Salomon Levie Woudstra
Sabotage actions were carried out in Enschede in the summer of 1941; 51-year-old Salomon Levie Woudstra was one of 105 people arrested in a raid on September 14. A cop who comes to the door gives him an hour to pack his suitcase and maybe Sal should have tried to run, but he goes along. In the gymnasium of a school on Beltstraat, the men wait to see what will happen. Sal starts writing on pieces of paper to his wife Netty and their children Hanny and Ben. “We will most likely stay here for a few days.” He is hopeful and thinks he will be home again soon. He expects to be able to have a note delivered and still have contact, but that turns out not to be the case. However, his family can still drop off some things for him.
Sal begins to worry about what will happen to him and gives his wife advice on how to handle financial matters at home. He doesn’t know how he can send the notes he writes, he still writes. “And now my darling, a final greeting before I leave.” He has to be transported on September 16. Sal has somehow found an envelope for his notes, and he throws it off the train. Sal Woudstra ended up in Mauthausen and was murdered there on September 25, 1941. Netty Woudstra-Mainzer, Hanny and Ben survive the war in hiding.
Jo Benjamins
It is December 1942 when Jo Benjamins throws a postcard from the train intended for family from Woudrichem, probably his niece Lena Waterman-Benjamins and her husband Simon. They were forcibly moved to Amsterdam’s Transvaalbuurt. It is a Friday when he writes, the transport is going to Auschwitz. The Monday before, he writes, his brother had already passed on. The parents also went on transport that day. In short, in that incorrigibly optimistic tone that can be found in so many cards, Jo continues: “Everything was fine. Your father was fine. We have nice weather.”
Then he returns to the order of the day. That’s all well and good, but they can’t just leave things alone. “Write to Jan and […] in Workum [Woudrichem] whether he wants to drain the toilets and water pipes. Also the tap in the back room behind the stove, then he will know what I mean. Greetings from all of us and take heart that we will see you again soon.” Benjamins was 42 years old.
Willy Tal
Willy Tal worked as a student nurse in the Jewish psychiatric hospital Het Apeldoornsche Bos, where he joined on April 28, 1942. In January, the Germans evacuated the institution and deported the patients to Auschwitz. Things were brutal during the night of January 21 to 22. According to eyewitnesses, patients were thrown into trucks, layer upon layer. “It was so terrible, that banging, that moaning and fussing from those people, that was terrible,” said an eyewitness, quoted by Dirk Mulder in Extraordinary transports. The trucks drove to the station where the patients were thrown into boxcars. The staff, who eventually became entirely Jewish, had to move on to Westerbork. On the way there, Willy Tal throws a postcard from the train, addressed to his family in Amsterdam. The postmark on the postcard is ……. N (possibly Apeldoorn) 22 I 1943
Friday
So far all good. On the way to Westerbork. I will write in more detail.
Dear gr sl
Willie
Inquire with Alfred
Lotje knows more and she will give her something.
As you know, Aad is just working with the patients…
Absolute end of the patient
Terrible scenes… ….
in patient transport. Indescribable We had to load them as b…
I was with 5 other brothers at…
Hello Willy Tal
Tal is in Westerbork for a short time, but has to join the transport on February 2, 1943 to Auschwitz, where he is murdered on February 24.
Lini Snoek
Branco Engeline ‘Lini’ Snoek from The Hague happily sat on the train in August 1942, writing postcards to her sister. She throws it outside. When she left she met acquaintances and on the way to Westerbork she occasionally sees ‘customers’, whom she knows from her shop in Weimarstraat. The train goes to Almelo and Lini is shocked when she thinks that everyone has to go to Germany straight away, as she writes on the next card to Emmy, the nickname of her sister Hermine. She sends five in total.
To her relief, the train now first goes via Coevorden to Westerbork. Lini has gotten an impression of what the mood is like among her fellow travelers and writes: “Everyone here has confidence that they will come back.” In Westerbork, passengers do not have much time to recover. The train arrives in Hooghalen and from there everyone has to walk four kilometers to the registration in the camp. They then walk all the way back to Hooghalen station to board the next train. Destination: Auschwitz. “Would I also see customers there”she asks herself on the fifth card she sends. It turns out to be her last sign of life, because Lini Snoek is murdered immediately after arriving in Auschwitz on August 24.
Anna van Dal
Anna van Dal, wife of Salomon Israel, together with her husband and daughter Esther ‘Elly’ Israel, throws a note from the train on its way to Sobibor on July 6, 1943. The note is to her father, Samuel van Dal.
The Israel family lived in Rotterdam at Zocherstraat 22-I and stayed in camp Vught. Salomon had to go there in February and was put to work in the Moerdijk satellite camp. His wife and daughter followed in May.
Dear father and grandfather,
We are sitting here in wagon 38 like herring in a barrel, but with a nice team of young people everything goes smoothly. Don’t worry about it because we are in good spirits. Say hello to everyone you know. I have asked your barrack leader if he will take good care of you. Father, I hope you can come home soon. And if you are ready, you can make an effort to reclaim us. I prescribe [de] certainty of our date of birth.
S. Israel Born 5-12-1902
Anna Israel v. Dal 11-3-1908
Esther Israel 12-5-27
Kissed a thousand times for you from your dear children Ans El and Sam
Cheer up
Annie S. v. Dal
Sam Ellie Barak 66
Oct 2, 1882
Goodbye
Samuel van Dal, who has been in Westerbork since November 1942, had already been trying to obtain an exemption for five months because of his mixed-marriage status. Ultimately, he managed to get that recognition in August and was ‘fired’ from Westerbork.
His daughter and her family are murdered the same day upon arrival in Sobibor.
Ben Cahen
Bob Cahen must have been an enterprising and inventive person. With only a first aid diploma from the Boy Scouts, he managed to get a job as a nurse in Camp Westerbork, which he had for almost a year and a half. In that position, he often had to walk behind “the Jewish chief physician Dr. Spanier” just before a departing transport “with a suitcase of medicines,” he said later. Someone who was “hysterical with fear about the impending departure” had to be able to quickly receive a sedative injection. In a letter sent from the camp in November 1942, Cahen talks about the conditions in the Drenthe transit camp. How it is sometimes overcrowded and unliveable. That deportees have to be transported – whether they are healthy or needy and sick. He also tells of someone who cut his own neck, was saved and after recovery simply had to board a train to “hell in Poland.” There was no real knowledge about this, but something was still wrong.
It gave Cahen an idea. After a few months of watching trains come and go, Cahen noticed that the same wagons were always going back and forth to the camps in Central Europe. In consultation with a few acquaintances, he asked deportees to keep a travel log and hide it in an air vent after arriving at their destination. That worked and several travel reports were returned. As unique and valuable as the trip reports are, unfortunately they contain little useful information about the destination, as the reporters had to stop writing and quickly hide their notes before getting out.
On January 18, 1944, Cahen himself was transported. Voluntarily, because his mother, Jeanette Susanna de Vries, has been selected to go to Theresienstadt and Cahen does not have the heart to let her leave alone. Together they write a postcard to Bob’s sister Nan and her husband Joop, who, witnessing the postmark, throw them off the train at Sappemeer. “We go with a lot of acquaintances. Mom is strong.”writes Bob. And mom writes: “God bless you and see you soon.” Mom is murdered in Auschwitz in July 1944, Bob returns and will be 81 years old.
