It is an elite club, numbering 28,486 people from 51 countries, unimaginably courageous non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust.
They are the Righteous Among the Nations, honoured by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum and memorial, on behalf of the State of Israel.
The club was expanded last Thursday in Toronto when the honour was bestowed posthumously on two couples who sheltered Jews in Nazi-occupied Holland.
“What did they have to lose? I would say everything,” said Elizabeth Quinlan, whose honoured grandparents, Eimericus and Anna Maria Tijssen, took a young Jewish girl, Annie Muller, into their already large family in southeastern Holland.
Also honoured at the moving ceremony at Israel’s consulate in Toronto were Hendrik and Frederika Veldboom, who hid a Jewish couple in their rural farmhouse near the border with Germany and rescued their newborn son.
The ceremony, attended by Ontario MPPs and other dignitaries, was crowded by dozens of descendants of both couples who came from points across Ontario, Edmonton, Texas, and the Cayman Islands.
The dangers the Dutch couples faced were clear: Hiding Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe was punished by shipment to a concentration camp or being shot on the spot. Add to that tension food scarcity, regular Allied shellings, and neighbours and even relatives who were Nazi collaborators.
It was in 1943 when the Dutch underground brought Elia “Annie” Muller, then 2-1/2 years old, to the Thijssens after the child had been moved through several hiding places. Despite the fact that five of the couple’s seven children were still living at home, they welcomed the Jewish girl, who would call her saviours
Opa
(Grandpa) and
Moeke
(Grandma).
The Thijssens’ married daughter, Lena, helped with the cover story: She said she was friends with Annie’s mother, who was in a sanatorium. The child was kept safe until six months after Holland’s liberation in May 1945, when she was reunited with her parents.
In a video hookup from her home in Holland, Muller, now 84, recalled with deep thanks her memories of a big family, how
Moeke
sliced the bread, the hams hanging from the ceiling, the old telephone, playing outside with the other children “and being naughty.” No talk of fear or the sudden need to hide. An artist, her work has centred on themes of memory and resistance – “a tribute to the people who saved me.”
Presented were “certificates of honour” and medals inscribed with a quote from the Talmud: “Whosoever saves a single life, saves an entire universe.”
The Thijssens immigrated to Canada in 1950 and settled in Proton Station, Ont. with four of their children. They initially worked on a farm, then moved to Strathroy, Ont., where Eimericus became a groundskeeper at a local golf course, while his wife worked at a canning factory. They kept their counsel.
In accepting the honour on behalf of her late grandparents, Quinlan, a retired judge who lives in Barrie, Ont., noted Canada’s dismal record of admitting Jewish refugees during the war era, the lowest among western countries.
“The inactions of our country underscore the empathy and humanity of our grandparents, who could also have done nothing,” Quinlan told those assembled. “A supposed civilized country could ignore the suffering around it, but
Moeke
and
Opa
could not.”
Her grandparents never talked about their valour. The sentiment, according to one of their daughters — Quinlan’s mother — was “it was just something we did. Anyone would have done it.”
That isn’t so, Quinlan said. “It was dangerous. It was an act of heroism that until now, was unrecognized.”
Hedrick and Frederika Veldboom, meantime, were newly married and members of the Dutch underground who turned their rural farmhouse into a hiding place for Jews and young Dutch men fleeing forced labour. Among the Jews were Lena Kropveld and her husband, Yitzchak Jedwab, a cantor. Wed secretly in 1942, they spent months in a hidden space behind a wardrobe, relying on coded warning systems.
The dangers rose to new heights when Lena gave birth to a baby boy. She held her newborn for an hour before Hendrik Veldboom placed him in a cardboard box and bicycled in darkness to put the baby on the doorstep of the leader of the underground resistance, who took the child in despite having eight children. The baby, registered as abandoned, was reunited with his parents after liberation.
In 1952, the Veldbooms immigrated to Brockville, Ont., where they became farmers. What would they have said about being honoured as righteous rescuers?
“I think they would be terribly surprised,” said their daughter, Jantina Veldboom Devries, who lives in Hamilton, Ont. and accepted the distinction “I think it would be almost unthinkable for them because they didn’t see themselves as heroic. They did the right thing at the right time. Doing the right and honourable thing doesn’t need recognition, they would say.”
Idit Shamir, Israel’s consul general in Toronto and western Canada, echoed that sense of humility expressed by the two couples — indeed by many other Righteous Among the Nations.
“Were they heroes?” Shamir asked. “They would laugh. They were farmers. Parents. Neighbours who kept chickens and worried about harvest.
“Were they saints? They would object. They made mistakes. They felt fear. They were gloriously, beautifully human. We call them what they were: Righteous. Not perfect. Not fearless. Not superhuman. Simply people who saw clearly when the world went blind.”
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