the hague | After Yvonne van Gennep-Bouma discovered that Holocaust victims used to live in what is now her home, she began to think about them constantly.
At night, van Gennep-Bouma imagined the former occupants preparing to turn in. And in the morning, she wondered where they had their breakfast.
That was in 2012, she recalled, talking to a visitor in the manicured three-story townhouse in The Hague where she has lived with her husband and three children since 2001.
It was also in 2012 that van Gennep-Bouma, a nurse in her 50s, started to research the tragic story of Barend Koekoek, who lived here with his wife and son until they were evicted and murdered in the genocide.
In researching their story, van Gennep-Bouma said she relied on help from a historian who studied The Hague’s Jewish community. Koekoek, she learned, joined the Nazi-sponsored Jewish Council through his friendship with the controversial Friedrich Weinreb, a Jewish author accused and later imprisoned for taking money from other Jews he falsely promised to protect. Koekoek eventually eschewed the privileges he would have been extended as a member of the council, instead insisting on boarding a death transport to Auschwitz with his ailing son, 5-year-old Henry Martin. His wife, Goderta Frederika Koekoek-Micheels, perished in Auschwitz on Oct. 30, 1944, at the age of 33.
Though she has to hold back tears while talking about certain parts of the story, van Gennep-Bouma said knowing Koekoek’s fate ultimately helped her find peace and learn to live with the Koekoeks’ memory. In February, she completed a two-year effort to have memorial cobblestones placed outside her home bearing the victims’ names.
On May 1, van Gennep-Bouma decided to share the family’s story by joining Open Jewish Houses, a grassroots project featuring dozens of property owners and renters of former Jewish homes. Each year ahead of Holland’s national memorial day for its World War II victims, they open their homes to strangers for lectures about the Jews who used to live there.
At a time when survivors are increasingly scarce, van Gennep-Bouma said, “Buildings can tell the story in a very powerful way.”
The Open Jewish Houses project was born out of a website, joodsmonument.nl, which lists the former addresses of 104,000 Dutch Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Having found his own address in the database, advertising copywriter Frits Rijksbaron urged other Amsterdam residents of former Jewish homes to place a “Jewish home” poster in their windows.
The action created a small community in Amsterdam, which in 2012 saw the first Open Jewish Houses event. The following year, the project spread to five other cities and now encompasses dozens of homes in 16 municipalities, with 10,000 visits expected this year on May 4, the Netherlands’ day of Remembrance of the Dead.
In Vught, an eastern town infamous for the nearby concentration camp run by the Nazi SS, Open Jewish House host Kees van den Heuvel said the story of the Frankenthals, Jewish refugees from Germany who lived in what is now his home, “is something very familiar to countless Syrians today.”
Van den Heuvel and his wife, Bernadette, knew their house used to belong to Jews — a wine dealer and his brother who were killed, and a dentist who avoided deportation thanks to his marriage to a non-Jewish woman — because they found “little signs,” he said. These included special tiles favored by Jews in the 1940s and a mural of a Jewish man.
“I now know this space right here used to be the waiting room for the dentist’s clinic,” he said at his home. “His clinic was upstairs. I can really see it before me.”
Danielle Citroen, who coordinates the project for Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum, attributes the project’s success to factors specific to the Netherlands, including the fact that, unlike in Austria, Hungary and Poland, “Jewish property issues were resolved vis-à-vis the Dutch government shortly after World War II, meaning very few homeowners have reasons to resist or fear the initiative.” Most Jewish victims, she added, were renting their residences.
In addition, information about Dutch Jewry was preserved thanks to meticulous archives.
And then there’s “a certain element of guilt,” she noted, for the murder of 70-75 percent of Dutch Jewry during the Holocaust — the highest death rate in Nazi-occupied Western Europe. And whereas this guilt would have prevented earlier generations from talking about the Holocaust in such an intimate setting, “Younger generations are sufficiently distant from the genocide to speak about it without triggering questions about personal complicity,” said Citroen, who is Jewish.
The Netherlands also has Western Europe’s highest number of non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust. With 5,516 Dutch rescuers designated as Righteous among the Nations by the State of Israel, the Netherlands is second only to Poland’s 6,620.