Thank you for my life
IT WAS a crisp autumn day, fleecy clouds drifting across a blue sky, when I arrived in Wormerveer for the first time, straight off the plane from London. I had come to this charming, canal-lined small Dutch town to finally see where my mother, Renate, had been hidden as a little girl during the Second World War. Less than ten miles from Amsterdam, it seemed like a world away from the bustling city where she was born and lived for the first 19 months of her life.
Wormeveer was the first stop on our two-day trip to posthumously recognise the brave couple, Aad and Fie Versnel, for daring to shelter my mother in Nazi-occupied Holland 75 years ago.
There to greet us were the daughters of the Versnels, Els, 71, and Cobi, 69, along with their husbands Piet and Jaap. Just a stone’s throw away from the railway station we congregated on the Weverstraat, the peaceful street where my mother lived in the middle of the war. I couldn’t help but imagine how back in 1942, she was probably taken in her pram from Amsterdam Central Station to Wormerveer station by train. It chills me to the bone to think that, in the space of less than an hour, she was separated from her birth parents and handed over to her foster parents, her life transformed forever.
Unfortunately, house number three, where she was hidden for around two and half years, no longer exists. In its place is a car park. In the next street still stands the original façade of a beautiful church, most likely the one she remembers praying at during the war.
Visiting Wormerveer was the missing jigsaw piece in her story. Over the years we’d heard so much about this place, but seeing it on that beautiful day made my mother’s wartime experience more heartfelt, more real. Moreover, it gave us younger generations a chance to connect with the Versnel family.
During the war, Aad and Fie were a childless couple in their thirties who showered my mother, not just with protection but with boundless love and affection. My grandmother handed over her baby in 1942. In June 1945 she was reunited with the four year-old daughter whom she no longer recognized. For the Versnels, handing back Renate, the only child in their life, was so very painful. On receiving her daughter back, my grandmother Cilla promised that she would pray for them to be blessed with their very own child. Exactly one year later, in June 1946 a baby daughter — Els Renate — was born, followed by Cobi in 1948. We never had the privilege of meeting this phenomenal couple who saved my mother’s life, but spending time in their home village gave us a small sense of who they were and how they had lived.
The following day in Amsterdam, my mother took her children and grandchildren on a whistle-stop tour of where she grew up. We arrived at Plantage Parklaan, in the heart of the old Jewish quarter, once dubbed the “Jerusalem of the North”. There was the traditional brick-fronted house she had lived for the first year and a half.
We were shocked to discover that literally around the corner, opposite the popular Artis Zoo, stood the impressive Dutch theatre, the Hollandsche Schouwburg, that was turned into a prison and deportation centre for Jews. More than 100,000 Dutch Jewish men, women and children were murdered in the Holocaust and many were first crammed into this building for days on end, before being deported to transit and concentration camps. It is now a permanent memorial to their lives, far less visited than the btter known Anne Frank House.
The next day we travelled to the Library of Rotterdam for a ceremony to recognise Aad and Fie as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem, along with five other courageous families. The recognition of the