Duifje Van Haren, nee Van Dam, was born in 1919 in Gorinchem, Holland, thirty kilometres from Rotterdam. She is the sister of Samuel Van Dam. She is about five foot three, a sturdy handsome woman who looks younger than her age. Her hair is thick, cropped short and very white, setting off a summer tan and merry, brown eyes. As she talks, she closes them to emphasize a point. She smiles frequently. Her apartment is attractive, with many paintings and delightful scenes in petitpoint, which is her hobby. She is alone much of the time and the handiwork keeps her from getting too lonely.

There were twenty-three Jewish families in her town before the Holocaust, all related in some way to each other - a total of seventy to eighty individuals.

Duifje was the middle child of three. The Van Haren family lived in a big house facing a harbour and backing onto a large river servicing ships that went to Germany and major ports in other countries. Relationships with the other townspeople were very good. The next door neighbors were old, close family friends. Duifje's parents ran a small, successful department store.

In 1942, when Duifje was twenty-three and had been married for six months, the Nazis entered Gorinchem to round up the Jews for deportation. Because Jews were no longer allowed to buy property, the newlyweds were living with Duifje's parents. The young couple escaped out the back door as the Nazis came in the front. This was the start of three years of running and hiding.

"In that little city was my brother, and he came out of the war too, my father and his wife [Duifje's stepmother] and they didn't came out, and my older brother is also killed in the concentration camp. My husband's family, they're all... all gone.

"In 1942, when they came to pick us up, I was married half a year. I was twenty-three. They came to Holland in 1940, but the first two years they left us alone. Actually, my brother-in-law was killed in 1940. Because there was sabotage, the Germans rounded up one hundred Jews [in reprisal] to take to Mauthausen 1.

"Five percent of the people in my town were no good, [attitude towards Jews] the rest were quite good, I would say. But we were restricted from shopping... leaving the house... running business. In 1942, when I was married, we were forbidden to buy a house so we lived with my parents. I knew everybody in this little city. There was no problem before the Nazis came. No, no. After, we had little to do with non-Jewish people because they were afraid. Some people we thought were good were not so good at all. There was a beautiful relationship between my parents and our neighbors... we lived there for a long time... the neighbors said, give everything that has some value to us, we'll save for you. We did, all our wedding gifts, my parents' things. When we came back after the war, they were just [shocked] that we came back. They said the Germans took everything. And I said, 'How come they didn't take anything from yours?' Later on I recognized different things of mine in the windows of stores.

"My older brother tried to leave. He was the first. He went as far as France with his in-laws, a lot of people. They couldn't get through to Spain or anywhere. They came back and had to move to Amsterdam, in the ghetto. They went to hide in the Turkish consulate. They were there a few weeks, I guess, and then the Nazis came there looking for somebody else and found them... and took them away .

"We lived with my parents... and my father said, 'No, I don't want a place [to hide] I can't hide myself.' He had no will to live, he was only fifty-five. He'd lost his oldest son. My parents wouldn't go when the Nazis came to our front door. We ran out the back and hid in the warehouse of a brewery, but my parents sprung into the river and tried to drown themselves. The Nazis took them out and transported them to Auschwitz, but they [the Nazis] thought we had sprung in the river too, and they were dragging the river the whole day for us, and that actually had saved us because they didn't look more for us. We hid all that day in a brewery warehouse.

"They [the underground] couldn't find a place for us because there was so many [looking for refuge] and we stayed in an abandoned house for six weeks during such a cold winter. We couldn't make a fire or cook. He was a very nice gentleman from the Resistance. He brought us food every night. He said, 'I cannot leave you here anymore, it is so bad. I take you home to my place.' He was a wonderful, wonderful man but his wife was not so nice. I don't think she was so bad. She was afraid. Very, very afraid.

"We were [put] In this very, very old house for a year and nine months [with] seven children from just born 'til thirteen years, and all the seven children never know that we were in the house. They take us, I'm ashamed to say, not to save our lives, they take us for money. We had no money with us. A reverend [minister], very, very fine people, and he paid them. I think the money from the church, they paid them to keep us. They paid fifty guilders a week for the place. Just a mattress on the floor, that was all. That didn't include our food. The underground brought us bundles of faked food cards. They [the people they hid with] kept for us the food cards. He was a very, very bad man. He was mean. He collaborated downstairs with the Germans. He took money from them. He was really a bad person. We never left the attic. We could do nothing... nothing. Just laying down on the mattress. We could talk to each other. The house was so big, no one could hear us. Then the English bombed the street. The whole street was flat, nothing left... only the house where we sat. The man said, 'We have to evacuate and you have to get out... tonight, or I'll shoot you.'

"We went to this Jewish doctor I knew a couple of blocks away. We stayed six weeks, until it was not safe anymore. We... went to [stay at] the house of the man who distributed food to the Dutch people. But there we had another problem. The young woman [his wife] couldn't stay away from any man... she couldn't stay away from the German soldiers. She drunk, she went to bed with them, she talk a lot. I look very Jewish, my husband didn't look Jewish at all. It was a very small house. You couldn't hide yourself. So my husband [who did not conceal himself] was talking to them because he was afraid not to talk to them. One of them was such a Nazi, he said to my husband, 'Did you ever have Jewish friends?', and my husband said, yes, he had some Jewish friends. The Nazi said, 'If I met one Jew I will kill him with my bare hands.' They were very good to us [the people who hid them], but we were so afraid the woman would talk to the Germans when she was drunk and didn't know what she was doing.

"All of a sudden we had to evacuate again. We didn't know where to go. It was only another few days and then the war is over. He [the man hiding them] bleached my hair [as a disguise]. By four o'clock we heard the war was over. Canadian troops liberated us.

"I'll tell you, we had such a big, big family. My father had sixteen brothers and sisters and my mother was from a family of fourteen, and my second [step] mother - nothing is left. My brother, two nieces, a nephew and an aunt, and that is it. My niece lives in Spain, my nephew lives in Australia, my other niece died in Israel.

'After liberation I read there were so many Jewish people that hid their children by non-Jewish people, so after the war there were so many of those kids, their parents were killed. So then we decided to take one. Now he's forty-five.

'We didn't have any papers. It took us more than a year to get our papers back. We couldn't start anything [business]; it was very frustrating. On the day my daughter was born we got our papers back. We did very good, but you know, I was very nervous after the war, and unhappy. When the Korean war started, I said to my husband I don't want to stay here anymore. My brother didn't want to stay anymore also. They went to Canada. My brother sponsored me. In 1953 my husband and I and four children, we went to Canada.

'Max [the adopted child] was six when we took him. He was afraid of everybody.

'My feelings are, and maybe it's not nice to say, that I don't like people very much anymore. Not at all. I'm very to myself. The experience I had was not so nice. Just a few people I really say... they were [wonderful]. But now I must say another thing. Would I have taken in people? I don't know if I would have done it. So who am I to judge? I don't know. But I don't like people. It's terrible. I'm close to my family and my kids and that's all. I always think when you cut them open and look inside, what do they think? I know that there are lots of good ones too. I know that too, but... my husband also felt very much this way. Max never, ever want to be Jewish. He didn't hide it. He's a very nice person, very close, but he never want to be Jewish. I think he thinks that if my [his] parents hadn't been Jewish, they wouldn't have been killed. He doesn't want to know anything about it [Judaism].

'In my town after the liberation there were four people left from the twenty three families.

'I am afraid it will happen again. I am so afraid. People can't understand. I couldn't understand, actually. Someone we met, Jewish people, survivors from the camps, asked me when I was pregnant with my first one, 'How can you bring a kid into this world?' I was young, I was very happy then, but now I can understand. If I were to do it all over, I wouldn't do it. I love my children very, very much, but I'm afraid for my grandchildren.

1 Mauthausen: Concentration camp in Austria in which rigorous slave labour conditions existed. Deaths followed quickly and in large numbers."