Before The War

They moved in with Grandma Tal, who gave them a flat on the second floor of her house because she wanted Sander to continue living nearby.

They were not young when our father, Sander, was born. Grandpa Shlomo was fifty-two years old, and Grandma Henriette was thirty-five. Shlomo was the bookkeeper at his uncle’s business. He died in 1927. 

Jacob Vaz Dias founded a wholesale agency and trading house for picture framing and all related equipment, especially the rods from which the frames were cut. He was a supplier to galleries, art shops, photographers, etc. Jacob contracted heart disease and kidney failure. He suffered greatly and died on 7 September 1928 at the age of 49. 

She had curly white hair. I didn't know anyone else with hair like that ... I remember once we went with her to a ‘dolldoctor’ with our ‘wounded’ doll that we pushed in a pink straw pram. We would also hang out at the Vondelpark, we’d be in the playground, and Grandma on the café terrace. I also remember our two grandmothers taking us there once.

During the day, they closed as boxes, with the bedding in them, so that we had a platform we could play on. It was original planning and precise execution. Father obviously enjoyed building those beds.

The large flat was on the top three floors of a five-story house, starting from the balcony up to and including the attic. The room with the small window under the roof was my room. Only the floor of the living area was heated. 

This is where we lived until the day of the expulsion on 29 September 1943. 

Grandma Tal lived alone for another two years in the house near the Amstel, but after the war broke out in the Netherlands, she moved to our new home, where she died on 6 April 1941 at the age of seventy-two.

We went to the same class and sat next to each other. We wore a pinafore. We learned to read and write in both Dutch and Hebrew. 

On 5 December, we celebrated our 7th birthday.

We handed out candy to all the classmates as well as the teacher out of a triangular paper bag. Then we were allowed to go up to the fourth grade, where Chanan studied, and to distribute candy there as well.

Since he knew he would not live long, he went to arrange his affairs for the day that he would no longer be. Mother’s brother, Uncle Jacques, was too young to take responsibility for the company his father founded. 

Grandpa Jacob Vaz Dias suggested that our father Sander stop his studies in Delft temporarily, marry his fiancée Fré, and take over the family business. 

Sander agreed. The business was thriving and promising when Sander started working there in 1928. Unfortunately for him,  the New York Stock Exchange collapsed in October 1929, marking the beginning of the world’s worst economic depression. Business waned and revenues shrank because people didn’t have money for framing pictures. It took the economy six years to recover and for business revenues to return to a reasonable level.

In 1935, my father went to Palestine to find out what options were available to the family if we decided to immigrate to Eretz Israel. He realized that he had to finish his engineering studies before immigrating. When he returned home, father continued studying to receive a certificate as an electrical engineer while also working in the business.

Since he was not interested in agriculture, he chose to study furniture carpentry and worked in a carpentry shop for 3 years, while studying drafting and technical subjects related to the profession and building woodwork. In 1936, he received an immigration certificate with the help of a loan of 1,000 Palestinian pounds, became engaged to Helena Hoek, whom he met in the youth movement’s camp, and immigrated to Palestine in April. Helena immigrated in 1937 and they married in Haifa. 

Of course, there were also less pleasant things, but these were insignificant. All these years we lived at the same address until 1940, when the war broke out and the trouble began.

She was awarded her doctorate in law on 1 July 1919. As a lawyer, her first job was as a senior official in the Municipal administration. Later, she worked at the Society for Social Work for the Benefit of Jewish Patients in Amsterdam.

She was a Zionist and a member of the Association of Jewish Women for Practical Work in Palestine and of the committee working to protect Jewish girls.

Upon his father’s death in 1921, Dolf inherited his share of his father’s business, but there was no real place for him in the business as a young partner. He left the family business and used the money he received to buy a business that unfortunately went bankrupt after a few years. He later became a retail agent for luxury goods. 

At the time, a market developed for home washing machines, especially in the provinces of the Netherlands where large families lived and for whom doing laundry was very strenuous. Curt Blüth began importing the “Easy” washing machines from America. He also set up a service and financing system that allowed customers to pay for the machines in installments. Dolf was in charge of financing services and supervised loans and payment tracking until the German invasion in 1940. 

I went regularly to visit her in Zandvoort, which is not far from our home in Bentveld. The fact that she had two houses, one in Zandvoort and one in Amsterdam, made a huge impression on me. The highlight was the flat in Amsterdam, with two bathrooms! One by the front door and one at the end of the corridor, which seemed to me to be endless.

In the summer of 1941, Grandma died a natural death at the age of 80.

I was 11 years old, and I was very sad. Today I see it differently: a lot of suffering was spared. If she had survived, she would probably have died in the gas chambers, and if not, she would have had to bear great sorrow for the death of her sons in various camps.

She later told us about the good life in Poland. Their economic situation was good but declined over the years. After graduating from high school, she worked as an office clerk. 

She wanted us to attend a good school that would set us on a path towards a good education and success.

The living area was on the first level and included a living room, a dining room, a study and the kitchen. The second floor included the bedrooms: a room for Father and Mother, Marco’s room, and a room for Sol and me. Aunt Eva lived on the third level.

Children from three age groups studied in one class, and each child learned according to his or her skills and pace. We did not sit in rows, and we could choose which subjects we wanted to study.

Because the education at our Montessori school was general and non-Jewish, my parents arranged for additional Jewish studies.

Initially, we went on Wednesday afternoons to a Jewish school in the neighbourhood, where we took religious studies. When we turned nine, a Polish Jew named Mundstück came to our home once a week to teach us. He was a nice man with an open mind, and he kept very busy, moving from house-to-house teaching children.

All our attempts to speak Hebrew with him came to nothing. He didn’t really understand us, and he was surprised that we couldn’t speak Polish. The whole family, together with Grandpa Ephraim, went on vacation to Scheveningen. We went swimming in the sea and had fun, but we weren’t really with him because we couldn’t communicate with him. 

This was the period after the Great Depression, and it took considerable courage to give up a good job for the uncertainty of a new business. Father Jo Reiner set up the factory with his brother-in-law Moishe Obstfeld, the husband of his sister Renée. The brothers-in-law divided the work between them, with Father responsible for buying leather and raw materials and overseeing sales.