When Hitler declared war on Poland in 1939, Bert Bochove was working in Finland as a mill manager. He was advised to return home to Holland. At first he joined his two older brothers in running the family retail business in their native town, Woubrugge. Bert was twenty-nine years old, and engaged to be married to Annie, a phamacist living in Amsterdam. Wanting to be his own boss, he borrowed money to buy a drugstore in Huizen, a fishing town of ten thousand on the Zuider Zee , about eighteen miles from Amsterdam. The drugstore was on the ground floor of a fine corner building, with spacious living quarters above.
BERT BOCHOVE: The Germans came over the border into Holland in May 1940. One year later, on the very same day in May, Annie and I married, and traveled to Huizen to open the store. Pretty soon we had our first guests in the house, but they were not Jews. They came because of my friend Jaap van Rijn, who helped me with the soap.
By then we had ration cards that allowed people maybe half a pound of soap a month, but it was seldom in the store to buy. Later it was the same with food, too. In a town like Huizen, the women kept their kitchens clean. They waxed and polished the counters, and made everything shiny and spotless, and then didn't use any of it, so it would all stay clean. They never ate in the kitchen, shoes stayed outside--slippers only allowed in the house. They washed the whole day long, and used a lot of soap. I think their souls were not so clean, however, but that's another story. The point is, soap was almost impossible to get.
Jaap, my friend from Woubrugge, owned a paint factory. The Germans had already requisitioned all of his stock to be sent to Germany, but before they came for it, he had changed the measuring sticks, and managed to keep several thousand liters of linseed oil in barrels buried in the yard.
"Here's what I'll do," he told me. "I'll make soap for you to sell in the store."
He made highly concentrated pieces of hard soap, about twenty pounds each; I made small pieces of soft soap from these, the stuff the housewives wanted most.
I could make about a hundred and twenty pounds of soft soap from each of Jaap's pieces, and I got two or three. On Saturdays the customers brought me a plate with their name on it. On Mondays they picked it up filled with soap. For a big family I put on a little bit more. And I sold it for the normal price, which in those times was unbelieveable.
Having that soap in my new store was a tremendous advertisement. Jaap taught me several other tricks too, that made my store well known in nearby towns. People came from all over the place, sometimes as many as sixty in a day.
One time--it was late in the morning--I went to pick up more soap from Jaap. His wife was a strong woman, and didn't show much agitation, but I could see that something was wrong. Early that morning they had had a telephone call from the bookkeeper at the factory saying that the Germans were there looking for Jaap--he must stay at home.
Jaap had said to his wife, "I've got nothing on my conscience. I'll go."
Brought up in a small town, he had a lot of self confidence; he was a proud man. Whenever he passed an N.S.B.'er (member of the Dutch Nazi party) on the street, he would say things like, "Better be careful! It will be a short war!" He was not ready for those Nazi fellows. Even though he was ten years older than I was, in some ways he was absolutely like a child: he didn't understand things. It would have been easy for him to stay home a couple of hours that day, but no, he went to the factory. They arrested him instantly, and he never came back.
Staying in Jaap's house were a young Dutch couple who had done quite a lot of underground things. They had good false papers, and they were coming and going all the time. After they arrested Jaap at the factory, the Germans came to their house, so of course, the couple hid.
As I was leaving, Jaap's wife said, "What should I do about them?"
"I'll take them out of your way. There's enough misery here." So I took them with me to Huizen, and they stayed in our house for a couple of months.
They were very well educated people, but they played a lousy trick, which I didn't find out about right away. The man told me stories about how he had supposedly brought Jews over the border to Spain, but it was pure fantasy. He knew how to talk about it, but he didn't know how to do it.
He took money from Jewish people and then did nothing, while the Jews waited to hear from him. Slowly, I found these things out--that they were a bit like parasites--and then I put them out of the house.