey.