Man on a mission against discrimination
The man behind a touring exhibition on Anne Frank says the world could still learn a lot from her story. Bess Manson reports.
Boyd Klap has so many remarkable stories up his tailored sleeve, it is hard to know where to begin. Perhaps with the one about the time he helped the Canadian Army locate Nazi headquarters on the day his Dutch city of Deventer was liberated in World War II. Maybe the one about the plumber he randomly met
40 years later in Queenstown who happened to be one of those Canadian soldiers.
The story about a narrow escape from the Nazis when he was delivering messages as a courier for the Dutch Resistance is a ripping yarn.
With more than nine decades of a life well lived, the pool of experience is deep. It is a winding road getting to the heart of his work with New Zealand’s Anne Frank projects. Diversions to one gripping anecdote or another are worth the trip.
Klap has spent the past dozen years as one of the driving forces behind several projects revolving around the diary of Anne Frank – a touring exhibition, Te Haumihiata Mason’s translation of the diary into te reo Ma¯ ori, and now a memorial in a Wellington park. Of course, he was backed by his team of workers and others from the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Yet his bulging book of contacts, ability to fundraise and contagious energy have been an enormous factor in the success of these endeavours.
All projects not only celebrate the life of Anne Frank, whose diary detailed life from within the confines of the annexe she and her family shared during the Nazi occupation, but also shine a light on the dangers of discrimination today. It is Klap’s raison d’etre.
Boots and all
At 94, Klap is an advertisement for staying active in mind and body. Hiking in Wellington’s Tinakori hills and swimming keep him physically fit.
He only stopped skiing at 89. The threat of snowboarders bombing down the mountain put paid to that. One bumped into him a few years ago and they pirouetted down the slope together in a dangerous dance.
‘‘I don’t ski any more but I am still a member of the ‘One Ski in the Grave Club’,’’ he says.
He started skiing when he won a trip to the Chateau at Tongariro after immigrating to Aotearoa in 1951. He joined ski clubs here and in Australia during a stint living across the ditch. He joined the clubs’ committees and served as president here and there.
That is Klap in a nutshell. Whatever he does, he goes in boots and all. ‘‘I have enjoyed my career, and I have done OK [but] I have always enjoyed being involved in other things aside from my job, things that are good for the community.
‘‘I like people and I like fun. If it gets too serious, then you get problems. I think your work and leisure need to give you
satisfaction but it also needs to be fun.’’
His Thorndon home is full of photos. His late wife, Ria, looks out of many frames. She died 11 years ago after a long period suffering from Alzheimer’s.
There is a wall of photos of Klap with Dutch royalty, and New Zealand politicians and dignitaries.
Above the sofa is one blackand-white image of a room – a very nondescript small box room which happens to be in the annexe in Amsterdam where Anne Frank lived for more than two years.
It was a gift from the Anne Frank House Museum.
There are piles of books, including the te reo translation of Anne Frank’s diary. The diarist is a very real presence here.
Klap and his team have raised more than half a million dollars for Aotearoa’s Anne Frank projects, including the ongoing touring exhibition.
‘‘All my life I have fought against discrimination. AntiSemitism has increased. Look what happened in Christchurch, that was a result of discrimination. What the Anne Frank exhibition does, particularly with young people, is make them aware of what could happen. It makes them aware of discrimination. That is why we focus on schools because young people must know about that.
‘‘Around the world you see more and more countries where democracy has been taken over by dictators. I fear that we are at a phase at present where democracy is under threat.’’
Two generations later it is important to know what happened to the two families who were discovered in that annexe.
The queues to Anne Frank House in Amsterdam show there is still a real interest in her life and story, he says.
Nazi occupation
Klap’s own story is pretty remarkable.
Boudewijn Huibrecht Klap was raised the eldest of five in a middle-class family in Deventer. His mother was a French teacher. His father ran a number of shops.
He grew up with strong morals about fairness, of doing things for others. His father was on every committee going. Klap is certainly a chip off the old block.
‘‘We had a good life. During the war we were better off than many people. Anyone was welcome in our house any time. We would always be adding chairs to the table.’’
On May 10, 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Klap was 13. ‘‘We were only about 60 kilometres from the border. By midday the Germans were in our town. ‘‘Back then I just remember thinking how good it was to be let out of school early.’’
In 1941, when the Nazis started rounding up Jews in Amsterdam, many people went on strike.
When the resistance movement started fighting back, senior people of the town were
shot publicly and left on street corners for 24 hours, Klap recalls.
‘‘The Nazis would demand those responsible for attacking German convoys to come forward, otherwise they would threaten to do things like burn down a church with 20 people in it. What do you do? It was terrible.’’
Slowly, the Nazis took over life in the Netherlands. His school principal was replaced by a Nazi whom Klap remembers coming to school in his uniform, taking out his pistol and plonking it down on his desk.
Their school books were heavily redacted – all references to the Dutch royal family, all antiGerman sentiment blacked out.
Klap did not last long at school under Nazi leadership.
He was thrown out for writing ‘‘WV’’ on the blackboard – W stood for Wilhelmina, the Dutch queen, and V for victory.
He was subsequently chucked out of two other schools for various misdemeanours.
His Jewish neighbours’ home was graffitied with the swastika. He and the rest of the neighbourhood tried to wash it off. That Jewish family disappeared one day and never returned.
‘‘At the time we had no idea about the death camps. But out of 82 of our Jewish neighbours, only four returned,’’ he says. In 1944, part of the Netherlands was liberated but the north remained occupied. ‘‘We thought the war was over. The red, white and blue flags came out. People from the underground resistance movement came out in the open.’’
But it was not over and many of those who fought in the resistance were shot.
That was when Klap, by then 17, joined the movement.
Generally, those in charge did not like younger people getting involved because they were more likely to talk, to brag about their exploits, he says. But by 1944 they did not have any choice but to allow them into their ranks.
‘‘I felt very strongly about being occupied by a foreign power. I saw what they did to people, in particular the Jews, and I felt there was a responsibility we had to bring the Nazis down so that one day we would be a free country again.
‘‘And we never doubted we
would find that freedom.
‘‘I became a courier in the underground. Someone would usually come to me with papers with information about troop movements, the impact of air raids, that kind of thing. I would roll them up and hide them under the bicycle saddle, ride to the next drop-off point and give them to another person. That information would then be radioed to Britain.’’ He was not scared, he says. At 17, it was all quite an adventure. ‘‘One day I was stopped by the Germans wanting to confiscate my bike but I talked my way out of that.’’
His Red Cross work was a good cover. In that role he helped look after evacuees from the bombedout city of Arnhem.
Many who were too sick to walk were pushed in wheelbarrows. ‘‘They would arrive in a hell of a state.’’
‘‘Some people looked so sad and terrible, I would take them home, and they would stay for a few nights before moving into the country.’’
His city came under friendly fire when the Allies tried to bomb bridges to stop the Germans using them. The roof of their own home was blown off.
He once met a Kiwi pilot who dropped bombs on Deventer.
In 1951, living in Eastbourne, he got talking with a chap who flew planes in the RNZAF.
‘‘He asked where I came from and I told him, Deventer.
He said: I remember Deventer because we tried to bomb the bloody bridge. I told him one
bomb hit the bridge but did not explode till it hit the river and he said: ‘That was me.’ ’’
Liberation
When Deventer was finally liberated, Klap met the advancing Canadian tanks and was asked if he knew the whereabouts of the Nazi headquarters.
Klap jumped on the tank and showed them the way.
That day is a bittersweet memory, he says.
The city was liberated but not before six of his underground cohort were shot by the Germans, hours before the liberation.
That night Klap and another resistance member stood guard outside the cathedral where the bodies lay amid artillery fire as the Germans retreated.
He remembers the arrest of young women who had fraternised with the German soldiers, their heads shaved and tarred with the swastika. ‘‘Looking back, they were just poor kids who happened to fall in love with a German soldier,’’ he says.
After the war, Klap joined the Dutch army, becoming a lieutenant. He went to the Dutch East Indies to ‘‘liberate these people who were actually fighting for their own independence but history tells you what really happened’’, he says.
After two years he and Ria, whom he met during his resistance days, immigrated to New Zealand. Their marriage was by proxy because Ria was not allowed to travel to Indonesia and they were not allowed into New Zealand before being married.
‘‘Ria had a big wedding in Holland, her brother acting on my behalf. There was a cocktail party and everyone was dressed up. I was with my platoon getting terribly drunk. That was my wedding night.’’
After a failed attempt at a tea plantation in Indonesia and a short stint on a farm in New Zealand, he got into the insurance game.
He started out selling premiums going door to door on his bicycle. He remembers biking down the Wainuiomata Hill, bombing it into Gracefield.
‘‘I had no brakes, no gears.
‘‘I felt like I could have won the Tour De France!’’ Klap, who was made a Companion of the New
Zealand Order of Merit for services to business and the community in 2011, went on to become chief executive of T&G New Zealand and Prudential Insurance Company. He has chaired at least 10 organisations including the Anne Frank Projects and New Zealand Netherlands Foundation, of which he was a founder.
Te reo translation
He had only ever intended to spend three months on the Anne Frank touring exhibition. Almost a dozen years later, he is still on the job.
He has never taken payment for any of the work he has done over the years.
Not one cent, says Levien Rouw, educational project coordinator at Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
‘‘A lot of volunteers with the Anne Frank exhibitions have come and gone, whereas Klap has stayed. The time he has given voluntarily would amount to a lot of dollars, which he has never asked for.’’
Rouw says Klap insisted on a local element to the later incarnation of the touring exhibition – Anne Frank: Let Me Be Myself – to feature people from Aotearoa talking about their own experiences of discrimination.
‘‘From the early phase of the exhibition he said we need to make an effort to reach out to the Ma¯ ori community. He said if we are talking about discrimination today you have to talk about it from a Ma¯ ori perspective.’’
A translation of the diary into te reo came about after Klap paid a visit to Parihaka.
He spoke on the marae about discrimination, about Anne Frank and her diary.
He was asked if the diary had been translated into te reo. It had been translated into 72 different languages but not te reo.
So began his next project. With the support of the Ma¯ ori Language Commission he sought out Te Haumihiata Mason (Nga¯ i Tu¯ hoe) to translate the book.
A copy of the te reo version was sent to every secondary school in Aotearoa.
The challenge of translating the full story of Anne Frank into te reo Ma¯ ori has been a remarkable achievement, says Sir John Clarke (Nga¯ ti Porou, Nga¯ puhi), a former race relations conciliator and Anne Frank Advisory Board member.
‘‘It has contributed well to the fact that te reo Ma¯ ori is a living and adaptable language.
‘‘It has broadened the interest and appeal of the poignant story of this amazing young girl, Anne Frank, who reminds us of the abhorrence of racial discrimination and the cruelty of war.’’
Without Klap’s drive, the New Zealand Anne Frank projects were unlikely to have happened at all, says David Zwartz, chairman of the Wellington Jewish Council and a volunteer for the Holocaust centre of New Zealand.
‘‘He has been so single-minded about those two stories. He is amazingly efficient and successful in organising and fundraising and publicising. Without his attachment to the project, it would never have happened.’’
Mira Woldberg, Dutch ambassador to Aotearoa, says Klap’s work in bringing Anne Frank’s story to New Zealand in an inclusive way, particularly through the translation, was extraordinarily important.
‘‘That story is still very relevant today [because] it is a story about issues that are occurring today – discrimination, injustice, singling out minorities, violence and intimidation.’’
Klap had the ability to mobilise with his enormous enthusiasm, and his convincing and convening power.
‘‘It is hard not to be convinced by Boudewijn. He uses his charm and enthusiasm to get his message across, to get things done. He is a person who makes things happen.
‘‘It is only ever about ‘can do’. He will not see the obstacles . . . I don’t think the word failure is in his vocabulary.’’
New memorial
Tomorrow, the Anne Frank memorial is being unveiled.
Klap, with the Holocaust Centre and the Anne Frank House, began creating the Anne Frank memorial in 2019, planting 90 kowhai trees in Ellice Park in Mt Victoria, marking what would have been her 90th birthday.
A memorial situated among the trees is a work created by designer Matthijs Siljee.
This does not mark the end of Klap’s work, though.
He will continue touring and promoting the exhibition.
As Rouw says, Klap is a ‘‘man on a mission’’.
But there is also life outside the Anne Frank world for Klap, who was in 2016 made Commander in the Order of Oranje Nassau, recognising his service to the Netherlands.
His life is full. He has his three children, six grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
He has his companion, French chef Veronique Sauzeau, whom he met five years ago after being ‘‘set up’’ by the German ambassador.
He divides his time between Wellington and Waikanae, where he has a bolthole. He drives up there, having just got his licence for another two years, he says with some delight.
The only thing about being this great age is that most of his friends and all of his siblings have died.
‘‘My daughter says to me: ‘Dad, you are the last man standing.’ ’’
When asked what he fears most about getting old, Klap remarks, ‘‘living in an old folks’ home, living with old people’’.
‘‘Then you start acting old. There is always someone dying. There is always a vacancy!’’
Klap is much too busy living to think about checking out yet. There is so much more to do. He has surely heeded Anne Frank’s words when she wrote in that diary of hers: ‘‘How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.’’