A pocket watch is a small time machine. Such a timepiece has recently surfaced, after being hidden in the wooden casing of a tail clock for nearly eighty years. In memoriam: two Jewish brothers, Alfred and Louis Overslagen from Rotterdam, both victims of Nazi violence.
Pieter Janssens, from the Flemish Brabant village of Molenstede, is the honest finder of the pocket watch. Last winter he was cleaning up things from his father, who passed away two years ago. He heard something rattle in an old clock. He opened the timepiece and found a silver bell with the inscription on the back: ‘AA Overslagen, á son frère Louis.’
Oh yes, the pocket watch. It brought up a story in Janssens that was doing the rounds in his family. Three German soldiers had been billeted on the farm of his grandfather, Gustave, in 1943-44. They slept in a shed, their toilet was in an adjacent field. One day Grandpa Janssens had found a pocket watch there, among the dung. No doubt it had fallen from the pocket of one of the soldiers. The text on the back made him smell danger: this must have been stolen property, which he did not want to return to the suspected thief. He hid it inside a clock.
Pieter Janssens had sometimes heard from his father that he would like to return the pocket watch to descendants of the Overslagen family. But yes – how do you find it? Those were the years before the internet.
And then, last February, the clockwork episode picked up speed. The keywords ‘Louis Overslagen’ yielded a link to the site Jewisherfgoedrotterdam.nl, which tells a story about the fate of watchmaker Alfred and clock trader Louis Over present, once located at 223 Hoogstraat in Rotterdam. The bombing of 14 May 1940 left their shop and workshop untouched. Both brothers died in German camps: Alfred on January 21, 1943 in Auschwitz, Louis around March 31, 1944 in an unknown place in Central Europe.
Historian Rob Snijders, author and administrator of the site, received an e-mail from Flanders. Whether more was known about this Overslagen family? Not directly. But a call from Snijders via Twitter and Facebook was successful: within 24 hours he received a message about a trail that led to a grandson and two granddaughters of Alfred Overslagen. Their mother Louise, daughter of Alfred, had survived the war.
On Saturday 9 April, Pieter Janssens handed over the timepiece to the three grandchildren of Alfred Overslagen, during an emotional meeting in Rotterdam. There it turned out that the pocket watch, 112 years old, is still running.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 9, 2022