On the Tweeboomlaan in Hoorn there are more families who have Jewish people in hiding during the Second World War. Elizabeth van den Berge also urges her husband Abraham to do the same. But living next to an NSB family, he doesn’t think that is a good idea at first.
In the end it will happen and it goes well for a long time. The Jewish couple Nathan and Esther Smit-van Huiden stays with the family. The few weeks old baby Loekie Themans also finds shelter.
The Jewish couple writes a letter to friends in 1944 about how happy they are with the baby and they have something to do. Only that letter is intercepted by the Germans. Not much later they are at the door of the Tweeboomlaan 74. Abraham is arrested and the people in hiding are also removed.
‘Bring the baby to safety, your husband will not come back’
“They told my grandmother that they would come back for the baby a day later,” explains granddaughter Yolanda van den Berge. “My grandmother then went to the resistance. There she was told that she could better bring the baby to safety and that she would not see her husband again.”