A few years ago, Jan Bardoul spoke at the Remembrance Day in Heerlen about the far too short life of a 5-year-old Jewish boy. Bardoul had come across his name during his archival research and had succeeded in reconstructing that life.
Pauline Bardoul can well remember how much of an impression that made on those present. All the qualities of her father came together in it. Few could find their way through archives so well and few were so able to bring paper to life.
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It is thanks to Jan Bardoul that that boy and 69 other Jewish victims of the Second World War will never be forgotten. He retrieved all their data on behalf of the Lodewijk Foijer foundation. This resulted in seventy memorials, so-called Stolpersteine, in Heerlen and Hoensbroek.
The first Stolperstein, ‘stumbling stone’ in translation, appeared in the Dutch streets in 2007. The German artist Gunter Demnig had started this work ten years earlier in Berlin as a reminder of the Holocaust. The paving stones, on which personal data have been added, are laid in front of the victims’ last home.
It is painstaking work to find all that data and then verify it. That was confided to Jan Bardoul. ‘It sometimes made us criminals,’ says Leo Niessen, then the chairman of the Lodewijk Foijer foundation. ‘Then everything seemed to be in order and then Jan came up with something again.’
Nobody really knows how Jan Bardoul, who died on August 5, became so involved in the fate of his Jewish fellow citizens. But the German occupation had made a great impression on him. Pauline: ‘He often talked about it.’ That he was walking down the street with his eldest sister, that suddenly the air-raid siren went off and that they had to find a safe place.
In the end, his entire family would survive World War II, which is quite a bit for a family with a total of ten children. Fortunately, because Jan Bardoul was above all a huge family man. He kept in close contact with all his sisters and brothers, however far out in the world. ‘And he has also passed on that family feeling to us,’ says Pauline Bardoul.
She cherishes the memory of the close relationship her father had with her oldest grandchild. “It was so nice to see how fond the two of them were.” Niessen remembers Bardoul’s regular card night with his brother and sister-in-law. ‘We could always harass Jan, but not on Thursday evening.’
Before Jan Bardoul put all his energy into the fate of Jewish war victims, he was a traffic sheriff. It had gone like this: Initially Bardoul stood in front of the class as an English teacher, but that was at a time when there was a teacher surplus rather than a shortage. That is why Jan Bardoul decided to attach a law degree to it.
After completion, this, in combination with his predilection for cars (Pauline: ‘Beautiful cars’), led to his appointment as traffic bailiff. That is a no longer existing position at the Public Prosecution Service, at the time intended to relieve the public prosecutor.
Traffic bailiff Bardoul took his position extremely seriously. The police could always call him, because he wanted to know about violations and crimes on the spot. The result was that Jan Bardoul avoided the bicycle. He thought cycling was dangerous.