(Author: Sybrandus Adema, Vol. 71, No. 3, Chanukah 2016)
“Regina Adema, ID I49344, dochter van Martinus Adema en Jikke Justina Blom, is geboren op 19 december 1902 te Bolsward, Nederland. Regina is overleden.” ( Regina Adema ID I49344, daughter of Martinus Adema and Jikke Justina Blom, was born on 19 December 1902 in Bolsward, the Netherlands. Regina is deceased.)
So began my internet search regarding a great aunt of mine, a larger-than-life mensch, singer and lingerie-seller. And, more importantly, a woman who singlehandedly sheltered and kept alive five Jewish men during World War II in her cramped Amsterdam apartment. A woman who offered hope to these trapped men in a country that saw roughly three quarters of its Jewish residents murdered during the Nazi-occupation. It was a place and time where, consumed by fear and hunger and even hate, one could be betrayed by one’s neighbours at the drop of a hat. But what would such a true legend be without romance? Because Regina and one of the Jewish survivors, Oom Sal, married directly after the war. They were inseparable until her death, where-after he died of a broken heart.
Growing up with Jewish neighbours and later friends in Cape Town (my father immigrated to South Africa and met my mother here), I sometimes mentioned the story, yet never investigated it – even when I met Oom Sal as a child and later lived in Amsterdam for a year. But suddenly I realised that the full story might be lost forever, especially with the older family members dying off. Accordingly, I embarked on a mini-search to get to the bottom of the history.
I began by sending emails to and talking with aunts and uncles – difficult, as they all live in Europe or Australia. I assumed that everyone would come up with a stack of information, photos and anecdotes, but strangely, most of them barely knew anything and their children were not even aware of the story. During the war, people kept quiet to avoid accidental betrayal. And after the war, many things were simply swept under the carpet.
On top of that my one aunt, who was more like a grandmother to me, selected the option of euthanasia a few years ago due to a long, painful battle with cancer. And she was the one who really knew it all! Too late to cry over spilt milk. However, I spoke to her daughter, my oldest niece (my father was the youngest of thirteen Catholic children), and cobbled together a few pieces of information from other family members. For the rest, the internet, especially www.joodsmonument.nl and www.geneawiki.nl, proved invaluable.
Shortly after World War I, a young Regina Adema moves to Amsterdam from the rural town of Bolsward in the province of Friesland. The city is old and large, yet boasting modern architecture in new residential areas such as the Transvaal Quarter (with its overwhelmingly Jewish population). Cinemas are opening and the amount of inhabitants not attending any church doubles. The ‘Grachtengordel’ (Canal Belt) embraces all, the Olympic Games are held here, the Roaring Twenties are swinging ahead and a post-war idealism is on everyone’s lips. Well, maybe not all – at the same time the Dutch Reformed Church splits over a controversy whether the Biblical snake really spoke in Paradise. But what does Regina care? She’s a very good singer and wants to perform with Louis Davids (real name Simon David 1883-1939), one of various Jewish Dutch cabaret artists at the time. Great-grandfather and great-grandmother are certainly not in favour of it, but she will have nothing come between her and the fun life she envisions.
Her musical career is not enough to survive on, thus she opens a ‘bh-zaak’ (a lingerie shop) in De Jordaan – then a distinctive working-class residential area in Amsterdam, today mainly inhabited by the rich. There is nothing lacking regarding her sense of humour: “Laat ze niet hangen voor een tientje,” proclaims the advertising in the window shop, appealing to women to not have them sagging to save a few guilders.
It’s May 1940 and someone with no sense of humour, Adolf Hitler, invades the Netherlands. The country capitulates within a week after Rotterdam is bombed to pieces and the Germans threaten that The Hague, Utrecht and Amsterdam will undergo the same fate. Little of the planned intentional flood damage to the Netherlands as part of its delay-defence was executed, so the occupation forces are quickly in full control. Rapidly, new laws restrict Jews’ movements, finally leading up to their mass deportations to labour and concentration camps from 1942 onwards. Since Tante Regina is friends with many Jewish artists, she is asked to provide some of them with shelter. Soon, there are four or five men in her small apartment, including a Salomon Shrijver. She must certainly have been in two minds about aiding them; if she is betrayed or caught out, chances are slim that any of them will live to tell the tale. As described in the diary of Anne Frank – whose house on Prinsengracht is not far from Tante Regina’s near Carré and the Amstel – everyone has to keep quiet all the time, the curtains remain closed and they are basically prisoners. Neighbours, friends or family can betray them, perhaps intentionally, perhaps accidentally. Not to speak of elements within the Amsterdam police, the German army, the SS brigades and collaborators who actively hunt Jews.
Whether Oom Sal still has any contact with his family during the first few months, one doesn’t know. What he would be aware of is the continuing war and Jewish deportations raging furiously outside the crowded apartment. In cyberspace a ghostly past comes to life, coldly diarising how many of Oom Sal’s siblings died during the war. In part due to the registration of Jewish inhabitants by the Jewish Council and the Dutch’s meticulous bureaucratic machine, it was relatively easy for the Nazis to apprehend Jews. That was the downside, but the upside is that, decades later, one can learn relatively easy that Oom Sal was born on 10 October 1903 (identity number I48766), that he was one of 14 children, and that two of his siblings died at a very young age. I also learn that five sisters and three brothers died during the war years: one in Amsterdam, and most of the remainder in the Sobibór concentration camp in Poland between January and July 1943 – two of them on the same day in a gas chamber. Which makes one wonder: were they at least together in those last moments?
According to Wikipedia the condemned prisoners, formed into groups, are led along the 100-metre long Himmelstrasse (Road to Heaven) to the gas chambers, where they are murdered using carbon monoxide released from the exhaust pipes of an engine. Local Jews, who better understood what was happening, are delivered in absolute terror, screaming and pounding the sides of the train carriages. Foreign Jews, on the other hand are treated with hypocritical politeness. Passengers from transit camp Westerbork in the Netherlands (originally built by the Dutch to house the ‘undesirable’ Jewish refugees after the country closed its borders to them in 1938) have a comfortable journey. There are Jewish doctors and nurses attending them and no shortage of food or medical supplies on the train. To them, Sobibór does not seem like a genuine threat.
About a quarter of a million Jews perish in the Sobibór camp, but inmates riot in October 1943 with hundreds fleeing before the authorities regain control. In your heart you cry out “yes, freedom!” only to read on that most escapees are eventually tracked down and murdered. No matter how well you know it, the information about the camp’s operation, the industrial scale and orderly way in which masses of people are driven to their deaths, leaves one shaking with rage. What went through everyone›s minds – those who were slain, and those that were slaughtering?
Sybrandus Adema is a journalist by trade, but since moving to the platteland, he spends most of his time tackling renovation and other DIY projects. He still writes, translates and edits, while also building websites and promoting the village of Rosendal via social and other media. This is a translated and edited version of an article that first appeared at www.litnet.co.za/op-die-spoor-van-regina-adema/.
Sara Speijer-Schrijver, sister of Oom Sal.
I even find a grainy black and white photo of another of Oom Sal’s sisters, Sara Speijer- Schrijver, who survives an unnamed concentration camp as her name is not on the list of the few Jews that survived Sobibór. Tragically, she dies on her way back to the Netherlands on a train near the German town of Lüneburg in April 1945. Less than 300km from the Dutch border, from home, her body is left on a station as an air raid prevents any funeral, much less one in accordance with Jewish custom. Her husband, Meijer Speijer, had died a month earlier in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, but their two children somehow survived in the Netherlands. Once again a relative mentions a link; she thinks one of the two, a woman, is still alive. But no, she does not have any contact with her. Also, one of Oom Sal›s sisters did survive and return to the Netherlands. This can only be Eva Schrijver as I cannot find a date of death for her. And yet nobody knows more about her…
For most of Oom Sal’s other relatives, there are no dates of death. Resident at 14 Weesperzijde, Amsterdam, is his father, Hartog Shrijver, who passed away just before the outbreak of war in 1939 and mother, Roosje Speijer (who shares a maiden surname with one of her sons-in-law). Years earlier, he had placed a tribute to Roosje in the Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad (New Israeli Weekly) to commemorate her 70th birthday. She died during the war in 1942, the websites maintain, but according to a relative she died before that. Since she was about 80 years old, one can assume it was due to old age and that she was not taken to the transit camp Westerbork. Both parents are also buried in the Jewish cemetery, Diemen, close to the city centre.
In occupied Netherlands, acquiring enough food was an enormous challenge due to rationing. People could only get a limited amount of government-issued food stamps, and in the last year of the war the ‘Hunger Winter’ sees severe shortages. Tante Regina faces innumerable military checkpoints to cycle hundreds of kilometres to Friesland where she can collect and smuggle food for herself and the Jewish men under her care. She sources it mostly directly from farmers, but also from her brother, Sybrandus Adema, who is a cattle trader in Leeuwarden. Apparently, the fact that she is not only flamboyant but also quite attractive helps her to get through the German blockades without any major incident.
The monument ‘Vrouw op voedseltocht’ (Woman on a food run) in Leeuwarden pays homage to the women that sourced and transported food during the Hunger Winter of 1944-1945. The memorial also pays tribute to the mother of the sisters Haanstra, who took care of two people in hiding during the occupation.
Unfortunately, this is all the information I manage to gather. But, in Friesland, I now hear for the first time that my grandfather had been picked up by the Germans in 1941 and taken to the Zaailand detention centre because a tenant of his had been found with a (banned) radio. Fortunately, my incensed grandmother, Geesbertha, marched to the prison within a day or two, read the soldiers the riot act, and helped to have him released. But another time she was in tears, according to an aunt, as she saw Jewish inhabitants in ‘Smitsbuurt’ behind her house being taken by the Nazis. “They will never return,” she observed prophetically; many people still thought that the Jewish population was simply being interned.
In the meanwhile, many of my older uncles were hiding in the countryside to avoid the increasing razzias – military sweeps by the occupiers to apprehend young men and send them to labour camps in Germany. At my grandfather’s house there was generally more food, also for distribution to others, which made a huge difference. So it was no surprise that five starving and scurvy-ridden children from Haarlem came to them for help after they had completed an arduous journey of hundreds of kilometres by road. The family found shelter for three of them, but the others were simply incorporated intothe large family and cared for until the end of the war. According to an aunt they were not the best-mannered house guests – much to the amusement of her and the remaining siblings, but to the dismay of my grandmother.
Back in Amsterdam, Regina and Sal had fallen in love with each other, but due to the war marriage was out of the question. The Netherlands had barely been liberated when they got hitched, on 27 June 1945. The few Dutch Jews who had survived formed a close-knit community in Amsterdam, and despite all the sadness and pain they retained their sense of humour. The one aunt who regularly visited the couple would apparently return to Friesland with a sore jaw – “caused by all the laughter!” When people came to visit them, it was always “party, party, party!” someone told me.
The war and suffering was not discussed much – for Oom Sal it was too painful. Life went on, and the couple once again ran a lingerie shop: she, the cheerful, upbeat woman; he a more reserved gentleman. They were unable to have any children – she had several miscarriages – but they financially supported various children in need. In June 1960, Oom Sal was at last paid compensation, totalling 1865 Dutch Guilders, for his Nieuwe Kerkstraat house contents that, like those of most other Amsterdam Jews, had been stolen (also called gepulst) under the auspices of the local government during the war (this according to a dossier held by the JMW, the national welfare organization for the Jewish community in the Netherlands). Decades later, the pair ended up in a Jewish old age home near Utrecht.
And I at last have their photographs, taken at a celebration on 19 December 1982. Tante Regina is turning 80 and they are singing and dancing together in ‘t Spant theater complex in Bussum – just a few months after I, as a nine year-old, first met them. In October 1983, Oom Sal turns 80; it is celebrated with a big party at the Oranje Hotel in Leeuwarden. His wife dies shortly thereafter, and something dies within him. He refuses to go to the funeral, and only attends under duress. Within months, he twice tries to kill himself before passing away of the proverbial broken heart.
Regina and Salomon at Regina’s 80th birthday, 1982
Age and lost love took a troubled soul to a peaceful place, but at least Oom Sal had a life. Not so in the case of seven other Dutch Salomon Schrijvers – with the exact first and last names – who were murdered in concentration camps, including Auschwitz, simply because they were Jewish.
But this is not the end. I unexpectedly receive an e-mail from New Zealand from a Jeanette Rooiman, who had seen my year-old request for information on a Jewish Holocaust website. She is tracing her Jewish family tree and knows a Schrijver (a distant relative of hers) who might be of assistance. I immediately contact Philip Schrijver with the information I have. “I read your story with great interest and many facts are known to me,” he replies. “As you know, only a few immediate family members of ours survived the war, including my father and his brother. My grandfather Philip (a brother of Oom Sal) was murdered in Sobibór in 1943.” Regarding my other questions, such as how his father and uncle survived the war, I am still awaiting answers. At least there is a generation of Schrijvers, a handful, who somehow escaped or survived the Holocaust. But who were the other Jewish men in Tante Regina’s house, and what became of them? The same can be asked about the other 17 000 Jewish people in the Netherlands who managed to remain hidden during this hellish time and survive. How many of their stories have been recorded?
Yet the final words, as quoted to me by an aunt, concern Oom Sal, the eternal optimist always hoping to meet a surviving relative: “Hij liet jaren na de oorlog de deur openstaan, want stel je voor dat er een familielid zou terugkeren!” (Years after the war, he still left the house’s door open, because what if a family member returned!)
