Sometime later I was in Hilversum, visiting one of our pioneer girls who was hiding in a home to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents. The director of that home was very helpful and took in many Jews.

Our pioneer girl said, "Come here. I must show you something. I have two little children to look after now."

She showed me the same two children I had brought to the station in Amsterdam. I was so happy to know where they were and to have contact with them again. Although there were two German raids on that house, when the war ended the children were safe. But their parents didn't come back. We had their names and birthdates and were able to trace them. We learned in exactly what camp and on what day they were gassed, only a few days after they had given their children to me.

Immediately after the war there was quite a bitter fight in Holland about the Jewish children who were rescued by non-Jews, who had no surviving family members to come back for them. The non-Jews had no understanding of the Jews' feeling that these children should come back to the Jewish community. They felt, as good humanistic people do, that all the people in the world are one big family and it made no difference whether or not they were raised as Jews. The non-Jews who hid them had very close ties to these children; they loved them and they wanted to keep them. With the two children I was concerned about it was a different situation, because they were not with a family but in a home, and it was not a good place for them to stay.

So in the context of this fight to get Jewish children back into Jewish families, I said that I wanted to adopt those two children, knowing that I did not really want to adopt them myself. I wanted to take them to Palestine, and that's what I did. They were adopted by a family in Haifa, and now this boy who was a tiny baby when I first saw him, is married and has a family with four children. He is very involved at the moment in learning about his family, in finding his roots. He lives five minutes from here and we see each other often.

Today we are all very close--the Zionist pioneer children, and all those non-Jews who helped. We share a past together. It was not only the experiences of the war, but also coming to Palestine--as many of us did--and trying to build a new country here together. I feel closer to them than to my own family.

The Westerweel Group Mirjam Pinkhof helped form and tirelessly worked for saved the lives of approximately three hundred and twenty Zionist Young Pioneers out of the eight hundred and twenty-one who were living in Holland after 1938. They helped smuggle about one hundred and fifty Young Pioneers into France, of whom approximately seventy reached Spain and Palestine during the war. Of the forty-eight teenagers living in Loosdrecht in 1942, thirty-four survived the war, or about seventy percent. In comparison, only twenty percent of the Jewish people living in Holland during the war survived the Nazi occupation.

Mirjam's husband, Menachem Pinkhof, died on July 15, 1969.

Mirjam Pinkhof gave this interview in her home in Haifa, Israel, on April 4, 1988.