GERRIT VAN LOCHEN
Dutch Rescuer
Caring for these people and maintaining secrecy involved the cooperation of neighbors, the doctor, the grocer, and of course the underground that provided the all important ration coupons. At least ten other people knew their secret. Throughout the war the van Lochen's farm door had a "broken" lock that kept their door always locked. Varsseveld was a place where locks were rarely used and it was customary for neighbors to walk into one another's homes without the formality of knocking or calling out first.
Even though the farm's relative isolation provided a degree of security, several raids by police and SS in the last months of the war were close calls that could have ended in tragedy for all. Fortunately the hiding place the van Lochens built above their threshing barn served its purpose with success.
As the American and Canadian armies were advancing in the spring of 1945, German soldiers were in retreat,
some crossing the Dutch countryside. On one occasion eleven soldiers took up residence on the van Lochen farm, drinking themselves to oblivion while the frightened Jews hid in the straw above their heads. On another day a Dutch policeman sympathetic to the Jewish plight, intending to misdirect an SS search for a particular man, led them to the van Lochen farm. He didn't know that they had Jewish people in hiding, It was another heartstopping close call. The tensions were so great for the Jews that when liberation did come, the German Jewish woman who had been there from nearly the beginning, at first refused to come out from her secluded place, not believing she was truly free.
Gerrit van Lochen, looking back on these events forty years later said, "We loved our neighbor. We rescued them from the enemy. We knew what was happening."
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