I am a thrift store shopper. I just love to check out the stuff that is donated to my favourite second-hand stores. Even though I am closer to needing to downsize rather than fill a house with more stuff, every once in a while, a treasure comes across my path.
Last spring I spied a silent auction item on the Facebook page of the ReSource Thrift Shop on Upper Gage that intrigued me.
One of their donators had wrapped up their donation in a paper which contained a note. It was a large green vase.
The note read:
Whoever is unwrapping this:
May you have a blessed day:
May you be happy
May you be healthy
May you be free from harm
Big love,
Dori
Now it just made my day to see that. It was a beautiful reminder that wishing the best for others can do so much good for our souls. So I went to place a bid on item # 75. A few bids were already on the sheet and I decided to bump up the bid to increase the chances that I would be the lucky recipient of this beautiful vase.
A few weeks later the silent auction was over and I got a phone call a few days after that to let me know I had won.
I happily went in to pick up and pay for a green vase that I really did not need. What I did need was the reminder that people like Dori make the world a better place when they do little things with love.
It would be such a thrill to find out who Dori is and to have the opportunity to thank her for that reminder.
So Dori, if you are out there…thanks. Big love right back at you.
8 “Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? 9 And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’
Like the woman in the parable of Luke 15, I know what it is like to be looking for a lost item. Things come and go around here. Some quite unfathomably as a matter of fact. Some things we find again and others are lost forever.
Martin has never liked wearing his wedding ring. It always cut into his finger and he never felt safe wearing it at work so he would only wear it on special occasions. Then one day it disappeared. We know he had it in October of 2000. We are pretty sure he lost it sometime before 2004. We searched when we realized it was missing but there was no sign of it and we came to the conclusion that it had been lost forever. Martin always said he didn’t need to wear a ring because he has a particular hangdog look that would easily prove to anyone that he is a whipped husband. 😆
In 2009 we got a new washing machine and set it up in our basement where it merrily washed our clothes – our mentionables as well as our unmentionables since then. Earlier this month we noticed there was some water pooling under the machine. Martin investigated by moving the machine away from the wall. Under the machine sat a discomforting amount of cobwebs and dust and unidentifiable flotsam and jetsam of the life of a middle aged couple. Martin then spied a ring under the machine that has not been moved since 2009. Yes, you guessed it. It was his wedding ring. Wow.
It must have been sitting in a shirt or pants pocket since before 2004 and then fell out and rolled under the machine when I was doing the laundry sometime after 2009.
Rejoice with us for that which was lost is now found.
It began with a picture. An old photograph treasured by my mother-in-law that held a mystery.
Who were these two girls? The story takes place during World War 2 in Groningen, The Netherlands. What was their fate? My mother-in-law did not know the names or the fate of the girls but their part in her life affected her deeply. Even if she had remembered names they would have not likely been their own as Jewish people were forced to take on new identities to stay safe. My mother-in-law had passed away in September of 2012 and so the mystery remained.
This past summer I did a search of the photograph through Google Lens and there was a connection for the girl on the left. Her name was Elsbeth (Betti) Devries and she died in a concentration camp. It still boggles my mind that any invading force would consider a 13-year-old girl deserving of death. I wrote a bit about what I found out about Elspeth in an earlier blog post.
But I still did not have any information about the girl on the right. She looked older. Was she related? What was her fate?
My cousin Klaas lives in the Netherlands and is quite connected to the historical groups. He passed along my information request to Bas, who in turn contacted Ally who then replied to me with a remarkable story.
The mother of Betti died in 1982. Her obituary gave a clue about Herta.
It appears that the girl on the right was Betti’s cousin Herta. I cannot be positive about this as I have not been able to connect with Herta’s children. Herta and Betti shared grandparents through their fathers and they both came to the Netherlands from Germany. I found a few articles online about Herta. Sometimes some of the translation details are not strictly accurate but it gives us a sense of some of the history. An April 2012 article from ‘Trouw’ was particularly helpful. Some of it is reprinted below. Herta de Vries was born on September 24, 1922 in Leer (Ost-Friesland) in Germany. She passed away on April 2, 2012 in Rotterdam.
Herta de Vries was born in German Leer and of Jewish descent. She fled to the Netherlands at the end of 1938, as a sixteen-year-old girl, together with her father from the Nazis, just after the Reichs Crystal Night when violence against the Jews erupted in Germany. Her mother had recently died of a kidney condition that could have been cured if she had been given the right medicines, but which she was denied as a Jewess.
It appears Herta spent some time (perhaps in 1939) at the Emmahuis, a sort of refuge home. An article was found with her words regarding the experience.
“From there I went to the Emmahuis in Wijk aan Zee, that was terrible! It was not as terrible anywhere else. In the first place of course you do feel upset, because you come from a family. Those barracks, I knew that was temporary, but the Emmahuis, the people in charge were so terrible, I don’t know if that was because that was cheaper, they did not speak their languages, no German, and there was one there who could really use her hands, and she did that too!We had to go out for walks, it was cold, and we had to go once or twice per day, I don’t remember exactly. And the matron, she would hand out the mail at a long table every morning. It was my birthday while I was there, and I got a postcard from an uncle in Germany. I was very, very, very unhappy there. I cried so much there, I have never cried so much in my life, that is how unhappy I was.”
After wandering around, Herta and her father ended up in Musselkanaal at the beginning of the war, where relatives who had previously emigrated to the Netherlands already lived. There it also turned out to be unsafe for Jews when Herta’s uncle and later her father were arrested – both died in a concentration camp. In the meantime, a boy from a seafaring family in Scheveningen had heard about the difficult fate and precarious situation of the German De Vries family in the north of the country. The war had already wreaked havoc in that Reformed Van der Zwan family: the merchant ship that father was sailing on had been hit by a German torpedo in 1941 and he had died in the process. Son Willem, a grammar school student, received permission from his mother to pick up the Jewish family De Vries. He took Herta (and her aunt Mary and daughter Elsbeth??) from Musselkanaal by bicycle to Winschoten station, and then by train to The Hague. Herta (her alias was Annie Bakker) came to live in the house of the Van der Zwan family as a woman in hiding. She and Willem fell in love and wanted to get married. That was postponed because on the intended day the message came in that cousin Elsbeth, who had been arrested (again) by Dutch agents in 1943, had not survived the war. She had been gassed in Birkenau.
Willem and Herta were engaged for six years before they got married in 1952. In those six years, Willem studied theology at the Free University to become a minister. Herta was baptized, but did not deny her roots: “I am and will remain Jewish.” As a pastor’s wife, she sometimes had difficulties, especially in the orthodox congregation in Overijssel. Willem van der Zwan was nicknamed ‘the red minister’ because of his progressive views. Herta was his mainstay. The spouses crept closer to each other in terms of faith, and the two of them seemed to want to close the gap between Christianity and Judaism. Although Herta was not academically trained, she was certainly as intelligent as her husband. She liked to read, especially literature and poetry, in Dutch, a language she had already mastered while in hiding by reading children’s books by WG van der Hulst and Anne de Vries. She spoke it flawlessly and without an accent. She was a vivacious woman who enjoyed every day and who was fond of her husband and four children and was also extremely humorous.
In the Rotterdam pastor’s family, the meals on Friday were slightly tastier than on Sunday. That was the tangible influence of Herta. She had been baptized in the Reformed Church after the war, but for her, the eve of the Sabbath had more meaning than Sunday all her life, and that was reflected on the table.
William passed away in 2000. It was a difficult time for his widow. Life threatened to lose its luster but she climbed out of the valley. She was pleased that all her seven grandchildren were given Jewish names, she saw it as a tribute. She applied for the Yad Vashem award posthumously for her husband. Willem himself had always refused, because he did not feel like a hero. But Herta felt that the man who, along with his siblings, had saved her life and the lives of others, more than deserved it. It became a mission for her. When the letter from Jerusalem came in with the good news, she cried for a long time—with relief (because it took so long that she feared the decision would be negative).
When she turned 89, her children gave her an iPad and she had mastered the device in no time. She emailed, Skyped, exchanged photos and surfed the internet. She hated it when the connection went down. On a daily phone call from one of her children, when asked how she was doing, she replied, “I’m not feeling well and I don’t have internet either.” The iPad was used, even during the last weeks of her illness when it was clear that the end was near, or, in her words, the book was full. Herta de Vries died on Monday 2 April, 2012 and was buried four days later, on Good Friday. That was quite special, because that year the Jewish Passover started on that day. That is not the case every year. Thus, at the end of it, the two faiths that defined her life reunited.
So that is a little bit about Herta. I am grateful for the opportunity to read a little bit about her life. Maybe one day I can be in touch with her family to confirm that she is, indeed, the girl in the picture with Betti.
No real information came of that post but the other day while on my Android I opened the photograph and clicked on Google Lens and discovered…
part of the Jewish Monument project
I found her!
I came across lots of information to sift through. Some of it led to dead ends and others just opened up more and more information. Here is some of what I found.
Which led to more information about Betti.
the funeral card
grateful for Google translate
Then down a rabbit hole of investigating.
I found her father and uncle had also been killed.
Betti and her father and her uncle.
her father
her mother
Such a sad, sad story but I am grateful to now know just a little bit of it. Maybe, one day, I can see the memorial of Betti in person.
Some answers only bring more questions. Whatever happened to her mother? Who is Herta? Who is the other girl in the first picture? There is a family recollection that the other girl might have come back from the war.
Anita Joldersma 