Mirjam Waterman
Mirjam's role in the resistance was to collect children whose parents were sent to Westerbork and deliver them to train station in Westerbork. She was born in 1916 and died in 1999. Keeping our fifty Young Palestine Pioneers underground meant finding safe places for them to stay, ration cards for food, money, books, making frequent visits to keep up their morale, and passing on to them letters from their friends and sometimes from their relatives. The need for places to hide was never-ending."-Mirjam Waterman |
"Many children were hidden in the institution. One of the youngsters was Kitty Frank. On one of my visits to this children’s facility, Kitty led me to a closed room and said, “I have another job here–to take care of two babies who’ve just arrived.” When she showed them to me, I realized that they were the brother and sister I had passed on at the train station just a few days earlier." -Mirjam Waterman |
Edelstein warned us that we could expect only the very worst for people sent east to camps in Poland or Germany. This was actually the first time that I heard about these things-not gas chambers yet, but that we could only expect nothing but death."-Mirjam Waterman |
We set up a small group- most of them were Gentiles, but it also included Jews like myself, Menachem, and Shushu. We started by making a list with the names of all the children to be rescued, and tried to place opposite each child's name of a family that was willing to accept them. We made photographs of each child for false identity cards, trying to find more than fifty places, the work went very slowly. We searched all over Holland.-Mirjam Waterman |
You might ask, why was it your business to worry about those kids? Well, we were trying so hard to resist the Nazis, it was just understood that we would attempt to protect those kids."- Mirjam Waterman