Mirjam Pinkhof Tells Her Story (continued)
In mid 1941, bowing to German pressure, Kees Boeke asked Mirjam to resign from teaching at the Children's Werkplaats, because she was Jewish.
After her dismissal from the Werkplaats, Mirjam returned to her parents' home in Loosdrecht, where, in the fall of 1941, she opened a school for the local Jewish children who, by German decree, could no longer attend their public school. Sixty students came to her house everyday.
The Second Youth Aliyah Group: Not far from my parents' house in Loosdrecht was a place called Paviljoen Loosdrechtse Rade. About seventy teenagers, aged twelve to sixteen, were living there with their leaders, all members of another Youth Aliyah group. Most of them were German Jewish refugees, although there were also a few Dutch people among them. The boys worked with the local Dutch farmers, studying agricultural practices, while the girls worked with the farmers' wives, learning how to milk cows, perform household tasks, and everything else a farmer's wife needs to know. Some of the boys were learning other skills, such as carpentry or blacksmithing. All of the Young Pioneers were devoted to preparing themselves for a new life in Palestine.
I had never given much thought to Zionism before the war, but when Hitler invaded Poland in '39, I began to think about it. When the Germans occupied Holland in '40, I became a Zionist. It was only then that suddenly something inside told me I belonged to the Jewish people, to the Jewish side of the whole thing. I joined the Zionist youth movement. Like most people starting something new, I entered into it with a great deal of enthusiasm.
Being so close, I had a lot of contact with the Loosdrecht Youth Aliyah house--I became very involved in their cultural life. For every Jewish subject, for a Jewish holiday, or the Friday evening Sabbath, for instance, I invited the Palestine Pioneer leaders to come and talk to my pupils. As I became more deeply involved with the Zionist youth movement, I sought the advice of the Youth Aliyah house leaders on those matters as well. This was in late 1940.
By 1942 the school at my parents' home was finished. The Germans opened a school just for Jewish pupils, but they soon deported all the students to Westerbork via Amsterdam, including most of the children who had attended my Loosdrecht school.
As the round-ups of Jews became more and more frequent, the Loosdrecht leaders and I started to think about what to do with all the Young Pioneers in their care. 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.
Even so, most of the leaders thought that hiding them would be completely impossible. In the first place, it was not very easy to find families who were willing to save people, especially teenage children who could barely speak Dutch. Living together in a closed, isolated world, they had had virtually no experience with the gentile world. They were very Jewish.
One of the leaders was Joachim Simon--everyone called him Shushu. He was an exceptionally fine man, who had a great influence on all the children, but he was very pessimistic about what Jewish people could do to save themselves from the Nazis. He was German and had already been in a concentration camp in '38, after Kristallnacht. Believing he understood the German mentality very well, he had no hope that anything good would come out of it for the Jews. He was completely convinced that the Nazis were all powerful, and we could never hope to win--it was absolutely useless to resist.
Another leader was a Dutchman, Menachem Pinkhof. He was also completely pessimistic about what was happening in Germany, although at that time no one in Holland knew anything about death camps or gas chambers. I must say we Dutch people were very naive; we couldn't even imagine all the things that had actually happened already.
One day a man who knew much more about the situation than we did came to Loosdrecht. The Germans had sent this man, Edelstein, from Prague to help set up the Jewish Council in Amsterdam. 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 expect nothing but death.
Menachem was the only one of the four leaders who had made up his mind that we should never give ourselves up to the Germans. He was the one who finally persuaded Shushu that we must try to find safe hiding places for all these children. Shushu thought it was impossible. But he changed his mind when I approached Joop Westerweel, asking if he was willing to help us. I knew his personality and felt confident of his answer. I also knew that he had connections with a large group of people who wanted to rescue Jews.