Before the war there were about 110,0 or 120,000 Jews in all of Holland.

Doesn't sound like a lot, but it was the same 2 percent or so that seems to be in most democracies today, or Western countries.

There was certainly anti-Semitism.

My father spoke about some he even got his throat almost slit by people didn't carry weapons.

The attacker just had a dime that he had sharpe even though were totally integrated as Dutch people.

My family had been there for several hundred years.

They were Dutch.

They were Jewish, but they were Dutch.

And they didn't see themselves in in that much of a separate way, if you will.

Both parents were came from kind of traditional families.

Both families kept kosher.

My mother's family was more traditional, more religious, But they went to regular public schools.

They went to synagogue every Shabbat, or Saturday.

My grandfather, my maternal grandfather had wanted to be a cantor but was pushed into An d what in those days it was a I don't know what.

He had to be in business.

I don't know that they had a f because he ultimately became a yeah, they had a business that went eventually bankrupt.

And he became a representative for clothing manufacturers.

So he traveled quite a bit.

My grandmother was a housewife.

She had wanted desperately to be educated, but I think she had to leave school after sixth grade and was bitter about it, I think beca you know, all that usual story in so many, you know, in that era in many parts of the world And so she was a housewife, ultimately.

My mother was the oldest, and she had a brother who I'm named after.

I carry his name, Bert.

He was born Ibertus, but nobody called him that.

He was called Bert.

Bert Magnus.

He was only a year or 14 months younger than my mother.

And then 12 years later, there was my aunt, Sary, Sary, who survived the war.

And I went to visi She's 94 now.

My father's family was the father was quite traditional.

But the mother, my grandmother, wasn't so tradit And I think she kept messing wobbly and maybe got abandoned eventually.

My father was a skeptic, and since he was allowed to ride his bicycle to work on Shabbat mornings, he could see no reason why he couldn't ride it in the afternoons to go in the other direction to go play with his friends.

I think he went to synagogue as little as he could.

Life was centered around the Jewish world, but not in business and not in their I think it was the social life really that was center.

You know, there's We seek our own.

But life as as my parents described it, But as you picked it up from incidences and reminiscence and this and this kind of thing, was very happy.

They went out.

They they were quite successful.

They were middle class, not wealthy, but middle class.

And their social life was was Jewish, but the business was not.

Whereas there'd been talk about the wa coming to Holland, somehow, and this my father really brings up later when he tells his stories about, you know, about about being in hiding later, is that if it ever happened, that he saw it coming.

But you didn't want to leave your home.

You didn't want to leave your business.

You didn't know the language elsewhere.

You saw the pictures and the movies of the brea and you didn't want to be part of that.

And so you just sort of ho And of course, it didn't go away.

And in spite of the Dutch attempt to resist by breaking the dikes and flooding it, it took them only three days to overrun the country.

We were no match for them.

And that in many ways sort of structured our occupation also.

There it depends now, of where But from, you know, the Jewish people, from everybody's point of view, it would blow over eventually.

They you know, you don't anticipate a war being five years, which is what it was.

And at first, of course, everybody expects things to, you know, you know, it gets kind of harsh and people expected to just survive it, you know, and to just duck and toughen it out.

And the Dutch were Th ey weren't complainers.

But a number of things happened.

And a fairly large section of people became part of the fifth column, which is the Nazi sympathizers.

NSBers we called them, Nazi yeah, sympathizer, even in English.

They side with the enemy, thinking, they'll bring order to the country, or, maybe it'll be better, or, I at least want to be on the winning side of things, or, I want to, you know, And so you had those people either for self-preservation or philosophical reasons.

Things began to be forbidden.

Different things.

I can't recall all offha but things like Jews can't ride buses.

Jews can no longer own bicycles.

Actually, nobody could.

The Germans wanted anything they could get their hands on they took eventually.

More and more on, so that eventually, you know, a lot of people lost a But then Jews couldn't go out after dark.

And then Jews couldn't and then Jews couldn't and then Jews couldn't, you know, wo And it became, of course, a total catch 22 eventually.

And then the inevitable started to happen.

The men by the age between the ages of 16 and 55 or 60, I'm not sure, were rounded up and collected.

And people ask in this country, what do you mean, rounded up?

You saw some of it in the Ukraine in current days.

A country can do thi Holland was very, very organized.

Everybody was registered.

Everybody had their name, not only in the ci but even in the synagogue records.

You had to, you know, you just and those people were forced to hand those over and watch their families get shot.

I mean, people ask, well, le aders of the community cooperate?

Well, I often say, what would you do to have your children and your wife carted off or to hand over a list?

And so and so it went.

And so my parents were engaged in They hadn't planned to marry yet, but my father turned to my mother and before they forbid people getting married, let's get ma so we'll be a couple.

And so they got married My father often kidded years later that the day celebrates its independence is the day he lost his.

He really never lost his rather dry, droll sense of humor over the years.

Bu In any case.

So they got married and they still, the rabbi said to my father, no, don't just do a civil ceremony.

This is the only time in your life your wife gets to be a bride.

Let her wear a wedding d And so she did.

And they So that was the beginning of the war.

And somewhere during the war, fairly early, my father ran into a man called Egbert Star.

He was what we call, a Righteous Gentile.

He truly, I don't believe he'd ever been married, certainly had no children.

And he was what you'd call a do-gooder.

He liked to help people.

He was very reli very active in his church, helped men who had alcohol problems, gave them money.

Just that's who he was.

He spotted my father on the street and And I know I want to help somebody.

It's terribl Do you know anybody An d my father kind of blew him off at that And how did he know he was Jewish?

That's part of, I think, the I don't know how they knew they were Jewish, I don't know.

How do you know when somebody is Mexican?

How do you know when somebody is mayb It's sometimes it's coloring, sometimes it's hair, sometimes it's just the from the day they were born until the day they were married.

And then sometimes after.

The homes were close togethe It was a very tight-knit community.

And Holla which gets to the rest of what My parents begin to realize how serious and dangerous this is.

We did not have concentration camps in Holland.

I don't believe there were any in any of the Western European countries.

Not in Holland, not in Belgium, Luxembourg, or in France.

The Germans wisely chose not to do it there.

They had them all further east.

Germany and Poland and Russia and so on.

And my father was not in a concentration camp, because there weren't any.

He was in a sort of a pre-coll where they were told they had to work.

And they dug ditches for defense they tried to make themselves good workers so that they could cooperate and yo But the men running the camp, the commandants, were the Germans.

But there were guards tha and they were given alcohol freely by the Germans to do some of the nastier work because there was some nasty stuff there, t And they would say, they would become quite loose-lipped when they were drunk and say things, well, you're all going to go be shipped east anyway, etcetera.

Life can be very strange.

These Germans, who were very me and had all these crazy rules, here they had this group of men, and they were all men in these who were scheduled to be sent on on transports to the East to whatever, mostly extermination, but working at first.

If you had a medical p you could go to the doctor.

And if the doctor you could get permission to leave the camp and promise to come back to get the yes, right.

Crazy.

In any case.

So my father wrote my mother and said, what are the symptoms for a deviated septum needing an operation?

Because he had one.

And she wrote back quickly and, because ap from this I gather, because again I didn't experience this.

and so he goes and he, I remember him saying, and when you're that scared and when your life's at stake, I did have a headache.

And I did have sweats.

A And he went to see the doctor, who crazy enough was a Jewish doctor, who had no question what my father was all about and what he was trying to do.

so he wrote the little note and said, Herman Goslinski needs a nose operation that should take 3 to 5 da And my father took the note dutifully to the commandant of the work camp.

And my father got permission to go get his nose operated and then report back.

Well, I think probably I that he did not get his nose operated.

He just got out of the camp and then went back home.

Bert was probably 23 at that point.

And Bert was a salesman for his uncle's store, and he was going to get some winter clothes for the business or for whatever it was, exactly.

And he got on the train from which is all of 27 kilometers.

But, you know, it was a big distance and you didn't wal And he got lured probably into a conversation by a fifth-column Dutchman, an NSBer.

And they began to talk politics and my father freely I mean, my I don't mean my father.

I mean Bert, my uncle represent, you know, and with me.

In any case, he expressed his view that he hated Hitler and the Nazis.

And when he got off the train, this Dutch man followed him, saw where he went, then ran back to the police station, reported that there was an anti-Nazi Jew at so-and-so address.

And my within an hour and a half, my uncle was picked up and jailed in Assen.

He was transported for all of one day to Groningen.

But my parents never learned of that.

So they never got to see him or nor his parents, you know, his And he was then escorted to the border by the commandant himself, which is a bit ironic, because they knew that he was gone.

My mother, who was very pregnant with me at that point, would go visit the commandant to get news about her b And that is where another thread of the story comes in.

They had a little apartment, you know, as newlyweds?

And And he gave her a written permission to move from her apartment to her parental home because he could use that apartment for his girlfriend.

He was a married man, but he could use it for his Dutch girlfriend.

And besides which, my moth need it anymore when they went east.

And my mother and, in her rather outspoken way, said, we're not going east.

And he said, oh, yeah, Frau Goslinksi, you're going east.

And so is everybod So between what my fa there wasn't a whole lot of hope left in my parents.

And then about three months before I was born, they actually, in one of those visits, got Bert's effects.

The week before or two weeks before they'd gotten still a postcard that said, I'm fine, no problems, I'm healthy.

And then the entry in the books and that the commandant told my mother is, he died of natural causes, which is rather unlikely.

And so that's sort of where our story was at that point.

I'm born.

My father's gotten out of camp.

The signs in our family are pretty straight, and my father is telling those he knows, we've got to find a place to hide.

My grandparents actually find a place to hide.

My father and my mother and I, at this point, are living in the house on Kraneweg, where I visited as a child and where my mother lived.

She wasn't born there, but she lived there from the time she was four.

And my grandparents lived there an d still lived there after the war.

Like I said, you know, we didn't move much.

It wasn't a real mobile society in that way.

And my father, and I'm not sure again in the neighborhood.

The guy lived only a block-and-a-half aw my grandparents lived.

And he sees my father again, who I don't know how he sees him, because Jews and he's already been warned not to go back to the house because there's going to be a razzie, a razzia that night.

They would cordon off a block in the neighborhood, and they wou starting at about midnight to about 2:00 in the morning.

And when I talk to the children, I say, can you tell me why they would do it at that time?

And it's pretty obvi at 12 or 2.

Between that time in the morning, people are sleeping.

And if the d get opened quickly enough, they yo u know, for communists and for Jews.

But especially young men still at that point.

They were not collecting all the families yet.

That happens later.

And so righ and Bert has died, and my father can't stay at the house, and my grandparents have found a place to stay, he runs in, my father runs into Mr. Star again.

And Mr. Star sa I haven' My father says, do we need help.

And he says, let me take you in.

I'll hide you.

And there's a hitch.

And the hitch is this three-month-old baby, because Mr. Star lives in an apartment building.

And there's an apartment above, below, and on the left, and on the right.

And what are you going to do with a baby in hid So my parents had been given the name of somebody.

Because word did get around.

There was besides an NSB movement, there was an under You don't call it underground.

You call it a resistan And the re They didn't have bombs.

But it was it was in the bigger stuff, sabotaging the railroad a little bit, maybe setting fire to a police station, creating false identity papers, creating false papers for food coupons because food was becoming a shortage.

So you had to have coupons for the amount of people in your ho which made hiding people not exactly simple either.

And so this underground, this resistance had contacted my parents and said, we have somebody who'll take your baby.

So my father went to g check on the people who sa And the woman said, oh, there's the Goslinski baby.

But the husband says, well, I understand it's illegal to hide a Jewish I want to go ask permission first.

Yeah.

as quickly as he can, so he won't be f And then just at the last minute, really, another word comes that there is somebody who will take this child.

And if they will put with as many fresh clothes as they can and diap and to please put a note on me in handwriting.

And that note should say, ik ben Klaasje Van der Velde.

Mijn moeder is verlaten, kun jij voor mij zorgen?

Roughly translated, I am Christina van de Velde, My mother has been abandoned.

Can you take care of me?

The implication being that I was the child of an unwed mother, probably, and I needed care.

Everything was done as clandestinely who were risking their lives to try to save these Jews.

And it's, you know, it gives me chills even when I say it.

I often think, who of us would have the courage to risk our families and our lives to save someone And it's because of people like that that I'm alive.

My parents weren't to know where I was And because if they were caught or those people were cau then maybe the baby wouldn't be caught.

They put these safety valve My father and mother are now safe in this apartment for the time being, and it's not terribly safe because Mr. Star has a housekeeper who's a spinster, and she's now dating Nazis.

Because they're interested in women and etcetera.

But it's amazing.

Somehow, she had enough respect for Mr. Star, her employer, that in three-and-a-half years, all this extra work and irritation and tension, she never.

She threatened when things got tough, but she never, ever said a word.

For those of you who've read the Anne Frank story, as many people have, the story is not so different.

But what happened in the Anne Frank story is that ultimately someone gave them away and that was the end.

And my father, I remember saying, after two years, after two- pretty soon, there must be forty people who know that we're here.

From the occasional neighbor who sees an extra chair left or an extra pl or has to wait too long at the door.

From the mailman who delivers mail, from the milkman who still delivers milk.

Or the egg lady who still showed up occas From the garbage coming out of th From the noises, occasionally.

From Mr. Star, who could not tell a lie, being hustle by the housekeeper to a neighbor's house when a razzia was coming so he wouldn't have to lie about, do you have any Jews here?

Amazing, really, when you think about it.

I've often said that in order to surv there are people who survived, you had to have two things.

Three, maybe.

You had to You had to have some chutzpah, which is just plain 'balls' is not a nice word, but that's the only word I can thi And you had to have mazel, luck, because without all three, you just weren't going to make it.

I should go back to Opa [grandfather] Star.

After about three months, there, there was a knock on the door.

Well, there were several knocks on the door.

One important knock.

He opened the door.

And it was my mother's and my 14-year-old aunt, my mother's little sister.

They had been sort of kicked out of the house they'd been hiding in.

Whether the woman got sick and tired My grandparents were not easy people.

Whether she began to fear for her life.

Whether she just plain wanted to go and visit her family in the south of Holland, and in the winter you couldn't Yo u couldn't leave heat coming out of a house.

You they she told them they had to go find someplace else.

And somehow, I guess my mother had communicated her address to them.

After all, it was a small country and somehow they did this.

I don't know how.

they said, can you help us find a place?

And Opa Star said, come in and close the door.

He says, we'll figure out something.

What he ultimately figured out is how to keep five people the in his one-man apartment for three-and-a-half years.

You know, it's hard to imagine what what hi Now there were an aunt and uncle in another part of the country who hid in a hole in a barn, underground, wet and cold.

And I mean, my parents had it good compared to that.

But on the other hand, if you think about no ra I think they might have had a secret radio occasionally.

Certainly, no television.

Certainly no cell phones.

Never going outside.

Never even going near the window.

It sort of makes the pandemic we've gone through these last few years kind of a cake for most of us, except those who got ill, unfortunately.

Jeanette Gnirrep and her husband, who's Carl Gnirrep.

I don't know whether he was there, but she knew I was com She had been warned and she for coffee because that's what you do at night.

At night it would have been tea.

In the morning it was coff And so that when this would happen and then came the knock on the door and she opens the door wi th this little note.

She has witnesses that No w, by the way, she happened to have been the same woman, very active in a home for unwed mothers.

Later, when I was much older, I learned that she probabl She was an unwed mother herself, once, and was always therefore very involved in this.

But it gave her a perfect cover to help me.

And that was the first step for me.

Life.

Remember, So I'm telling you what I know from others and fr Jeanette and from my parents and from my aunt.

But she was too active in the resistance moveme And it turns out that many times when there were razzias warned or searches warned, she would take me somewhere.

And then, being a young child or a baby at first and later a young child, I would be distracted wo uld be gone and I would be with strangers again.

And that apparently happened about 40 different times in the first three-and-a-half years of my life, which was very lucky for me that there were so many people willing to take a risk.

I remember walking in Groningen after the war with my grandmother, I believe, and somebody saying, aren't you Bertie?

Now, how the heck they But because that's not the name I had during the war.

But I just don't know.

But they recognized me.

They said, oh, y or, you were with us for a month, or somethin And that happened to me several times postwar.

So there was no question that this happened.

I mean, I have heard higher numbers, but forty seems like t She felt like my godmother.

She is the one that kept track of where I was going.

I would wind up back at her house after I would go somewhere else.

Oma Schattepoes, which in English would probably be oma, grandmother, oma sweetheart.

Sweetie is wh So not knowing her last name or being able to say it, I called h sweetie or sweetheart.

So that was how I knew her, Somewhere along the line, and I'm not sure where, but I still had to have been wearing di at about two, maybe, I had been th And she got me back at that point and I was covered in in eczema.

I had almost I'd had such a bad blood infection from where they'd given me a smallpox shot, where diarrhea from the diaper ran in, that I'd almost lost the leg, that she finally said, I'm keeping this child.

She's 'failing to thrive,' in English, and I'm not giving her away again.

And she did.

She kept me.

An My parents were, my father was going crazy, worried.

They both were.

And my mother some n make it to the next day.

And my father Just hold on.

Let's Tomorrow is a new day.

But at some point my mother was probably over the whole thing.

And they got word back to Oma Schattepoes, Mrs. Gnirrep, that I needed to just be seen by my parents.

They just needed to know that the child was still alive and well, that she would see her baby again.

And so Oma Gnirrep, Oma Schattepoes was given orders, no address again this incredible caut she was given orders to walk down a particular street slowly with a stroller at a particular time.

And she's watching with this child.

And she's she's she's she's given me an apple, I gues and busy and something.

And I'm going to give I am going to give this I should be givi Crazy story, since she isn't supp And all of a sudden at one of the windows, she sees two heads peering anxiously through the window, and she looks around.

And by the way, this apartme from where some of the headquarters were for the Nazis.

She just decides to go with the baby in there and she goes upstairs and I see my mother.

Or really, my mother se and my father, and my mother says, what's that apple for?

And I say, I'm going to be give that apple.

It's for my mommy.

But I don't give it to her because she's not my mommy.

So that was the only time they did see me.

The underground, the resistance movement, put us back together and I was reunited within days with my own parents.

After the war.

You know, it's so hard to describe after the wa I didn't know it, because what did I know?

But looking back, clearly, my parents were the best parents they knew how to be, but they were so traumatized.

Nobody knew a word for that in those And there was no psychological help and there was no other kind o The business, the apartment they had had the war was gone.

The business that my father had of some other people to take care of, when he showed up there they said, oh, Herman, you're We don't need you anymore.

So that took care of his liveliho To put it in perspective, my father lost during the 80 aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins, and my mother, 65.

And there were, if you remember, the uncle who died, Bert, the store he went to, where he was picked up was an aunt and uncle who lived above 27 kilometers south of Groningen, in Assen.

And in that store, there was a home above it, which was in Europe in those days, maybe in New Yor and a retail lady's store, a lady's dress shop.

And they had had three children, I say, had had, because that aunt and uncle did not survive.

Before they were taken away, the uncle was quite sick already, but h to find a hiding place each separately for his two girls.

Jenny was 16 and Hettie was probably 17 or 18.

And they were each hidden somewhere.

I can't tell you where, except tha And they had a six-year-old little blonde daughter.

And when they were taken away, just before, they were still able to say goodbye to Jenny, where she was.

And Jenny pleaded, let me keep Lanika.

Let me keep I'll t I can take care of her.

I'll keep her well.

And her parents said, you're too young.

She stays with us.

So Jenny had, all her life, a big above her bed.

She never forgot her.

And that the anguish about not being able to convince her parents that she could take care of keep them alive.

Anyway, Jenny and Hettie both survived.

They were in camps.

I don't know if Hettie was Jenny was for sure, but somehow got loaned o for labor and through some sort of a ruse, one day pretended she was going to that farmer instead of and walked out and survived somehow.

I do not know her story completely.

But she and Hettie were teenagers or just post-teenager after the war, and young and inex And they came to my parents and said, can you help us in any way?

And the plan that Groningen to Assen, where the store and the residence was.

The girls moved in with my parents for the time being.

The store was reopened and that was really important because besides not getting any help, or products to open a business unless you'd had a business before the war.

And so by using the name of this sto my parents were able to buy goods.

They had to go every week to buy the because you couldn't buy a wh But they built a very successful b over a number of years again.

The girls lived with us, and I still remember in Assen, up But it didn't work real well.

You had a young couple who was trau My mother was working in the store all the time.

The older girl wanted to go to Amsterdam, Hettie.

She went to Amsterdam quite soon after because I have really no recollection of her living there.

She committed suicide within a couple of years.

I remember some rumors about it.

But, you know.

Jenny stayed longer and lived with us, but wasn't really a businesswoman and it was And so my parents put, she dated and she got married and she was put in a business across the street, of her own.

But probably one of the earliest recollections I have, personally, so mehow disappearing when the dishes because she had to go to the bath You know, these people.

You know, there was a lot of friction.

Jenny, you know, feeling, you know, whatever.

In any case, I remember sitting at the family table and Jenny was gone already.

She was married.

She got married very quickly.

I think partly to get And she got the business across the way.

And all of a sudden a woman walked in our dining room, and my mother said, this is Ger, and Ger is coming to live with us.

And I remember to this day my heart just sinking.

Kind of, I guess, feeling, oh somebody else again instead of my parents.

And my parents do how they had to sit with me for months at the side of my bed and hold my hand, one hand each, and say, real parents don't leave.

They don't abandon.

Real parents will be here in the morning.

Don't worry.

We are yo My parents were, as I said, really the best parents they knew how to be.

I don't think my parents were given to guilt.

I think the only guilt I can ever think of, of my father feeling he should have left before he did.

I remember my mother's s that she had to give me up at three months.

And I do remember my father at my wedding at the age of 22, saying this is now the second time in my life that I will be giving away my daughter.

But this is a happy one.

I mean, it's something that never left them, of course.

But did they, you know.

They were totally absorbed in those early years after the war, not in parenting.

In building a life back, in building a family again, having two more children, in getting a livelihood.

And my mother was much m I never saw my mother as a housewife.

In fact, when we came to this coun my mother immediately went to work.

We brought a housekeeper with It's another story.

You know, one of the things that about over the years and that some people ask is, you know, is, you know, what are the effects?

And there's there are many.

And I think you grow up with a sense of blackness.

The world, aga There was very little, no radio.

There was a children's program An d your entertainment, you made your ow You read once you could read, you certainly But your parents didn't play with you.

They were working and they were relaxing.

They w And so your entertainment was listening to the adults part of the time, hearing the stories.

And the world was divided.

The world that you grew up in black void of something before the war and after the war.

And before the war we this.

And after the war, this and this.

And so you not really knowing how to but you grew up with a crazy kind of a black void of your own that had a lot of demons in them.

But you didn't know what they were.

You didn't ask about i And you just didn't open the box, either, because it was like maybe a Pandora box of some sort.

It was unconscious.

You didn't know it.

I grew up without aunts and uncles and without cousins with all So that affected your life a lot.

You didn't have a matrix in Holland any family and certainly not any community.

And then, of course, after the war, jumping from one moment, we didn't have a kosher home.

I never even heard the word, kosher.

I never saw candles lit.

There were no more synagogues.

There were no more rab There might have been a few rabbis, certainly not anywhere Th ere were two other Jewish families in town, three.

And my parents hadn't a clue as they were coping with what today we'd call PTS and trying to lift themselves up and get started again.

Another story.

That we weren't, knowing nothing about bein We were always told that we were lucky.

And therein comes part of the problem with lu cky when somehow inside is a kind of a bleakness.

I was essentially kind of a happy kid.

I made friends easily.

I was a tomboy.

But as I look back over the years, I didn't really trust.

I didn't connect.

I made friends.

I adapted very easily to anything and everybody to get along.

But I really probably took I don't know how many years for my husband to finally totally have my And one of the reasons I married the man I married, who was probably not fo r, the personality I had innately, was that he represented safety, dependability, reliability, and maturity.

Those were, somebody I could absolutely trust to stay with me, to be with me, and to have children with, and to be the father to my child I know that I knew this very young, somehow.

But I think maybe the other place I learned it many years later.

See when you came, also backing off for a m When you came, in Holland, nobody talked about it.

Everybody'd had the war and they didn't want to know about our aspect of it.

Everybody had hunger or had lost things and so the they weren't hunted.

They you know, and you just learned very When we went to America, my father brought his our housekeeper, this Ger She was still with us.

With He paid her for a year.

And also her her her trip to America and her trip back from America.

Unfortunately for us and for me particularly, and lucky for her, she found a husband and was no longer a spinster and she left us after six months.

So after six months, at the age of 11, both parents working, we were clearly latchkey kids and I had to make dinner and I was responsible for my sisters.

So I don't think I probably had a whole lot of a childhood.

And I learned very quickly when I learned English at the age of almost 11, I didn't speak any English, but people did know you were from somewhere else.

Unfortunately, unfortunately for me, but fortunately, for them they moved to a to that had a lot of Dutch people.

So they thought an easier place to But it was a place that had no Jews.

And again, I was growing up, I was in elementary sc probably the only Jew.

I wasn't in elementary school.

And in high school there might have been one other He found me and asked me to the prom, but like I nev I didn't realize it because the one experience they had trying to go to a synagogue was embarrassing because they asked about money and my, you know, and embarrassed my father.

So he and there was nothing around So it wasn't really until I began to do some dumb things, like accept a date from a 15-year-old boy, or maybe he was 16 and I was 15, who An d my mother said, you're going out on a Friday night?

And I'm looking because you didn't talk back and you didn't say anything.

You didn't argue wha And just like that, she says, well, you know, your dad and I never go out on a Friday night.

Friday night is family night.

She had been so busy, not ever lighting a candle, not ever saying Shabbat, just moving on, that I hadn't a clue.

So it was that kind of thing.

I think that suddenly said to it made my parents realize that their three girls because I had gotten two sisters you know after knew nothing about being Jewish and that we hadn't picked it up by osmo So they then there was a temple opening somewhere.

It wasn't their kind of thing because the synagogue they had grown up with was Orthodox.

That's all you knew in Holland before t After the war in Holland, you also began to get later, probably like in the '70s, '80s, a Reform movement that was called something else there.

But what we would call, Reform.

An was available within about 10, 15 miles from where my parents lived at that point.

And so they sent my sisters there.

But I was too old.

It was too late for me to get any Je But I had the fortune at the age of 16 to get introduced to B'nai B'rith Girls, which is a Jewish boys and girls organization.

And whereas they weren't religious, they talked about Shabbat and they knew abou and they did things like tsedakah, which means giving and and doing good deeds and all kinds of things that I'd And so that's where I began to get some Jewish context and some different sense of myself.

And I think whe I joined BBG, I suddenly was part of the group and I really I felt I belonged And then I didn't go get go out to marry Jack Levkowitz, my husband.

Jack represented safety.

As I've discussed.

He happened to also be keep kosher I didn't really quite know what that meant.

But figured, okay, I kind of picked him.

He picked me, you know.

And so when he said, I need you to And it wasn't really easy.

And I kind of didn't li And I in my head refused it because I inherited a fair amount of my father's skepticism.

But that got tempered over all these years, by doing.

And as the Talmud and the sages will tell you, just do it and it will happen.

And to some extent I keep kosher not so much because I believe in it, but because it's part of a very important fo r thousands of years.

And I don't want t I think I have a very strong need to belong to community.

And so volunteering and working in and around the Jewish community became a natural.

I mean, at first it was also League of Jewish of League of Women Bu t ultimately, since you only have so much energy and so much money, mine began to be focus And when my husband wanted to be part of a group that started a Jewish day school, my first reaction was a secular school?

I am a product of Berkeley, a public school.

But then I began to buy it and say, you know, it's a much healthier way to really give the children an authentic education that's not on top of their regular schooling.

After school.

You can give them You don't have to brainwash.

You just have to and give them a really good regular educat So I became involved, and so community and the day schoo and helping others became a way life for me.

So when we were still in Holland, there were in the small town of Assen two or three other survivor Jewish families.

And those were definitely my parents' friends.

And so when they would get together, over coffee and tea.

It wasn't meals.

You didn't get together for meals, you had coffee and tea or whatever later.

There was endless talk of before and after the war, but there was a distinction made.

The real survivors were the ones who had been in the camps, who had really suffered the concentration camps.

We were not really considered survivors because we had never gone to the camps.

We cer And somehow, probably to some exte by my parents.

They didn't talk I don't think, although we did eventually.

We of course, knew about Oma Schattepoes and Opa Star how they hid them during the war because we visited them and they were our adopted grandparents.

But as children, we didn't you know, here and there, from listening.

I truly grew up in an atmosphere where you couldn't talk about it, because at some point when the you know, the war or anything like that, as you get older, people would and they they knew, you would get comments like, well, how could you let them do that to you?

At which point you learned really quickly to shut your mouth and just not discuss th And so it wasn't until I was a mother, quite well along, I was probably i I don't remember how old I was.

I would have been 40.

I was widowed when I was 56, so somewhere, maybe early thirties, something came out.

What had been happening in this country, people hadn't talked about the Holocaust eith For the longest time, the wa In many ways, those who lost their people, it was it was for the Jews who knew about it or either felt guilty but had learned not to talk about it, whatever.

It became a topic of interest.

And so people began to talk about it.

And then they formed a group for th And I went once or twice, but those people w And you were not considered legitimate, so you backed off.

And then, lo and behold, they discovered that there were children of the survivors who also had trauma.

So you've got second-generation groups.

And I tried that, but that didn't work.

I wasn't quite that, either.

He called a congress of hidden children and I saw in Washington, D.C. and something went out and I got it.

Looked at it and was at first very interested and then said, no.

You'd learned not to talk about it, to keep that box closed.

And and I said, eh, it's so long ago.

Who wants to talk about that?

And I know plenty Who wants to talk about that?

Who wants to, you know, go My husband convinced me to go.

When we got there, two things One, there were thousands of us.

At least 1,500, and with with spouses.

Not all of people had spouses, but there were a lot of spouses.

There were joint things.

There were sep in their discussion, in the spouses' lecture, to a person, my husband later told me, every spouse said, yeah, we had to drag them here.

They didn't want to come So it wasn't just my experience.

It was pretty universal.

And I know some people here even in Tucson who still won't talk about it.

And so that was one.

But then the most illuminating and helpful thing that happene is the congress was run all by professionals, psychiatrists, social workers, etcetera, who were all hidden children, had all been hidden children.

And that was important because Elie Wiesel, the only exception, for whom I have great adm and would never say anything negative, was the only speaker who was not a child a hidden child survivor.

And he bombed.

Because ag who were really in the camps and those who were not.

No, you know, no fault of his.

No problem.

But it just the way it was.

But so the first speaker got up and you have t people sitting there, the spouses curious, the survivor the hidden to do with us here, really?

Because we just weren't ready to go.

And that first speaker to open welcomed us and then said, all of our lives, and he said our, see that was the difference.

All of our lives we have been told that we are lucky.

You could have heard a pin drop, because to a person that is what we had been told.

you know, with time, you know, it's like when you are widowed.

The hole never goes away, but with time you stop falling in and you learn to cope, and you learn to make your life.

Because ultimately who weren't lucky enough to be able to make choices that are good, healthy, coping choices don't get to live the life we need to And I had good examples in my parents.

they were people who embraced life.

Who looked, yeah they had har in the immigration days again, too.

But they looked at the possibilities in lif and they went on and they made successes.

And I do remember my father saying.

I was married.

I don't know if my sister Carrie And he said, I don't get it.

How do I have three smart, bright, attractive daughters without one of them having one shred of self-confidence?

And so, you know, those are the things you begin to work on at some point or another when you're given the opportunity.

There's so many things that change as you look at them over time.

You know, when we're young, we can't wait to gro And then when we have our little children and we just can't wait for them to get bigger so they're not such a burden.

And everybody around you is telling you, don't hurry, life's going to go fast.

Just enjoy it.

Life's going too fast.

You don't You can't wait.

And then somewhere alon and guess what?

Life does go fast th ose younger years of my children more and been around more for my grandchildren, but they're in other towns and so I to do that as much as I'd like.

I think it's the same also with, you know, why did I survive?

You know, at first you don't think about it.

And then it wasn't until I held probably my own three-month-old baby in my arm to begin to nurse her, that I suddenly broke out in tears and said, oh my God, that's the age I was when my mother had to give me away.

Could I do that?

And so it's life that takes you along the path and makes you, you know.

And at first talking about it was like really hard.

Then you begin to really feel that, as Elie Wiesel said, once you have become aware, once you have heard th and become a witness, you are a witness.

An d I pass it on to my grandchildren.

I passed it on to my children, who certainly had thei in some ways.

And and now as I'm older, I often say, why do I even tell the story anymore?

It's it's it's getting to be sometimes too commercialized.

It's it's almost as if being Jewish, you have to talk about the Holocaust.

And that's not what Jewish is.

It's a lot of other wonderful things And why am I still telling this story to high school wh en I wasn't even in a camp and I don't have a dramatic And then I realize that it's the story.

It's this endless hatred and prejudice that we keep perpetuating as a human race, and that your job is to try to share and teach as much as you can so that, as one Holocaust educator once said to me, we all have and there's a bad dog, and the one you feed is goi And you have to try to help the world feed the good dogs as much as you can.

And you have to do it so that eventually people will learn and we can be better.

And yeah, I there are times when I am sad or something.

And there have been some great griefs in my life.

I also realize how incredibly lucky I am to have survived beyond the age of one.

They honor those people who risked everything to save Jews that they know of.

In order to get someone to be declared a Righteous Gentile, the applicant, the surviving Jews, have to jump through a lot of hoops for a couple o to really prove it very authentically so that everybody who's there truly is there.

And my parents had never chosen to do that partly because, again, it was so long ago they didn't talk about it in this way.

He was gone, but they finally came to We visited each one of these families, that is the nieces and nephews and children of Opa Star.

To a person, they were thrilled to hear that their family had been a part of saving Jews.

And when we, and so proud and so grateful.

After the, so we visited each family individually.

In the days before the ceremony, we were at the ceremony.

They were at the ceremony.

We did a dinner for them.

There were probably, I don't know, 20 and I don't know, maybe there were 12 of us or 14 of us, the 12 of us represented between us, be cause of what their uncle and brother had do And it taught me one more thing.

It's never too late to say thank yo to be said, for God's sake, say it.