On Lesbos in 2015, Pieter Wittenberg found a bit of happiness again among the Syrian and Eritrean refugees. A few months earlier, his youngest son Joost had died in a traffic accident when he was only nineteen. Everything felt empty since then. Helping others to survive simply by handing out blankets and food – it gave life some meaning again.
Pieter Wittenberg’s two sons, Joost and Niels, already had the right to vote at the age of ten. From that age on, Wittenberg asked them every election which party he should vote for, and followed that advice without any objection. In his opinion, the youth had more right to that vote than he did. “Pieter knew a lot, but especially how to be a committed father,” says his eldest son Niels (31), who will become a father himself for the first time this summer.
Niels calls his father by his first name when he talks about him, as an equal. They also discussed that way. About the meaning of a word, the meaning of life – about everything. Things could get heated, especially because they looked so alike. ‘How can someone who is so the same think so differently from me?’ was what went through his head. Others often interpreted it as arguing, but they enjoyed it.
Someone else always had to help you
Pieter Wittenberg was born in Amsterdam in 1948. He had an older sister and a younger brother. After their parents divorced, two half-sisters were added. His sister Vera Wittenberg was only one year older – two hands on one stomach. “Pieter was always braver than me,” she remembers. Their stepfather took them to a gory movie when she was only nine. “But Pieter, then eight, said: don’t be afraid Vera, that’s just tomato juice.”
According to Vera, compassion was in the family’s DNA. Their father was Jewish and fled from Czechoslovakia to the Netherlands in 1938. During the war, as Vera remembers, he was helped by people around him, including the family of his later wife. That flight history made a deep impression on Pieter. At the same time, he also received strong convictions from his mother’s side. “Our grandfather believed that everyone was equal,” says Vera. “You always had to help someone else.”
Wittenberg worked in the financial sector for most of his life. Dressed in a suit, because he had to, he took his sons to school every day. As soon as he got home from work, he exchanged that suit for a worn-out polo. Banking was actually not for him, thinks his sister Vera, but, as he himself explained: “The world revolves around money, so if you want to change something for humanity, you have to rely on money.”
From left to right: Vera Wittenberg, Dinne van der Vlis, Pieter Wittenberg, mother Erne van der Vlis-Antonisse, Thomas Wittenberg in 1957.
Image family archive
They were both world improvers, Vera thinks, although they had different ideas about how to do that. Vera sought it in politics and protest. “I always thought: you have to be in Brussels,” she says, “because that is where the power is.” But Pieter mainly wanted to help people, which was often only possible one at a time. In it he found his sister Dinne, whose idea it was to go to Lesbos in 2015. Together with his wife Liesbeth, they helped on the island for years, and the three of them founded Showerpower, a safehouse for women and children.
Due to the indictment by the Greek Public Prosecution Service, Wittenberg suddenly became world news in 2018. He and 23 other volunteers from the Greek NGO ERCI on Lesvos were charged with human smuggling. The biggest issue surrounding the ‘criminalization of aid’, every human rights organization wrote – and every newspaper repeated. NGOs in Greece immediately stopped their rescue operations at sea. For fear of persecution, they never resumed those actions.
In the eight years that followed, the indictment dominated Wittenberg’s life. He gave interview after interview to draw attention to what was happening at the European border. He was angry, disappointed in the system. How could helping someone else be a crime? And, more importantly, who saved all the refugees at sea? Those questions kept him endlessly busy, says Liesbeth.
The news could make him silent, gloomy too. Liesbeth sometimes had to slow him down
Wittenberg subscribed to just about every news medium – from Dutch newspapers to The New York Times and Der Spiegel. With the advent of the smartphone, that news went everywhere. It could make him silent, sad too. Liesbeth sometimes had to slow him down. “Not everything needs to be at the table,” she would say, “there is another life.”
In addition to the great sadness for Joost, that other life also had a lot of happiness. They loved traveling and the sea. Wittenberg was a fanatic hobby sailor all his life. They met during a sailing competition to Norway. She was the boarder, he was the skipper. When she was seasick, he took care of her. “I fell in love with that care that so many people later saw on Lesbos,” says Liesbeth.
During his years as skipper at ERCI on Lesbos, he regularly clashed with his much younger manager Athanasios Karakitsos – both stubborn and fierce. “Pieter once took a boat out to sea without consultation to help people. I was angry.” Karakitsos knew more about the Greek coast guard, and how strict it was, “but Pieter, as a seasoned skipper, knew so much more about boats than we did,” says Karakitsos.
Humor until the end
On January 15, 2026, eight years after the indictment, many hearings and delays later, the court on Lesbos acquitted Wittenberg, Karakitsos and the 22 others. Immediately the next day, Wittenberg created a group app, including Karakitsos and Sean Binder, who was also acquitted. ‘Adios court, welcome next steps‘, Wittenberg had called the group. They discussed when lifeboats would be able to go to sea again, and what their role could be in this. Wittenberg knew: I had to start helping again.
A week later he learned that he only had weeks to live.
He kept his humor until the end, says Liesbeth. On one of his last days, sitting on the edge of his bed, the many bouquets of flowers he had received surrounding him, he looked around the room. “There,” he said, “there we are, in the Keukenhof.” And when he woke up after a deep sleep: “You should die rested.”
Pieter Wittenberg died on Friday, March 13 at the age of 78 in his home in Peest, Drenthe.
