GERRIT VAN LOCHEN
Dutch Rescuer
Gerrit van Lochen was born in 1916 in the small town of Winterswyk, in provincial Holland, but he grew up and lived as a young man with his parents and sister on their rented farm in Varsseveld. His upbringing in the Dutch Reformed Church instilled in him the precept that the Jews are "God's chosen people," so when the Nazi persecution of Jews in Holland began it seemed natural and correct for his family to extend help when they were asked. And they were asked. They saved the lives of at least five people.
The first was a Jewish woman who had some years earlier fled her native Germany, seeking safety in Holland. As the Nazi roundup of Jews in Holland began, the van Lochen's landlord had agreed with an underground contact to give this Jewish woman safe shelter on his farm. But at the last minute he had second thoughts and asked the van Lochen's to take her instead. They didn't hesitate. She stayed with them until the end of the war, nearly 4 years. She had three sons. The first didn't perceive the danger of his situation. When he and his family were asked to go to work in a German camp, they agreed, never to return.
The German Jewish woman's stepson was at first hidden on a neighbor's farm, but when the neighbor found his situation too dangerous he asked the stepson to leave. He came to the van Lochen's farm early in 1943 and stayed until liberation. In the same year her third son, along with a Dutch Jewish woman from Varsseveld came to the van Lochen's where they remained until the end of the war.
An unrelated young Jewish man named Herman also joined the band of hidden Jews on the van Lochen farm, making a total of five people to house, feed, and protect.
Throughout this period there were others who came for a day or two, including a young man who was hidden for a time in a tuberculosis sanitorium, posing as a patient. When that ruse was no longer tenable, he came to the van Lochen's farm where he stayed a few days until a better place could be found for him.
Go to the Next Page