Finding Homes
Between 1942-1945, 24,000-25,000 people were forced to go into hiding.
Tina Strobos: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
"Menachem took me aside and said, 'Joseph, we will all go into hiding together. Give me your identity card, and don't make trouble.' It was a very hard responsibility for a young man like him to take on; he couldn't know whether he would succeed in hiding us."--Joseph Heinrich
Hiding Places
"From that day in August 1942, until the end of the war, I was hidden in eighteen different homes in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Doorn, and other towns and villages in Holland. "
-Sophie Yarri (To Save a Life)
"The entrance to our hiding place has now been properly concealed. Mr. Kraler thought it would be better to put a cupboard in front of our door (because a lot of houses are being searched for hidden bicycles), but of course it had to be a movable cupboard that can open like a door." |
At last, at the top of the stairs , he entered my room and gave a little cry of delight. "This is it!" he explained. Over the next few days he and his workmen were in and out of our house constantly. Six days after he had begun, Mr. Smit called Father, Betsie, and me to see. We stood in the doorway and gaped. Built-in book-shelves ran along this false wall, old sagging shelves whose blistered wood bore the same water stains as the wall behind them. Down in the far left-hand corner beneath the bottom shelf, a sliding panel, two feet high and two wide, opened into the secret room."- Corrie Ten Boom (The Hidding Place) |
One day a man came and announced he was a carpenter, sent by the underground to make a hiding place for us. My mother looked at me, "Do you know who this man?" I said, "No, of course not, but if we can't trust him, who can we trust?" So she agreed:"Okay, show him the attic."That's how I found out I was part of a network. They didn't give you an official certificate. This carpenter built sort of an attic within our attic , almost inaccessible. In one or two of the raids the Gestapo went up there and knocked around but they never discovered it."-Tina Strobos |
"My wife was smarter and much more practical than I was. Right away when Henny came, she told me to build a hiding place, in case the situation got worse. She and Henny were really pressing me, but I was too busy and couldn't see the use of it. Maybe I was more optimistic than they were. I took things easy and let the consequences come later. But they were simply trying to help themselves. Finally, it penetrated that they were right, and I built it. It's good that our family had that place, too, because later on it saved our lives." |
Rita Admiraal
In an interview, Rita Admiraal talks about her father Case and how he was part of the Resistance and helped hide Jews and find homes for them.
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"How fortunate we are here, so well cared for and undisturbed. We wouldn't have to worry about all this misery were it not that we are so anxious about all those dear to us that we can no longer help. I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while my dearest friends have been knocked down or have fallen into a gutter somewhere out in the cold night. I get frightened when I think of close friends who have now been delivered into the hands of the cruelest brutes that walk the earth. And all because they are Jews!"
-Anne Frank
The beginning of the war 24,000-25,000 people went into hiding. Out of that, 16,000-17,000 survived.