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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Waldemar Hugh Nods—Forgotten Hero

I have been doing posts about World War II and the Holocaust since 2016. When I started, I reckoned I’d have enough material to last for a year, two years tops. Seven years on, I am still finding new stories daily. Stories like that of Waldemar Hugh Nods.

Waldemar Hugh Nods was born on 1 September 1908 in Surinam, South America, a Dutch colony. His parents were some of the first Surinamese people born free from slavery. Slavery was abolished in 1863 in Surinam.

In 1928, 20-year-old Waldemar came to study in the Netherlands. His dark skin color caused attention and discrimination.

In October 1928, Waldemar met Rika van der Lans: white, 17 years his senior, and already married with four children. When they began their relationship, it caused a scandal.

Rika had already upset her Catholic parents by marrying a Protestant, Willem Hagenaar, in 1913. However, by the time she met Waldemar, she was separated from Willem and took their children to live in The Hague. She supported the children by renting out rooms, which is how she met Waldemar.

When she found herself pregnant by Waldemar, it led to alienation from her
children and their family. Their son Waldy was born on 17 November 1929. he was nicknamed “Sonny Boy,” after the Al Jolson song, popular at the time.

Rika Waldemar and their son were evicted from their home. They met an elderly Jewish man named Sam, who offered them shelter.

Waldemar completed his studies in 1931 and secured a job as an accountant. His new family moved with him to Scheveningen, a seaside district of The Hague, where they opened a guesthouse, with financial help from Sam, in 1934: Pension Walda.

Despite the Great Depression, the guesthouse was remarkably successful, especially with German tourists. This was mainly thanks to Waldemar’s perfect German, acquired by studying for his diploma in business correspondence in German.

Finally, Waldemar and Rika were married on 17 May 1937.

Right at the time, Rika’s affairs with her own children seem to normalize again when the Germans invade the country. Rika and Waldemar were forced to shelter German soldiers. After a while, the family had to leave because the area was being cleared for the Atlantic Wall. Because Rika mentions that she has five children, they are assigned a larger house. Then in November 1942, the couple began to hide Jews from the Nazis at the request of a young resistance fighter. They were seen by the Dutch resistance as ideal candidates as they were a small family with spare rooms in their home and were also free of the antisemitism that occurred among the resistance, which made Jews harder to hide than other Dutch fugitives.

Their son, Waldy, was unaware of the hidden guests until the day he was brought home by the police after getting in a fight with a boy who had racially abused him. This panicked his mother, who told him about the Jews and insisted that nobody must ever find out.

In August 1943, the family moved to a house on Pijnboomstraat where they continued to hide Jews and others. The resistance sent them fugitives others were unwilling to accommodate. Among them were Dobbe Franken, the daughter of a leading member of the Jewish Council in Rotterdam, and Gerard van Haringen, a Dutch SS deserter, who now regretted running away from home aged 17 to sign up. Just before dawn on 18 January 1944, the house was raided. Everyone, including Waldy and the hidden fugitives, was interrogated. Waldemar admitted to hiding Jews.

Rika took all the blame and was sentenced to life imprisonment. She was first imprisoned in Scheveningen, and from there, she went to Vught concentration camp (near ‘s-Hertogenbosch) and was eventually taken to Ravensbrück, where she was murdered in February 1945.

Waldemar was given a lenient sentence compared to his wife, whom he last saw at Scheveningen prison. He was deported via Vught concentration camp to Neuengamme Concentration Camp on 23 February 1944 and was given prisoner number 32180.

Waldemar’s dark skin stood out at Neuengamme. The SS guards remarked, “He was a chimpanzee who surprisingly turned out to be able to understand and perform complicated instructions to the letter in German.” Thanks to his language skills he was put to work in the camp post office and was able to communicate with his family.

Waldemar wrote his last letter to his relatives on 7 January 1945 in German as prescribed.

“[ … ] and Waldie my boy, how are you? Work hard and also do your best with football.”

He knew that the war would soon be over and hoped to return home soon:

“[ … ] back as soon as possible. [ … ] I am waiting for that now.”

In April 1945, due to the evacuation of the Neuengamme main camp, Waldemar Nods, like many other prisoners, was put on the passenger ship Cap Arcona, which was moored in the Lübecker Bay, the stretch of sea Northeast of Hamburg. On 3 May 1945, the ship was accidentally bombed by British aircraft. The vast majority of prisoners on board the Cap Arcona died.

Waldemar initially survives the attack. He jumped into the sea and swam to the coast (he was a good swimmer in Surinam—he already swam long distances in the river), made it to shore only to be gunned down by SS child soldiers, with orders to shoot any survivors.

Waldemar and Rika’s son, Waldy, grew up in a foster home. He worked as a financial and economic journalist at Het Parool and later at Bruynzeel in Suriname.

Waldemar died at the age of 85 in 2015.

Sources

https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de/vorbereitung/biografie_waldemar_nods.html

https://vrijheid.scouting.nl/scouting-in-de-oorlog/database-bestanden/burgerslachtoffers/766-burgerslachtoffers-waldy-sonny-boy-nods/file

https://olc.chocochaos.com/dosn15z.htm

Click to access life_story_waldemar_nods_2.pdf

https://www.oorlogsbronnen.nl/tijdlijn/Waldemar-Hugh-Nods/02/110382

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Hero—Albert Leonard Wittenberg

I had planned to write a post on the victims of Buchenwald that died shortly after liberation, I was sidetracked by stumbling across the story of Albert Leonard Wittenberg.

Albert was born on 14 April 1909, in Paramaribo, Surinam. Surinam was a Dutch colony in South America. Like many of his fellow countrymen and women, he moved to the Netherlands. He got a job as a firefighter in Amsterdam.

Before the war, he was an active member of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) and the left-wing Union of Surinamese Workers. During the war, Wittenberg was a member of the resistance. When the parents of their Jewish neighbour Betty Sarlui had to go to the camp in early 1943, Albert and his wife Janna took the six-week-old baby into their family as their child.

Betty is ‘registered’ via detours in the marriage record of this non-Jewish couple. Janna said she had cheated because her father, Albert, was dark and of Surinamese descent.

Betty said in an interview in 2020:

“Albert walked as proud as a peacock with me down the street in the pram. There, I lay, without the Star of David on my jacket—like a happy baby. I lived with them for two and a half years. When Albert—who worked for the resistance—was arrested, I stayed with Janna, and I really had a very loving start in the middle of Amsterdam.”

Wittenberg was arrested (during the summer of 1944), and at the beginning of September, he arrived at Camp Vught. When that camp was closed, he left with the last transport to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, to be transported from there via Camp Neuengamme to the underground V2 factory Dora-Mittelbau. The train never arrived instead they were stranded at a small station along the way.

On Friday, the 13th of April, 1,016 concentration camp prisoners were herded inside a grain barn, piled knee-high with straw, which, had been previously doused with gasoline. According to the accounts of survivors, the barn was then deliberately set on fire by German SS and Luftwaffe soldiers and boys from the Hitler Youth. Prisoners who tried to escape the fire were machine-gunned to death by the Germans guarding the barn, including the teenage boys from the Hitler Youth. Albert Leonard Wittenberg was one of 1,016 murdered at the Gardelegen Massacre.

On Saturday, 14 April 1945, the 9th Army of the United States arrives in Gardelegen, a village in East Germany. The soldiers encounter a gruesome sight—hundreds of burnt bodies lie in the barn of the Isenschnibbe estate. The Allied soldiers saw that the fire had just been extinguished. They’re just too late.

Russian and Jewish prisoners eluded their guards, in the vicinity of Estedt, Germany, while marching to the notorious Gardelegen concentration camp four miles to the South. Farmers turned over the escapees to the Nazis, who marched them to a remote spot, dug graves and shot them in cold blood. The U.S. Military Government ordered German civilians to exhume the bodies and provide decent burial. In the foreground is a 15-year-old boy, the son of one of the farmers who helped turn the victims over to the Nazis.

Albert’s wife and children, including Betty, survived the war.

On 7 November 2011, Albert and Janna posthumously awarded the Yad Vashem—Righteous Among the Nations Award. It was presented to relatives of their family. The city council in Amsterdam adopted the name of this park on 28 January 2020.

Betty Mock was the girl taken in by the Wittenberg family. She was the initiator and has thus ensured a lasting memory of Albert Wittenberg.

What’s so poignant about this story is that Albert was an economic emigrant and moved for a better life. He saved a child’s life, fought Nazis, and consequently was murdered for it. Just think of his story in the context of immigrants.

sources

https://www.oorlogsbronnen.nl/artikel/liefste-kusjes-aan-jou-en-de-kleintjes-het-einde-van-verzetsstrijder-albert-wittenberg

https://www.bussumsnieuws.nl/nieuws/algemeen/162613/-ik-besefte-opeens-de-holocaust-gaat-ook-over-mij-

https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=209532

Albert Leonard Wittenberg

https://beeldbankwo2.nl/nl/beelden/detail/a8339cac-0259-11e7-904b-d89d6717b464/media/8a567118-3855-540f-656a-fb10753c3501?mode=detail&view=horizontal&q=gardelegen&rows=1&page=3

Albert Wittenbergplein

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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Anton de Kom—Son of a Slave and Resistance Fighter

It is a well-known fact—that the Dutch, like the British, French, and Portuguese, were a colonial power for centuries. The Dutch influence is still noticeable around the globe.

One of the Dutch colonies was Surinam, a small country but considerably larger than the Netherlands, in South America between Guyana (former British Guyana) and French Guyana.

A fact that many Dutch historians appear to overlook or ignore is that the Dutch were one of the biggest slave traders in the world. Slaves were also used in Surinam by the Dutch for the rich colonial occupiers until 1 July 1863, when the Dutch, like other European countries, abolished slavery.

Cornelis Gerhard Anton de Kom was born on 22 February 1898  in Paramaribo, Suriname. He died on 24 April 1945 in Sandbostel, Germany. He was the son of a former slave.

De Kom was born in Paramaribo, Suriname, to farmer Adolf de Kom and Judith Jacoba Dulder. His father was born a slave. As was not uncommon, his surname is a reversal of the slave owner’s name, who was called Mok.

De Kom finished primary and secondary school and obtained a diploma in bookkeeping. He worked for the Balata Compagnieën Suriname en Guyana. On 29 July 1920, he resigned and left for Haiti, where he worked for the Societé Commerciale Hollandaise Transatlantique. In 1921, he departed for the Netherlands.

De Kom volunteered for the Huzaren, a Dutch cavalry regiment, for one year. In 1922 he started working for a consultancy in The Hague. A year later, due to reorganising the consultancy, he was unemployed. He then became a sales representative selling coffee, tea and tobacco for a company in The Hague. There he met his future wife, Nel. In addition to his work, he was actively involved in numerous left-wing organizations, including nationalist Indonesian student associations and Links Richten (Aim Left).

De Kom and his family left for Suriname on 20 December 1932 and arrived on 4 January 1933. From that moment on, he was watched closely by the colonial authorities. He started a consultancy at his parents’ house. Where the people from Surinam could complain about the poor living conditions they were subject to. The colonial occupiers saw him as a threat and were afraid he might cause a revolt.

On 1 February, De Kom was arrested, while en route to the governor’s office with a large group of followers. On 3 and 4 February, his followers gathered at the front of the Attorney General’s office to demand De Kom’s release. On 7 February, a large crowd gathered on the Oranjeplein (currently called the Onafhankelijkheidsplein). Rumour had it that De Kom was about to be released. When the crowd refused to leave the square, police opened fire, killing two people and wounding 30.

On 10 May, De Kom was sent to the Netherlands without trial and exiled from his native country. He was unemployed and continued writing his book, Wij slaven van Suriname (We Slaves of Suriname), which was published in a censored form in 1934.

De Kom participated in demonstrations for the unemployed, travelled abroad with a group as a tap dancer, and was drafted for Werkverschaffing (unemployment relief work), a program similar to the American WPA, in 1939. He gave lectures for leftist groups, mainly communists, about colonialism and racial discrimination.

After the German invasion in 1940, De Kom joined the Dutch resistance, especially the communist party in The Hague. He wrote articles for the underground paper De Vonk of the Communist Party, mainly about the terror of fascist groups in the streets of The Hague (much of their terror was directed against Jews). De Kom became a Surinamese resistance fighter and anti-colonialist author. On 7 August 1944, he was arrested. He was imprisoned at the Oranje Hotel in Scheveningen and transferred to Camp Vught, a Dutch concentration camp.

In early September 1944, De Kom was sent to Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, and forced to work for the Heinkel aircraft factory.

De Kom died on 24 April 1945 of tuberculosis in Camp Sandbostel near Bremervörde (between Bremen and Hamburg), a satellite Camp of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp.

He was buried in a mass grave. In 1960, his remains were found and brought to the Netherlands. There he was buried at the Cemetery of Honours in Loenen.

De Kom was married to a Dutch woman, Petronella Borsboom. They had four children. Their son, Cees de Kom, lives in Suriname.

The University of Suriname was renamed The Anton de Kom University of Suriname in honour of De Kom.

The University of Suriname also erected a statue in honour of Anton de Kom on the campus.

Anton de Kom was listed in De Grootste Nederlander (The Greatest Dutchman/Dutchwoman) as #102 out of 202 people.

In Amsterdam Zuidoost a square is named after him, the Anton de Komplein. It features a sculpture of Anton de Kom as a monument to his life and works, sculpted by Jikke van Loon.

The  Surinam government print money bills in honour of De Kom.

Photographs courtesy of the Family archives