Escape to Suriname—A Holocaust Christmas Story

Some might think the title, Escape to Suriname—A Holocaust Christmas Story, is a bit contradictory. Dutch Jews were fully integrated into Dutch culture, and many would have participated in the Sinterklaas and Christmas celebrations. This story is about more than that, and one I was not familiar with.

On Christmas Eve 1942, more than a hundred, mainly Jewish refugees, arrived in Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname, which was still a Dutch colony. So many refugees left everything behind in the occupied Netherlands and fled to Lisbon, and among them was Liny Pajgin, with her mother, sisters, and brother-in-law. The Portuguese ship Nyassa took them to Suriname. The group was interned in the Home for War Refugees—an old clubhouse in Paramaribo. After several months, they emigrated to the Caribbean and some to the United States.

The flight through Europe in 1942 was dangerous. Refugees had to cross several borders, each with its own risks: between the Netherlands and Belgium, Belgium and occupied France, occupied France and Vichy France and the border between Vichy France, and Spain. Many refugees didn’t have the correct papers and had to cross the borders illegally. Many desperate to cross, depended on so-called passeurs (essentially human smugglers). Liny Pajgin’s family used various passeurs at border crossings.

Once in Spain, they heard that ships were sailing from Spanish and Portuguese ports to the Caribbean. One of those ships was the Portuguese ship Nyassa. On 5 December 1942, the ship sailed from Lisbon to Porto, and on 10 December the Nyassa left for Suriname. On board were Jews and non-Jews who fled from the occupied Netherlands. They were well fed, which was surprising after their flight was full of hardships. Many of them were seasick, and their crossing was not without dangers—there were fears of attacks by German U-boats.

It was 1942 Christmas Eve when the Nyassa reached Suriname. The ship was too large to enter the port of Paramaribo, and everyone had to be transferred to a smaller vessel. The transfer was via a narrow, slippery ladder. Several suitcases fell into the water. This was standard practice in Suriname but a fearful moment for the refugees because they remembered well how the Jewish refugees on the German ship MS St. Louis were not admitted to Cuba or the United States. Some passengers were afraid of being discharged at sea.

The MS St. Louis was under the command of Captain Gustav Schröder. On 13 May 1939, it set sail from Hamburg to Havana, Cuba carrying 937 passengers, most of them Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi persecution in Germany.

Captain Schröder was a German who went to great lengths to ensure dignified treatment for all his passengers. Food served included items subject to rationing in Germany, and childcare was available while parents dined. Dances and concerts were part of the ship’s entertainment, and on Friday evenings, religious services were held in the dining room. (The bust of Hitler was covered by a tablecloth.) Swimming lessons were given at the ship’s pool. The hope was to reach Cuba and then travel to the US—but were turned away from Havana, and the United States wouldn’t let them disembark. They were forced to return to Europe, where more than 250 were killed by the Nazis.

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Fortunately, it turned out not to be a repeat of the MS St Louis this time, and they safely disembarked to the port of Paramaribo.

Almost immediately after arrival, all refugees were interned in the Home for War Refugees. The men and women were separated. There was hardly any privacy, and there were not enough sanitary facilities. The refugees were not allowed to leave the campsite, which was surrounded by barbed wire—at least for the first few weeks. They were not given access to their money. They were not allowed to make contact with the outside world. For some, this felt like a great injustice: they were Dutch citizens on Dutch territory.

As soon as the MS Nyassa refugees gained access to their money or found a job, they left the internment camp. Others received help from the Jewish Surinamese. The refugees found shelter together at a rental apartment in Paramaribo or in the homes of Surinamese people. Part of the group worked by joining the Princess Irene Brigade.

Not everyone stayed in Suriname, some moved to the Caribbean. For example, the Wolf family emigrated to Curaçao. The young Wolf brothers enrolled in school, and their parents worked in a clothing store. Here the MS Nyassa refugees often encountered other Dutch refugees who ended up in the Dutch colonies of Suriname and Curaçao, but also in Jamaica, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.

Others, like Liny Pajgin and her relatives, obtained the correct legal papers to emigrate to the United States and stayed there even after the Netherlands was liberated in 1945. After the war, some of the refugees returned to Europe.

Below is an interview with Liny Pajgin from 30 March 1990. The interview starts about 15 seconds into the video. Not only does she describe the escape but also the life in the Netherlands before World War II and the gradual introduction of anti-Jewish laws introduced by the Nazis.

Sources

https://www.oorlogsbronnen.nl/artikel/joodse-vluchtelingen-vinden-veiligheid-suriname

https://www.oorlogsbronnen.nl/artikel/joodse-vluchtelingen-op-st-louis-zoeken-veilige-haven

https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/nl/kennisbank/vluchtelingen

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The Pure Evil of Klaus Barbie

If there was a chart of The Top 10 Most Evil Nazis, I reckon Klaus Barbie would be on that list.

Known as “The Butcher of Lyon,” for his reign of terror in Nazi-occupied Lyon, France, Barbie not only sent Jews to concentration camps but also brutally tortured French Jews and Resistance fighters. His torture rooms had tables with restraints, ovens, and implements for electrocution. He personally was involved in the tortures using not only his fists but also whips and truncheons.

Victims were bitten by dogs and often had their arms and legs broken. This brutality earned him the nickname “The Butcher of Lyon.” He would also skin prisoners alive.

In a long list of unspeakable acts, Barbie’s operation in April 1944 against a group of children stands out. In the remote locale of Izieu, France, Barbie, never known for moral scruples or mercy, crossed a final threshold of criminality.

On the morning of 6 April 1944, members of the Lyon Gestapo had been tipped off by an informant that carried out a raid on the children’s home in Izieu and arrested everyone there. The group was enjoying breakfast when the Gestapo arrived. 44 children aged 4-17 and seven staff members were incarcerated in the prison in Lyon and deported to Drancy the following day. The deportation order was issued by Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyon. Barbie reported the arrest of the children and adults at the children’s home in a telegram that he sent to Paris. He gleefully reported to his superiors that he had uncovered “a children’s colony.” During the children’s detention in Lyon, the Germans discovered the whereabouts of some of their family members and were then taken to Drancy and later deported to their deaths in Auschwitz.

During the raid on Izieu, Leon Reifman, a medical student that cared for the sick children, managed to escape and hide at a nearby farm. His sister, Dr Sarah Lavan-Reifman, the children’s home doctor, his parents, Eva and Moisz-Moshe and his nephew, Claude Lavan-Reifman, lived at the home. They were all murdered at Auschwitz. Miron Zlatin, Sabine Zlatin’s husband, who ran the children’s home with her, was deported on 15 May, with two of the older boys, to Estonia, where they were shot to death.

By the end of June 1944, all the children and adults caught in Izieu had been deported from Drancy. Most were sent to Auschwitz, including all the children and five adults (among them Sarah Lavan-Reifman, who refused to be parted from her son Claude) and were sent to the gas chambers.

Despite all of Barbie’s crimes and evilness—it wasn’t enough of a reason for the US government to put him on trial.

In 1947, Barbie was recruited as an agent for the 66th Detachment of the US Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) alongside a Serbian agent of the Belgrade special police and SD, Radislav Grujičić. The US used Barbie and other Nazi Party members to further anti-communist efforts in Europe. Specifically, they were interested in British interrogation techniques (which Barbie had experienced firsthand), and the identities of former SS officers that British intelligence agencies might be interested in recruiting. Later, the CIC housed him in a hotel in Memmingen; he reported on French intelligence activities in the French zone of occupied Germany because they suspected the French had been infiltrated by the KGB and GPU.

The US Department of Justice reported to the US Senate in 1983 opens with the summary paragraph:
“As the investigation of Klaus Barbie has shown, officers of the United States government were directly responsible for protecting a person wanted by the government of France on criminal charges and in arranging his escape from the law. As a direct result of that action, Klaus Barbie did not stand trial in France in 1950; he spent 33 years as a free man and a fugitive from justice.”

Allegedly, Barbie helped to establish new concentration camps for opponents of the Bolivian military, where he resurrected his old torture techniques.

Barbie was extradited from Bolivia, where he had been using the alias Klaus Altmann Nansen, to France in 1983. He was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity. In September 1991, at the old age of 77, “The Butcher of Lyon” died of cancer.

Klaus Barbie was pure evil—evil for the sake of being evil.

Sources

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/klaus-barbie-izieu-childrens-home

https://allthatsinteresting.com/klaus-barbie

Click to access 1343754.pdf

https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/childrens-homes/izieu/index.asp

The Execution of Hans Bonarewitz

The saying goes, “Music can soothe the savage beast,” but what if it is the savage beast that is using the music as a cynical form of evil and torture?

In July 1942, Hans Bonarewitz attempted to escape from the Mauthausen concentration camp by trying to hide himself inside a box and was captured on 30 July 1942. The photograph above is of Hans Bonarewitz forced to pose standing next to the box he wanted to use to escape.

He was to be executed, but rather than just killing him, he was paraded through the camp like some circus attraction.

He was led to the gallows on a makeshift cart pulled by fellow inmates. The camp orchestra had to continuously play the song, “J’attendrai ton Retour,” (“I shall wait for your return”).

Another song, the traditional German children’s song “Alle Vögel Sind Schon Da,” (“All the Birds are Back Again’), was played immediately before execution. It was just evil on top of evil just for the sake of being evil and nothing else. How disgusted the musicians must have been, being forced to do this.

The information was discovered by Aitor Fernandádez-Pacheco, a filmmaker of the documentary film, “Mauthausen, una mirada Española,” who interviewed the former Spanish prisoner Mario Constante for his documentary.

sources

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1144948

https://ww2db.com/image.php?image_id=10954

https://boyerwrites.com/tag/hans-bonarewitz/

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Escaping a Jewish Work camp.

There were 4 concentration camps in the Netherlands. The best known was Westerbork, the other 3 were Vught,Amersfoort and Ommen.

A relatively unknown fact is that there were also an estimated 42 work/labour camps. Between January 1942 and October 1942 , the Jewish work camps in the Netherlands spread across the countrie from which unemployed Jews had to carry out outdoor work.

The work in the camps was heavy, in almost all cases waste ground had to be cleared. The digging is done by hand. The men work long days, from six in the morning to six in the evening.

On the night of October 2–3, 1942, during Yom Kippur, the Jewish men were removed from most of these camps. They were transported to camp Westerbork on the pretext of family reunions. Most of them were sent later to Auschwitz, Sobibor and other camps, where the majority were murdered.

Maurits Jakobs was one of the men who were interned in Vedder one of the work camps. The camp was run by a Dutch company, Nederlandsche Heidemaatschappij, although it was under supervision by the Nazi regime.

At the end of September 1942, Maurits Jakobs cycled through a pitch-black forest in the middle of the night. He had just escaped from the Jewish labour camp Vledder in Drenthe. At that time, hw was not yet aware that his old camp mates would be deported to extermination camps a few days later, via Westerbork.

He managed to escape from Camp Vledder with the help of supervisor Willems, who was employed by the Nederlandse Heidemaatschappij. Willems has parked his bicycle at the sandy path. But the initiative for the escape came from Jo Oldenburger, a former employee of Maurits.

Oldenburger knew that the situation for Jews was becoming increasingly ominous and arranged a hiding place for Maurits and his wife in the town of Emmen. In the evening Oldenburger is waited for Mauris at the camp with an extra bicycle. Maurits, who initially still had doubts, decided to go along and follows Jo via the sandy path into the dark forest.

Maurits knew. as long as he would see the red bicycle light of Jo Oldenburger, who cycled in front of him, it would be safe. That was the arrangement.. Suddenly the light disappeared from view and Maurits hid with bicycle and all in a ditch. But Jo appeared to have turned a corner. They agreed to stay closer together.

The bike ride of almost seventy kilometers was tough for Maurits, who had not been on a bicycle for at least a year. After a long and painful journey they arrived at the hiding place in Emmen. Thanks to various hiding places, the Jakobs’ couple managed to stay under the radar all this time. They both survived the war.

This was probably the most ‘Dutch’ escape one could imagine. Escape by bicycle.

sources

https://www.ru.nl/rich/our-research/research-groups/cultures-of-war-and-liberation/current-projects/projects/knhm-1929-1954/

https://www.oorlogsbronnen.nl/artikel/maurits-jakobs-ontsnapt-dagen-voor-grootschalige-deportatie-uit-kamp-vledder

https://joodsewerkkampen.nl/geschiedenis

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The death of Mengele

It is said to you speak not ill of the dead, but in this case I am willing to make an exception. Jospeh Mengele was beyond the shadow of doubt one of the most evil men who ever lived.

Although as a Doctor he was supposed to look after people and first do no harm. The Hippocratic Oath is the oath the Medical Students take, although the actual quote “First do no harm” actually isn’t a part of the Hippocratic Oath at all by the Greek physician Hippocrates . It is actually from another of his works called Of the Epidemics. One line of the Hippocratic Oath states “The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.”

Either way Mengele’s duty as a physician was to after the well being of those he treated. However he used his position in Auschwitz to fulfill his own twisted ideology and for his own sick gratification.

But as the title states this blog is about the death of Mengele. He had evaded prosecution . He had actually been in US custody. Unaware that Mengele’s name already stood on a list of wanted war criminals, US officials quickly released him. From the summer of 1945 until spring 1949, using false papers, Mengele worked as a farmhand near Rosenheim, Bavaria. His prosperous family then aided his emigration to South America. He settled in Argentina. He became a citizen of Paraguay in 1959. He later moved to Brazil, where he met up with another former Nazi party member, Wolfgang Gerhard.

After Wolfgang Gerhard moved back to hi native Austria it is believed the Mengele assumed his identity. The pair had sent several letters to each other. Some of the letters reveal Mengele’s lack of any remorse and how he felt sorry for himself , he complained how ‘bad’ his life was in Brazil, ironically I do agree with his notion of his ‘bad’ life in Brazil. He really should not have fled but should have faced the consequences of his actions and crimes, rather then fleeing like a cowardly dog with his tail between his legs. He should have been executed.

On February 7th, 1979 Mengele went for a swim in near a holiday resort near Bertioga, Brazil, during the swim he had a stroke and drowned. He died age 66 which is a lot older then many of his victims.

In 1985, a multinational team of forensic experts went to Brazil searching for Mengele. The experts established d that a man named Gerhard had died of a stroke while swimming in 1979. Dental records and a DNA test conducted in 1992, revealed that Mengele was the man who had drowned.

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Sources

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Josef-Mengele

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/23/secondworldwar

https://www.dw.com/en/a-german-town-and-josef-mengele-auschwitz-angel-of-death/a-52114089

World War 2 “Drag Queen”

 

 

One out of every five inhabitants of the town of Aalten located in the Achterhoek, the so-called back corner in the east of the Netherlands bordering Germany, was in hiding there during the Second World War. The occupier was on constant look out for people on the run, Jews or young men trying to avoid work in the labour camps. Even the churches in town were not safe.

On 30 January 1944, two Churches were raided simultaneously: the Westerkerk (Western Church) and the Christian Reformed Church. The catch was considerable: forty-eight young men were arrested and transported via the Dutch city of Arnhem to the Amersfoort Concentration Camp or to the prison in Scheveningen: Oranjehotel (Hotel Orange). Gerrit Hoopman (19) was the only person who managed to escape from the Westerkerk, thanks to the help of a Mrs Visser-Taal, who had been evacuated from the Dutch seaside village of Scheveningen when German forces seized the city for strategic purposes. She discreetly passed her cape, this bonnet (picture above)and her traditional overskirt to him. Disguised as a fisherman’s wife, Hoopman left the church arm-in-arm with her and rode off on a men’s bike

(picture below Mrs Visser -Taal ,on the left, and her daughter,-Neeltje)

 

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Escape from Auschwitz

Four Poles, Kazimierz Piechowski, Stanislaw Gustaw Jaster, Józef Lempart, and Eugeniusz Bendera, escaped on June 20, 1942 after breaking into an SS storeroom and stealing uniforms and weapons. In disguise, they drove away in a vehicle that they stole from the SS motor pool, and reached the General Government. Jaster carried a report that Witold Pilecki had written for AK headquarters.

On the Saturday morning of 20 June 1942, exactly two years after his arrival, Piechowski escaped from Auschwitz I along with two other Poles, Stanisław Gustaw Jaster ,

veteran of Invasion of Poland in rank of first lieutenant from Warsaw; Józef Lempart ,a priest from Wadowice; and Eugeniusz Bendera , a car mechanic from Czortków, now Ukraine. Piechowski had the best knowledge of the German language within the group, and held the command of the party.

They left through the main Auschwitz camp through the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. They had taken a cart and passed themselves off as a Rollwagenkommando—”haulage detail”—a work group which consisted of between four and twelve inmates pulling a freight cart instead of horses.

Bendera went to the motorpool; Piechowski, Lempart, and Jaster went to the warehouse in which the uniforms and weapons were stored. They entered via a coal bunker which Piechowski had helped fill. He had removed a bolt from the lid so it wouldn’t self latch when closed.

Once in the building they broke into the room containing the uniforms and weapons, arming themselves with four machine-guns and eight grenades. Bendera arrived in a Steyr 220 sedan (saloon) car belonging to SS-Hauptsturmführer Paul Kreuzmann, As a mechanic he was often allowed to test drive cars around the camp.

He entered the building and changed into SS uniform like the others. They then all entered the car: Bendera driving; Piechowski in the front passenger seat; Lempart and Jaster in the back. Bendera drove toward the main gate. Jaster carried a report that Witold Pilecki (deliberately imprisoned in Auschwitz to prepare intelligence about the Holocaust and who would not escape until 1943) had written for Armia Krajowa’s headquarters.

Forgotten History-Witold Pitecki the man who sneaked into and out of Auschwitz.

When they approached the gate they became nervous as it had not opened. Lempart hit Piechowski in the back and told him to do something. With the car stopped, he opened the door and leaned out enough for the guard to see his rank insignia and yelled at him to open the gate. The gate opened and the four drove off.

Keeping away from the main roads to evade capture, they drove on forest roads for two hours, heading for the town of Wadowice. There they abandoned the Steyr and continued on foot, sleeping in the forest and taking turns to keep watch. . Kazimierz Piechowski eventually made his way to Ukraine, but was unable to find refuge there due to anti-Polish sentiment.

Forging documents and a false name, he returned to Poland to live in Tczew, where he had been captured. He soon found work doing manual labor on a nearby farm, where he made contact with the Home Army and took up arms against the Nazis within the units of 2nd Lt. Adam Kusz nom de guerre Garbaty (one of the so-called “Cursed soldiers”).

His parents were arrested by the Nazis in reprisal for his escape, and died in Auschwitz; the policy of tattooing prisoners was also allegedly introduced in response to his escape. Piechowski learned after the War from his boy-scout friend Alfons Kiprowski, who remained a prisoner at Auschwitz for some three more months after his escape, that a special investigative commission arrived at Auschwitz from Berlin to answer—independently of the camp’s administration—the question as to how an escape as audacious as Piechowski’s and his companions’ was at all possible.

When Poland became a communist state in 1947, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for joining the Home Army, serving seven.

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The Vrba–Wetzler report aka the Auschwitz Protocols

On April 10, 1944 (some reports say April 7), two men escaped from Auschwitz: Rudolph Vrba (Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg in Topoľčany, Czechoslovakia. He took the name Rudolf Vrba in April 1944 after his escape, and changed his name legally after the war.) and Alfred Wetzler. They made contact with Slovak resistance forces and produced a substantive report on the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In great detail, they documented the killing process. Their report, replete with maps and other specific details, was forwarded to Western intelligence officials along with an urgent request to bomb the camps. Part of the report, forwarded to the U.S. government’s War Refugee Board by Roswell McClelland, the board’s representative in Switzerland, arrived in Washington on July 8 and July 16, 1944.

While the complete report, together with maps, did not arrive in the United States until October, U.S. officials could have received the complete report earlier if they had taken a more urgent interest in it.

In April, 1944 Vrba and Wetzler hid in a woodpile right under the guards’ noses for three days, traversed rugged and dangerous enemy terrain, and solicited the generosity of strangers. After an extraordinary 15-day trek covering 85 miles across occupied Poland, they finally reached people they thought they could help. At the Jewish Council headquarters in Zilina, Slovakia, they described the horrific activities of the Nazis at Auschwitz. Their tale was recorded in the Vrba-Wetzler Report, which they assumed would be distributed to the proper authorities, who would then force the Germans to stop the deportations and executions.

The men crossed the Polish-Slovakian border on 21 April 1944. They went to see a local doctor in Čadca, Dr. Pollack, someone Vrba knew from his time in the first transit camp. Pollack had a contact in the Slovak Judenrat (Jewish Council), which was operating an underground group known as the “Working Group,” and arranged for them to send people from their headquarters in Bratislava to meet the men. Pollack was distressed to learn the probable fate of his parents and siblings, who had been deported in 1942.

Vrba and Wetzler spent the night in Čadca in the home of a relative of the rabbi Leo Baeck.

The next day, 24 April, met the chairman of the Jewish Council, Dr. Oscar Neumann, a German-speaking lawyer.

Neumann placed the men in different rooms in a former old people’s home and interviewed them separately over three days. Vrba writes that he began by drawing the inner layout of Auschwitz I and II, and the position of the ramp in relation to the two camps. He described the internal organization of the camps, how Jews were being used as slave labour for Krupp, Siemens, IG Farben and D.A.W., and the mass murder in gas chambers of those who had been chosen for Sonderbehandlung, or “special treatment.”

The report was written and re-written several times. Wetzler wrote the first part, Vrba the third, and the two wrote the second part together. They then worked on the whole thing together, re-writing it six times.Neumann’s aide, Oscar Krasniansky, an engineer and stenographer who later took the name Oskar Isaiah Karmiel, translated it from Slovak into German with the help of Gisela Steiner.They produced a 40-page report in German, which was completed by Thursday, 27 April 1944. Vrba wrote that the report was also translated into Hungarian. The original Slovak version was not preserved.

The report contains a detailed description of the geography and management of the camps; how the prisoners lived and died; and the transports that had arrived at Auschwitz since 1942, their place of origin, and the numbers “selected” for work or the gas chambers.

Rudolf Vrba’s sketch of the Crematorium at Birkenau(translated in English)

The report provided details known only to prisoners, including, for example, that discharge forms were filled out for prisoners who were gassed, indicating that death rates in the camp were actively falsified.

It also contains sketches and information about the layout of the gas chambers. In a sworn deposition for the trial of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in 1961, and in his book I Cannot Forgive (1964), Vrba said that he and Wetzler obtained the information about the gas chambers and crematoria from Sonderkommando Filip Müller and his colleagues who worked there.

Müller confirmed this in his Eyewitness Auschwitz (1979).Auschwitz scholar Robert Jan van Pelt wrote in 2002 that the description contains errors, but that given the circumstances, including the men’s lack of architectural training, “one would become suspicious if it did not contain errors.

The report was indeed sent to Allies around the world. But to Vrba’s horror, some copies took months to arrive in the right hands, and the most urgent copy was suppressed by Rudolph Kastner, head of the Hungarian Jewish underground, who worried it would destroy a deal he was trying to make with the Nazis. Kastner’s deal eventually saved about 1600 Jews on his “train to freedom,” but according to Vrba and others, the suppression of the report resulted in hundreds of thousands more being deported to the gas chambers.

The Jews of Europe needed outside assistance, but by then, Vrba and Wetzler had all but given up hope that their report would ever trigger a coordinated Allied response. Copies had been sent to the British, Americans and even the Pope, but nothing had happened. Then, in June of 1944, a copy of the report made its way to British Intelligence. It confirmed growing Allied suspicions that the Nazis were murdering millions of Jews. The document was immediately forwarded to top British and American officials.

On June 15th, the BBC broadcast the horrific details of the report. Five days later, extracts were published in The New York Times. The Nazi secret was finally out. America’s first official response was to threaten reprisals against anyone involved in the Hungarian deportations. The Vatican added the Pope’s condemnation. But despite the Allied pressure, Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian head of state and puppet to Hitler, allowed the deportations to continue. On July 2nd, the US Air Force attacked Budapest, raining bombs on the Hungarian capital. Horthy believed the raid was punishment for his refusal to stop the deportations. But in fact, the timing was a complete coincidence.

 

The escape of Hugo de Groot aka Hugo Grotius.

Hugo de Groot (AKA Hugo Grotius) born in Delft on 10 April 1583 (the year before William of Orange was murdered). He was the intellectual prodigy of his age, and one of the ornaments of the University of Leyden. Early in life he became associated with Olden Barneveld, and when the struggle between Arminius and Goniarus broke out, he sided with the former, and exerted all his influence on the side of toleration.

Having, only in a less degree than Barneveld, excited against himself the prejudice and hatred of Maurice of Nassau, he was seized, and, at the age of 36, condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the Castle of Lovenstein, near Gorcum.
His escape is one of the most amusing stories in Dutch history. He was not denied books, and at fixed seasons these were changed by sending a large chest to and from. As the months passed, and the strictest search never discovered anything in the chest but books and linen, the guards grew careless. The ingenuity of his wife, who had been allowed to share his imprisonment, turned this slackness to account. She persuaded him on one occasion to occupy the place of the books.

When the two soldiers whose duty it was to carry out the chest came, they said it was so heavy that “there must be an Arminian in it.” With admirable tact, Madame Grotius replied, “There are indeed Arminian books in it.” Ultimately, after various narrow escapes, he crossed the frontier and reached Antwerp, when he went on to Paris, where his wife joined him. He was never allowed to return to the Netherlands.

He gave himself up to a great literary work which had been long in his mind, the De jure belli et pads, a treatise which at once gave him enduring fame, but which, like Paradise Lost and The Pilgrims Progress, did very little towards enriching the author. His other noted book was a work on the evidences of Christianity, published in 1627, and entitled De veritate religionis Christiana. He died an exile in 1645. And now the town of his birth honours his memory by giving him not only a tomb in the New Church, but also by placing his statue upon the most conspicuous site within her boundaries, in the very centre of that market-place where so much of tragic and historic interest has passed.

In the Town Hall hangs a portrait of Grotius by Michiel Janszoon van Mierevelt, the first in time of the great Dutch portrait painters. Delft is also associated with other famous painters, such as Van der Meer, whose picture of his native town is one of the treasures of the Hague Gallery ; Pieter de Hooch, one of the best painters of interiors; Paulus Potter, the great animal painter; and others.

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