Lou Leviticus Shoah Foundation Testimony

November 19, 1995, survivor, Louis Leviticus, L-E-V-I-T-I-C-U-S, interviewed by Ben Nachman, N-A-C-H-M-A-N, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States of America. The language is English. [Unclear] My name is Ben Nachman, interviewing Lou Leviticus in Lincoln, Nebraska, November 19, 1995. Can you give me your name, please?

My name is Louis Isaac Leviticus, L-E-V-I-T-I-C-U-S.

And when were you born?

I was born on July 4, 1931, in the town of Aalten, A-A-L-T-E-N, which is in the Netherlands.

Can you give me some information about your life prior to the war, growing up, your family, and so on?

Well, whatever I remember of it, we lived, I think, for about two years, two and a half years in Aalten, because that was the time of the Depression when I was born. And then we moved to Amsterdam, which was Amsterdam West, in the Haarlemmermeerstraat, which is fairly close to where today is Schiphol, the airport. And we lived there on number 127 on the first floor. And from there, we moved to the Gaaspstraat, G-A-A-S-P Straat, which is in the southern part of Amsterdam, on number 36. The second and third floors were ours. And from there, we moved to, well, that's where I lived when the war started.

What year did the war start that you noticed?

Oh, noticed. 1940, the fifth of May, I think it was. No, it was the fifth, the tenth of May. Enough, yeah.

Up till that time, what kind of a family life did you have?

I guess, I didn't have to, I don't have too much to compare it to anymore, but I suppose it was normal. My father worked and my mother was at home. We were pretty well-to-do people. We had a servant, at least one always. And so we were pretty well-to-do. So I guess we were more or less a regular bourgeois family in Amsterdam.

What type of work did your father do?

Well, here's another problem, which is one of those games memory plays with you. I thought he was what you call a CPA nowadays, but according to a, and I've got a pile of stuff here, my dossier from the Netherlands, he was a foreign correspondent for a company which handled recycling, recycled materials. So that's one of those outfits which collect steel and clothing and paper and what have you, and then bundles it up and sends it to industries. And he was foreign correspondent there. So that's the first time I read about that about half a year ago.

Did you have anyone living at home beside your parents and yourself?

Well, upstairs we had an extra room and we had a lady living there from time to time. We had people who boarded with us.

Was this person related to the family?

No, not a family person. No family at all. Non-Jewish also.

What kind of religious activity went on in your home?

In the home, absolutely nothing. I can't remember candles lighting or anything like that. Sometimes I used to go to with friends to their home and they would have some Friday evening Kaddish and things like that. But a. . . And when there was a bar mitzvah of a brother, then I used to go with them to the synagogue there, in the synagogue in the Lekstraat, which was a new synagogue there. But that's about it.

Did your parents attend synagogue?

No.

Not at all?

Not at all.

So there was not much religious background?

No religion whatsoever. No, my father was a Freemason at the time. And so that tells you everything that you want to know about religion, at least in Europe.

Did you have an extended family living in the area?

Well, listen, Holland is so small. Anybody living in Holland who is a relative lives in the area because it's so small. And even then, in those days, when there were not too many cars, train, the transportation system was excellent. So it took you half an hour to an hour to get to your relative. Yes, we had relatives in the city of Amersfoort, which is about 30 kilometers away. So 40 kilometers away from Amsterdam, I guess. We had relatives in Hilversum. We had them in Aalten, of course, where my grandfather and grandmother lived. And we had some in the Hague, which is, you know, it's all around. It's really a very small country, so.

And your economic conditions were good at this time?

They were good, I think, after we moved to the Gaaspstraat. They became very, very good. I don't really know much about it. I always had everything I wanted and more because my grandmother on my father's side was totally nuts about me and gave me anything I wanted. I had books, I had trains, I had this, I had that, whatever you want.

Were your grandparents religious?

On my mother's side, yes, they were regular synagogue goers and they had their regular their regular in the evenings and so forth. And Brachot and things like that for for for meals. However, the funny thing is that my grandfather was a butcher on my mother's side. He was a butcher and he was a non-kosher butcher. So how do you reconcile that? I don't know. But that's life. I guess he's not here anymore to ask about it and...

Had your family been in the Netherlands for a good number of years?

On my mother's side, I really don't know. I think they were. But I don't know how long on my father's side. They were very there- their a very long time. They used to live in the southern part near the town of Roermond, R-O-E-R-M-O-N-D, which is in Limburg, not far from Maastricht, which is, of course, famous because of the Maastricht agreement in the E.C. But they were farmers, actually. They were farmers and they were also, how do you call it? In the leather business, in the tanning business and so forth. And they came there a very long time ago. One uncle or uncle, one of the family members, one of the brothers, even fought with Napoleon, went with him to to Russia. The Russian campaign came back, found out that he wasn't very popular in the Netherlands anymore because of that, and fled to the United States where somewhere he was supposed to end up somewhere, either in Kentucky or Tennessee, in the hills there. I don't know. We've never found a trace of him and probably changed his name. Certainly not Leviticus. And before that, the family came, originated in Greece, in Saloniki, apparently, and from there migrated to Spain and then missed the inquisition. They came to the Netherlands. So they've been there a long time. Long time roots in the Netherlands. Yeah, yeah.

When did you first start noticing changes as the war approached?

Again, my memory is pretty bad. The war didn't approach us. The war was there from one day to the next. One day it was nice and quiet, and the next day, on the 5th of May, it was the 5th of May in the end, the next day they were bombing the northern part of Amsterdam and everything was going up in smoke and my dad was being called up and was crying and I remember that like, well, like I remember getting up this morning, which I do remember in this case. So those things I do remember, and that was different. And from then on, in the beginning, there wasn't much difference. I went to the same school even after the Jews and Gentiles were separated because it just so happened that the school which was designated a Judenschule, a Jewish school, was the same school I went to before it was designated like that. It's only that the non-Jewish children were taken out. So that was the first thing. And then came the business of the star, of the yellow star which I had to wear. That was sort of traumatic, I remember that, that was... It didn't make children feel good because, first of all, they didn't understand why. And second, it set you apart from the friends you had always played with. And those friends were not now, all of a sudden, allowed to play with you anymore because of the various German edicts and also of the natural hesitancy of kids to play with something or somebody who's different from them. It was very, very evident I had a neighbor kid who I was quite friendly with. We played a lot and climbed trees and got into all kinds of mischief. And I did get into mischief before and after the war, it didn't make any difference. But the, he a. . . Well, all of a sudden, he wasn't allowed to play with me anymore. His father, turns out, was a fascist, but he'd never bothered about it. But when the Germans came, things like that, we couldn't go to schools, we couldn't call on the trams, we couldn't you know It became very oppressive. But as a child, I still found time and I still had friends and I had my little girlfriend even, at that age even. It started very early, which is a story later on which maybe I can get back to. I think everything hit me the worst. I might as well get there now. Everything hit me the worst when one day I came to my girlfriend's home, her house. I went up the stars, up the stairs and you know in Holland, the houses are a little bit different. They have outside stairways which go inside the house and then you go up to the first floor and then you have three or four doors. Some doors go further up and all the doors are on that level. So I knocked on the door and then I noticed that there was nobody, nobody answered and there was a big tape on the door. And then one of the ladies, one of the neighbor ladies came out and told me that they had been picked up. And I think that losing her was the first time that I really felt that there was something very terrible going on for me because before that I hadn't seen anything. The area where we lived was not a Jewish area per se. And we never had, well there were Germans and there were pickups. In fact, there was a big garage opposite where we lived and I was always interested in machinery. And I used to go be a regular visitor in that garage and the Germans were there and they let me just be there. I never felt that, you know, I was afraid of them sort of because I was afraid of anything in uniform because I got into so much trouble that I was always told that they were going to send me to jail or something like that. So uniforms always, I never liked them. And so, but yeah, that time with my, when my girlfriend was picked up with her family and that was a terrible shock for me and a terrible loss because we were really, she was a real tomboy, you know, she was quite something.

Were your friends mostly non-Jewish during that period of your life?

Before the war, before we had to wear the star, yeah, most of them were not Jewish, they were non-Jewish. They were non-Jewish friends and they may have been one or two in my class but nobody ever asked who's Jewish or who isn't. It was just when they started wearing the stars that you wear, marked with the mark of Cain as it was, as it were. And you had to, all of a sudden you felt that everybody was looking at you. There goes another one.

Can you tell me more about how your reaction was when your girlfriend was taken away?

Oh, I cried. I cried. I was lost. I was lost. I really felt that very strongly. And... one of the reasons after the war, two uh, about two years ago, I went to visit the Durchgangslager, how do you call it that, through transportation camp, Westerbork in the Netherlands, was to really make sure that she had died, to see the records, because I was always hoping, even though I was married, had nothing to do with it, but I wanted to know what had happened to her. And she was a very dear kid and her sister and her mother, her father, I don't remember what happened to her father, actually, but...

Were there any other people taken away at this time that you can recall specifically?

Yeah, well, there were people who disappeared. There were people who disappeared whom I had gotten to know. All of a sudden, they weren't there anymore. Now, whether they were taken, you didn't ask questions as a child. You just accepted what you were told. You know, the story... I really had no fear of transportation so much, really, in the beginning, because the story we were told by the grown-ups, at least by my mother and father, is that... And everybody else understood that, too. It wasn't only they who told me. But all the kids sort of understood that you were transported to Poland or somewhere near there, and you were put out to work on farms and to work on the land and so forth and all that. That's what the whole transportation business was about. Now, I always liked to go out. My father was an outdoorsman, and I got that bug from him, too, so I was always outside, unless it was terribly freezing. Very bad weather. I was always outside, always along the, along the, along the riverside, and I had my own little sailboat, also. And so I was always on the water and doing all kind of funny things. And so, to me, it wasn't so frightening, but the fact that they took her away without...and them away, people who were close to me, that all of a sudden, that hit me at something very serious.

Was there any discussion at home about what was taking place at this time?

Never. Never discussed. Never afterwards discussed. Ever.

This was early in the beginning of the war?

That was probably...she was taken away, I think it was in the beginning of... ...'42. well, '41 or '42. You have to take into account May... I don't...my memory of that time is very, very bad. And there are things which I just...are a blank. I don't know if I was under tension, and that's why that I suppress it, or whether it is just that I was just a kid who didn't notice things and just lived for the minute and so forth and all that. I think the latter, it's both... it's something of both, probably.

Did you notice a shortage of food during this period?

Yes, there was some, but not much, because, you know, we had money, we could buy things on the black market, my mother did, and she also managed to get my...her sister and brother-in-law, who lived in Amersfoort, they were... -Amersfoort was a smaller city- ...they were bakers, they always had more food than they could exchange food for food, certain things for certain things. And so they usually had pretty enough food, and I can't remember being hungry those years. No, not those first years.

How were the occupying forces able to determine who were the Jewish families?

Well, first of all, the Jewish people... No, not the Jewish people, the Dutch people in general are extremely precise in recording everybody's history, religion, where he has lived, whom he married, when he died, if they died, how many times did he marry, how many children did they have, and where did those children go to? And that was recorded in places, first of all, in the birthplace of these people, but also in the subsequent locations where they used to live, as well as in the general register in the Hague. So the only thing they had to do is go to the general register in the Hague. And they had everybody in the Netherlands, and they knew who was Jewish, first of all. Then nobody really believed that the Germans would do what they did. And so it was a question of disbelief, and the Germans, if you look at the way they went about it, every day they tightened the news a little bit more. And they roped in a bunch of Jewish, shall we say, intelligentsia. And of course the intelligentsia is so intelligent that they believe it even less, because they say, well, this cannot happen in this civilized, in this civilized era. Things like that, they don't happen, that doesn't happen. So they roped in the intelligentsia. Then they started passing those rules onto the Germans, onto the Judenrat, as it was called, the Jewish council in the various cities and in the Netherlands in general. And people believed them because they'd always believed these people, these Jewish people, these intelligent, rich, well-to-do, and what have you, lawyers and so forth, doctors, philosophers, professors, what have you. Everybody who has a title was in those. And if you look at books like, books about the Netherlands, then you see that all these councils were populated by people of very great standing and regard in the community. So, and nobody believed really what was happening. Every time there was something else, and when people started really getting wise to it, the Germans just used a little pressure. They said, okay, you don't want to tell them to do that? Well, okay, why don't you go into the transport tomorrow to Westerbork? Or why don't you come to the Jewish theater, the, as it's called, the Schouwburg, the theater, the Jewish theater in Amsterdam, which was, for instance, one of the locations where people were rounded up, put together, and then from there they were put on trains to Westerbork or to Vught, the two main camps from which people left the Netherlands.

You were saying, oh pardon me.

Yes, go ahead.

You were saying that the noose was beginning to tighten. Can you give me some examples of that?

Well, you know, it happened so imperceptibly. But, and I don't remember the sequence, but in one of the books which are here, there is a very good sequence where they show the sequence of dates and how they change the law a little bit every time. For instance, you can say, okay, somebody is not supposed to go on the public transport. All right, you can still take a taxi. Then a week later you cannot take a taxi. Then another week you cannot go out after ten o'clock. Then two weeks later you can't go out after eight o'clock. And you can't go into a bookstore. And you can't go into a food store and so forth. And all these, all these rules passed every time there was something else which was out of bounds and where you, what you couldn't do or something you had to do or whatever. And it went gradually and all of a sudden people realized where this was coming to. And then people started running away, sort of, started trying to escape.

Where did people escape to at that time?

Well, mostly underground. There was no way to get to England or anywhere else, as far as I know. I think very few people managed to escape through Belgium, France and Portugal from the Netherlands. Only those who were extremely rich and had very, very good connections. Some managed to escape to Denmark and from there into Sweden. I know some did, but not many either. It was very difficult to get anywhere.

Do you remember who was the administrator of the German government in the Netherlands?

Well, there was one Christians, if I remember, and then the biggest son of a gun was, oh, I might as well say son of a bitch, was Seyss-Inquart. Seyss-Inquart, a German general who really was a terror. But there may have been some before him, but from Seyss-Inquart I remember very well, because I was very close to him physically in position, not anywhere near else. And because one of the places which he used to visit, and we found a picture there of his, was a bunker in the town of Hilversum, which was called the Blaskowitz bunker. It belonged to General Blaskowitz, who was later on the commander of the forces, the German forces. And that big bunker happened to be in front, in the garden, in the yard, a huge structure of the orphanage where I was after the war. So that's how I certainly remember those names and so forth.

Did you say you were close to him at one time?

Yes, yeah, well, there was a, that was when I was already in, after I was in hiding, after my parents were picked up when I was with the, with the underground group in Hamersveld - Leusden. We were, I was at school, and there was a big to-do all of a sudden, and there was a, some Germans came for inspection, came to see how the school was working. There was not a Jewish school, obviously, because otherwise he wouldn't have come there, he would have sent a couple of guys with machine guns. But he came to see the little school there, and there he was. He came limping in because he had a bad limp. He came limping in, stood in front, and asked some, the ones, the lucky ones in the front, they were asked some questions, and, of course, there was a little blonde girl whom he tickled under the chin, and then he left. I was with the bad boy, so I was in the back of the class, so I never got that close. But that was our friend, Seyss-Inquart.

You were mentioning some of the people went underground.

Yes.

Was this a fighting underground?

No, no, this was, I mean, it was called to go underground was meaning to go into hiding.

I see.

That's really the term. There was also an organization which was called The Underground, but that was a different deal. In Dutch you say to go underground, meaning you go into hiding.

November 19th, 1995, interview with Louis Leviticus. Lou, can you tell me what was transpiring at this time with your parents?

Well, my father had to go. He was, he, during the war he was in the, he was in the army reserves. He had been in World War I when he was a lieutenant, or second lieutenant. I don't even remember that. But anyway, so he was interned for a short while and then he came home. But then in 1942, in the beginning of 1942, he had to go to a work camp. There were several locations for work camps in the Netherlands. There was one in Ommen, O-M-M-E-N, and one in Dalfsen, D-A-L-F-S-E-N, and most of the work there was digging, digging up trees and preparing the land and so forth and all that. And that's where they kept a lot of Jewish men. And they publicized that quite a bit. They sent photographs. I mean, I have a series of photographs of those days that my father was in such a camp with a number of other Jewish prisoners. And that, of course, made it pretty difficult for my mother, although we did have money. I don't know how exactly she managed and whether she had any help from my grandparents or my grandmother on my father's side. I know that the others did not help there. And then it started being apparent that from those camps, the men were directly transported to, not even through Westerbork, but directly to Germany. Again, as workers. However, my dad figured that something was rotten in Denmark there and he decided to escape. Somehow he communicated that to my mother. And several weeks or a month before my father managed to escape from that camp, we went into hiding. And my father joined us later on. We were in two places that I can remember that we hid. One was on a farm in, I think it was Hoevelaken. And that's H-O-E-V-E-L-A-K-E-N. It's a town between Amersfoort and Apeldoorn. It's in the center of Holland. And another one was in Amersfoort itself, near the railroad station. near the railroad station. And that is where they discovered our existence, the Germans, and picked us up.

Prior to this, was your father ever compensated for this work camp?

No. Not that I know of. I have no idea. Maybe a lot of few pennies. No, I think that was just for the glory of the German Reich that you had to do that and help them out.

Then when you left your home, after your father had returned from this camp?

Oh, my father's joined us, my father joined us when we were already in hiding. So we'd left the home, our house, before that.

Can you tell me about this hiding period?

Well, it's really difficult to, again, memory is sometimes pretty bad. On the farm it was nice, I enjoyed it very much on the farm. The farmer, he wasn't that old. He was a real, a real hick, what you call, but he was a nice man. And after all, they took people in and they were well compensated. An awful lot of money, it cost. I know that because I did catch some of that from talks of my mother had with my dad about it. And they had two daughters. And one daughter, I was 11 or something like that. How old was I? Yeah, I was 11. And one daughter was 13 and one daughter was 15. And they rather liked me. And after a while, I liked them too and so forth and all that. So I remembered that period very well. That was a period I could go outside most of the day. There was nothing wrong with that. My parents couldn't because of the fact that there was another farmer not too far away who could have seen us. But as a little kid, little kids, kids are always sort of allowed, you know, a little cousin here or something like that. The other place, we had to stay inside all day. The other place in Amersfoort.

How long were you on this first farm?

I think about, two and a half, three months. That was about it, four months maybe.

How did you happen to make that contact to get to that particular place?

Well, my mother, through some underground, Well, I know who it was who did that. That was there was in, in Amersfoort, there was quite a circle of people who objected to what the Germans did. And one of those people was a milk man. He was very famous, very well known. He got killed, unfortunately, not by the Germans, but by the British who shot up a car which didn't have the proper signs on it. And they shot it up towards the end of the war. He was interned for a while, but he came back from that as far as I know. Anyway, the, this milk man and the whole crew of people, they organized safe houses and safe places for Jewish people and for others because there were many others who were also on the wrong side of the German laws and they had to be safeguarded as well and put into safe houses. So they did a lot of work. There was one man there who had a name and I always thought that I did, I must have misheard his name because it has absolutely had a pseudonym, pseudonym, which was absolutely ridiculous in Dutch, maybe in any other language, maybe it's not in some languages, I don't know. Anyway, it turns out that I didn't hear wrong because my, when I later on was with the underground people, they knew him by that same name. And nobody knew where that name came from or what it meant. This man worked totally on his own. He has remained anonymous. He has, nobody knows where he, well, they know he's dead, but nobody knew where he lived, why he did it, where he got funds from, how he knew addresses. He worked totally on his own and his memory is, I mean, everybody remembers him, remembers his name, remembered what he looked like. I do. And I don't remember many people from those days, but I remember what he looked like. And the funny thing is that no- he disappeared from the face of the earth the moment the war ended.

What was his name?

Well, he was - we don't know, we don't know that, but his name, as he was known, was Moltjes Veer. Don't ask me what it means, it has no meaning in Dutch, it has no meaning in French, no meaning in German, no meaning in anything I know. And we've broken our heads trying to find out what it meant and where he was.

Had you ever seen this man?

I saw him several times, he came to bring us these ration cards and so forth, or food, and he brought us from one place to another. Don't, you know, he was a mystery, a real mystery man like Pimpernel Smith. Don't, you know, he was a mystery, a real mystery man like Pimpernel Smith. There he is, there he's gone.

What was the purpose for moving from place to place?

Well, apparently that, financially, I think it was a financial thing, that it was cheaper for my parents to be in the second house than it was to stay with that farmer. He apparently extracted a good price from us.

How long were you in this second hiding place?

Well, I think that was about two months also, two or three months, and then somehow, well, we know the story, we think we know the story why the Germans discovered that place and came to get us, got us, but I managed to escape from there.

Did they take your parents at this time?

Yes, yes.

What time during the war was this?

That must have been in late September or very early October.

Of what year?

1942. 1942,

where did they take your parents?

Well, they apparently took them to what is called the Hotel Orange, in Amsterdam, which was a prison where people, where prisoners were interrogated because it was the purpose there to find out where they got their papers from, where they got this from, where they got that from, and how did they get the addresses and so forth and all that, and who were their contacts in the underground, what was their names, and that's, you know, if my mother said that my mother or dad or anybody would have said Moltjes here, they probably would have beaten the devil out of them because it's nothing, it's not a word, it's not a name, it's nothing, but the guy, that was the man's name. There was no way to contact him. He always was there when you needed him. Unbelievable

Were you able to trace their path, after they were taken away?

The only thing, the only way I could trace their path was by going to the transit camp Westerbork and finding out if they had been transported through there. Yes, and they were. And you don't know where they went, after- Yes, to Auschwitz. They went Auschwitz. Directly to Auschwitz, and according to what I have here from the Red Cross, they, very shortly after their arrival, they were separated first of all, but very shortly after their arrival they were gassed because they were, they two or three days or something like that from they day they arrived.

Was there any other family members that accompanied them?

No, no, because they were picked up separately, and the other members of the family, I don't know when they went through Westerbork, exactly. I can find it out because I got the dates of their, of when they died, in which camp, and you know, and so on, and which year, and that's, I doubt it. They were never, we were not in the same town even, most of us.

Do you have any idea what happened to your grandparents at this time?

Well, my, the grandparents on my mother's side, and my aunt and her husband, plus cousins, they also went into hiding and they survived the war. Another, my mother's brother and his wife, did not survive the war. They were also transported to Westerborg and they, they died, I think one in Sobibor and the other in Buchenwald, or something like that. I don't remember exactly, but not in Auschwitz.

When you, when your parents were picked up, you said you were able to... Escape. Escape with them, would you give me details on that?

Well, the detail is a long story and I don't know. Anyway, what I did, we were on the second floor. I mean, that's not the second floor like it is over here. It's not it over there. It is the ground floor, first floor, second floor, you know. So we were up second floor and we were in the rooms there and the bell rang and I heard the word police and something triggered in me and I knew I had to get out of there. And I ran to the back doors, the big doors which open outwards, which open outwards onto a veranda. You know what the veranda, it's a porch. And I got on the veranda, I got on the veranda and I know when I look back, I still see my dad closing the doors behind me. He closed the doors behind me. I went off the veranda. On the floor below me, there was a canvas, oh, how you call it, a canvas sunscreen which broke my jump and so I slid off and came down into the garden below. And there was a policeman there too. He was too surprised to do anything and I was gone before he could do anything. He was more surprised than I was, I guess. I mean, it was just automatic what I did there. I, uh. .. Now, the gardens are fenced, each of them is fenced in separately. So you have to go over fences all the time. These fences are about eight, ten feet high. So I climbed over those fences. How I got over them; I was a good climber. I told you when I was a kid that we always used to climb trees and so on, I was a great climber. I could get up on anything. So I was gone in no time and apparently it was either that he decided, let the kid go, we'll catch him later. Or he was just baffled that I appeared and disappeared so quickly. I like to think the letter that's more flattering. I ran up, then when I got to another garden, about four or five gardens away, I climbed up a rain pipe, a rain spout. I climbed up to the first floor on the veranda, again, because all those houses, they're in block form and they backs are all towards the same site, towards those back gardens. So I climbed up, got on the veranda, took a big washtub, which was there, pulled it over me and set. And that was it. I, of course, I was very, all of a sudden it dawned on me where I was and what I was doing. And I had to do a big one, a very big one. And there was a flower pot there. So I did whatever I had to do, put the flower pot over it, set on the flower pot. And I'm just still thinking what those people thought the next day when they came onto the veranda, and saw that flower pot. You know, it's just one of those things which it's tragic, but it makes me laugh. When it was dark, I ran to a place which I thought was safe, which was this milkman's house, which I knew where it was. And it wasn't so safe because he had just been picked up himself. But since he had been picked up already, they decided to let me sleep there overnight. And I heard them talking in the kitchen with their brothers and sisters and so forth and all that. And they said, well, I think the best thing is to bring him back tomorrow to his parents. And I thought, no way is that going to happen. I'm not going to go. And so early in the morning, I woke up very early and I ran out again, ran out of the house, found my way to a farmhouse, which I knew was friendly, and then moved. Now, and here goes, my memory goes blank. Because there is a hiatus from the time that this happened to the time I was not picked up, but I was taken in by the underground people of about three weeks. And I don't know what I did during that time. I don't know how I stayed alive or whatever, whatever I did. I have some vague memories of stealing a chicken and making a fire in the bucket with pieces of wood and rags and where I got matches from, God knows. And it was in a shed and cooking, sort of, cooking, burning the feathers of the chicken and cooking the damn thing and biting into it. It's very, very strange. There's really no good memory there. And I don't know if it's fantasy or if it's truth. But anyway, after three weeks, I was taken in by these people from the underground, from the TD underground group.

Where were you at this time?

Well, that is the problem. I thought I was near where I was born in the eastern part of the Netherlands. The people who picked me up are not sure. The man who picked me up is not sure where it was, but he didn't think it was over there. And he thinks it's somewhere else. And according to my file here, which I have here, my dossier from the Netherlands, it was in a third place. It was back in the farm where we were the first time. It could be.

What city was that nearby?

Hoevelaken, It was near Amersfoort, not very far away. About 40 kilometers.

During this period, did you have any idea how the Germans knew that you were in this house when you were with your parents?

No, I heard that only later. According to my mother's sister, they had intercepted a messenger with some letters. And in those letters, it was mentioned that this address, my mother's address. Apparently, my mother had written something to somebody I don't I really don't know exactly. And knowing my aunt, I mean, she may have invented it just to make me feel bad.

At this time, you said that the underground came into play.

Yes.

Can you describe that for me?

Well, the underground, this, I have to tell you something about the man who became one of the righteous Christians and has been honored in the Netherlands for his activities during the war. He is a very venerable gentleman. He started by accident helping Jews, just purely by accident. My uncle and aunt, grandmother and grandfather, and their two children lived opposite a club, a social club, big building, social club, wonderful place. I used to play there.

This was located where?

In Amersfoort. In Amersfoort. In Amersfoort. And it was called the Sos, the society club, the Sos. Anyway, they got, they received a notice from the authorities that they had to come to Amsterdam and they had to, [Unclear], how do you say that? They had to come and get ready to move to go to Germany, in essence. And they were terrified. They were not going to do that. And so they went over the road and they sat there and they were talking about it to their friends who were the caretakers of that place, which is, he's more than a caretaker, the managers, let's say it like that. And at that moment, Karel Brouwer, who's the man I'm talking about, came in.

How do you spell that?

His first name, K-A-R-E-L, his second name, B-R-O-U-W-E-R, came in because he was married. He just had gotten married to their daughter. That was their middle daughter. Yes. Rita was the middle. Yeah. The middle daughter. Rita was 21 and Karel was 24. And he was a secretary, an undersecretary, as it's called, they have different ranks there, in the municipality of Leusden, L-E-U-S-D-E-N, which is very close to Amersfoort. And so he was 24, she was 21. He'd been married for three months and he took in six people into his house that same night. He hadn't told his wife nothing. He just brought them in and said, let's put them up and let's see what we can do for them. That's how he started. And he has a very precise, typically Dutch mind. He's the type of mind who designed these very precise, registration systems. And he also had the mind to thwart them and to do things with them. So over the years, not immediately, there were lots of stories, I mean zillions of stories, I can tell you the things we did. But over the years, within a year, year and a half, a system had been developed which would match a living person with the history of a dead person. Of course, the dead part was omitted from that registration somehow by a very sophisticated network. And so you or I, we could have the identity of somebody who had been born about the same time that we were born. We were born John Peters in Columbus, Nebraska. And we moved , etc. from there to Fremont, we moved from there to Hastings All those papers were in order. And you had your own identity card, which was totally valid. Not a German could find anything wrong with it. In fact, that was so good that one of the Jewish boys who had such a card was caught by the Gestapo, was beaten up by them. And he insisted, this is me, this is me. He was sent to a camp and he was freed from the camp because they couldn't prove anything. His story I have here too. And he lives in Amsterdam still. His name is Harry Theeboom. Harry is easy to remember. Theeboom is T-H-E-E-B-O-O-M, means T-tree. And he's a good friend because we were together for a long time during the war. And so this is the man I started working with, or working with, living this, sorry, and a little bit working with whatever there. Whenever there were things to do, which a kid could creep through, and they know that I was handy in creeping through and getting through things, I was used for that particular purpose as a messenger and things like that. And by the way, in that particular capacity, I met somebody also, an actress who, what's her name, oh, she was very famous, Roman Holiday and all that. I can't remember. All of a sudden the name escaped me.

Can you... What was her, what kind of, what did she do?

She wasn't, oh she was a messenger also. She was a messenger somewhere in the same type of activities that I did. Only she was quite a bit, she was several years older, but Audrey Hepburn, that was her name.

Was she Dutch?

Well, she was part Dutch and she got caught with her family in the Netherlands when the war started and never managed to get back over. She was actually, I think her mother was British or her father, I don't remember. No, I think her mother was British and her father was Dutch. And well, I didn't know her well, but I did meet her and promptly with, like all 12-year-olds fell in love with a beautiful girl, you know, and all that. But she was a little bit gangly, but who cares as you know, when you're young. But anyway, that was my, that was one of the things which later on I was reminded of. So I lived there until, actually until the end of the war with some interruptions, which were caused again by a German, by the Germans getting the better of us and occupying the house and me escaping again. I'm good at that apparently. And I'm an escape artist. Escaping again, it was quite a story then, and the Germans occupied the house for about four or five month until the war was over. This was already fairly, towards the end of the war, it was late in 45, early 45. it was late in 45, early 45.

Did you stay with this same person when you were evicted from this house?

No, no, no, there was no way. Everybody, a number of us escaped, some of them were sent to camps. There were at that time in the house, I think there were about 15 people. And it was sort of a bad stroke of luck that this happened. There was no treason or anything like that. What happened is that there were two, three people were pushing a pushcart with wood on it. Now you weren't actually not allowed to have wood unless you had a license for it. And there was an older man who was the father of Karel. His father was walking with them. And all of a sudden he saw a couple of Germans and he panicked. And he said, run. And the guy started running. And in their panic, they just happened to be close to the entrance of our place. So they ran in and they ran through the back and out back and out into the fields and all the way off and so forth and all that. And that was sort of traumatic because the Germans immediately came into the house and wanted to see everything. And we had a lot of papers in the back and guns as well. I knew where they were and they held all the big guys and I was supposed to dispose of the stuff. was supposed to dispose of the stuff. I disposed of it underneath a wheelbarrow. Nothing would have happened if one of the stupid Germans would have lifted his feet and not fallen over the wheelbarrow. So the wheelbarrow turns over and here was all this stuff. Now that was you know. . .

November 19th, 1995, interview with Louis Leviticus. Lou, you were telling me about the German chasing into the house. Can you continue with that for me?

Yeah. We had, in the back of the house, there was a sunroom where we had a lot of things stashed away, hidden away, papers, these Russian cards, identity cards, unmarked identity cards, material to make false stamps, false seals and things like that, and a few revolvers. And it was in two, not too big, tin boxes, and I knew I had to get them out, and Karel said, try and get them out. And so I went out into the back because the Germans were standing there, with the guns, everybody had to stay there, but the little kid, when he says he's got to go potty, then they let him go. So they let me go. I went into the back. I got those two boxes out. I hid them. I couldn't hide them anywhere else. The first thought was, I'm going to put them nicely there, underneath the wheelbarrow, and I put them nicely underneath the wheelbarrow. You couldn't see them. And then I came back into the house and I was shaking like a leaf. I mean, I thought everybody must see that I'm shaking like... It was really terrible. I was so nervous and so afraid. And everything would have gone well. And then later on, they were going to make an inspection around the house, and they took me with them to show them where things were. So here we have some pigs there. We had some straw there. We had some chickens there. We had a little shed there. Show them the shed, the this, the that. I obviously didn't put it in the shed because I was clever enough to know that it was the first place you look. And here was this wheelbarrow laying around, and I was looking out at the corner of my eye at the wheelbarrow. And one of those German clods tripped over one of the handles of the wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow turned upside down, and here read it to tins with weapons, papers, and all that. And that changed everything. They became really nasty and ugly. And that was the time I knew I had to get out. And somehow, I don't know how it happened, but somehow again, there was nobody there to see me go. And I went and I went over. There was a sort of a canal behind it and I jumped over it partly, partly into it. And ran off, and I presume that they started looking for me. And that's when some others escaped on the other side of the house. So in the end, they didn't get much of a haul. They got the house and they got a pregnant woman, which they didn't do much with, interestingly enough. And that was it. And everybody else got out. Not everybody was there that particular day.

Did they find the actual equipment that you were using to forge the documents?

Well, they were the stamp makers. The ones where you make the seals, yes. But yes, that's nothing. You take a piece of rubber, hard rubber, and you have a knife, a good carving knife, you make yourself a new set. I mean, if you want to do... We were very inventive. How we made the papers look old and things like that and really used. We slept in them. We slept on them. We sweated on them and all kinds of things we did in order to make papers look old and smelly. Were any of the people taken away during this raid? Yeah, three were taken away during the raid, and they went into a concentration camp and one his father-in-law.

Her father died. Karel's wife's father died in the concentration camp.

Yeah. He never made it back. He went to... They probably tortured him pretty badly because he went to a place called Amersfoort also, which is the same town, and it was a very bad... The camp is a very bad reputation there. And it wasn't far from where we lived, actually. So I escaped again, and then somehow I got in contact with friends of friends of friends of Karel, who got me to a farmhouse where I stayed about four or five month, which wasn't. And then, immediate, in meantime the war ended, and it took another month or two before we could get back into the house because the Germans had been there and they had... They had ransacked it pretty nicely. And then some good Dutch people, Dutch Nazi friends, had come in and carted away some stuff. So it was sort of unlivable in the beginning. This was your home, your... Well, that was my home. It was my home. It was with these people from the underground who had more or less adopted me as a son. Even though they were young, he would- like I said he was 24, she was 21, And I was in 1942, I was 11. So, you know, a mother of 10 years old is a bit of a rough one. But he was a very authoritative man, a very impressive person.

Did you at this time have an opportunity to go back to your original home? After World War II?

After World War II? Yes. I visited it once with a policeman because we had some things hidden in... And again, this is something I found. I remember that very well because my mother and father were trying to think about, where shall we hide things? I said, well, let's take up the carpet on the stairs. Let's take out some of these slats and let's put it in there. And we did and it still was there. Even though Nazis had lived in there, they never found it. And they carpeted nicely over it and we opened it up and we found some things. I have two of those things here, which were in there.

At this time, were you made aware of what happened to your parents?

Well, I knew they were in Germany, but for years and years and years, they were deported to Germany or somewhere. For years and years, I hoped that all the rumors were wrong and that I would see them again. But once I received an official letter from the Red Cross, and that was only about eight years ago, nine years ago, something like that, then I knew for sure that they were dead. My uncle and aunt never told me that they knew that they were dead. Never. Never. He never told me anything about that.

Why?

Why? God knows.

Can you describe this group? Did it have a name?

Yeah, it was called the TD, which means in Dutch Technische Dienst, Technical Service. Their modus operandi was to falsify records. And in fact, they falsified so many records that after the war, it took the man, this Karel, and shows you how, what type of person he is, about two years to set the records straight. To get every place where falsified records were to get them to correct it back again to the original, somehow he kept track of all of that. But that is the exact type of bureaucratic mind who can do that. And if you set it, put it to work for the right purpose. I mean, it saves lives. If you put it to work for the wrong purpose, it kills you. Okay? Okay? But he did it the right way. And he is a hero because of that, but he always endangered himself. Can you imagine a 24-year-old kid right out of college doing something, starting something off like that here in this country today, endangering himself? No way. I can't.

Was it a very large group?

Yes. In the beginning, it was very small. It was only two main people. One was the man who had the contacts in the various places. And the other one was Karel, and he was the technical genius behind it all. He developed the methods and how to do things and how to approach people in the various services. Because one person or one group of person can't do it. You have to have collaborators in different towns all over the country for this. And they found those collaborators. So the network became huge. Towards the end of the war, when the Germans wanted to deport a lot of Dutch young men to Germany for war camps, all those people, when they were looked after, got new identities with something in it which would allow them to stay. And the estimate is that about 10,000 people were saved that way. Jewish people, several hundred. He himself, his own little circle, did about 50 or 60 Jews, saved 50 or 60 Jews. Nobody is exactly sure, because every time somebody comes out of the woodwork, remembers that they got helped by him, and he doesn't remember. His memory is just as bad as mine, which is not very good.

What happened to you as far as your life was concerned after this period, the war ended, and describe what took place.

Well, what took place was rather unpleasant. I wanted to stay with Karel and Rita, his wife, and their daughters. And I became a very big family. I would have had 11 brothers and sisters by now. They were Roman Catholic. And my family felt that I shouldn't stay there. And they did all kinds of things. And by the way, they wanted to adopt me. And I wanted to be adopted by them, because I felt safe with them always. And a lot of dirt went on, a lot of stories were told which were not true and maybe and were distorted. And I've got everything in my dossier about these people so that they would be forced to give me up and to put me into an orphanage. Their worst mistake was that they put me in an orthodox orphanage as well, where I was sort of a rebel without a—well, I had a cause, of course, my cause. When I was quite a rebel there, and they were happy to get rid of me and let me go in my own way after. But I did study, and I did very well in my studies. So I finished high school and all that. And then I went on a binge, and we went around. I went around with a band and so forth and all that.

Was this during your period in this orphanage?

No, that was after the orphanage. After the orphanage. During the orphanage, I refused to go to a Jewish school, which they wanted me to go to, because the Jewish school, I knew exactly what it was going to be like. It was going to be just like the orphanage. A lot of mixed up kids. I was mixed up myself, obviously. But there were people in that orphanage who were far more mixed up than I was, traumatized by the war. Children who had really been through—I mean, if you hear their stories, they have been through absolute hell. And not necessarily in camps. Most of them were not from camps. But they'd been farmed out, and they'd been abandoned sort of, and they'd been maltreated and molested and whatever. So there was a lot of difficulty there, and I knew that they could go to that school. I'd have a whole bunch more like that. I said, oh, no, I'm going to stay in my school, and I stayed in a very hard school, and I made it.

Who were you living with during this period?

I was in the orphanage.

You were in the orphanage?

Yeah, I was in the orphanage. That was in Hilversum.

This wasn't the Orthodox?

That was the Orthodox orphanage. But I had to get special dispensation from Rabbi XYZ and his cohorts to go to a regular human school.

How long did this last?

Well, that lasted till about 49, 49 yes. I finished—I compressed everything. Because I skipped classes, even in high school, because I was pretty good. I studied during the war. I had studied with some of the, in some of the schools, the Catholic cloister schools, the monastery schools, the Croziers and Jesuits and so forth. And they taught me well, very well, especially I was good in technical things, in math and so forth and all that. And I liked languages. During the war, I read a lot, because there was nothing else you could do. And I even remember reading at least part until I got bored with it of Dante's Inferno in Latin with the—it was a dictionary, you know. So I would go through great lengths to understand things. I read a lot of things which I shouldn't have read, of course, in those days as well.

At this time, then, you finished your high school education.

Yes.

Then what took place?

Well, then, in the end, after a few peregrinations, I ended up in Israel in a kibbutz.

How did you get to Israel?

Well, it wasn't difficult to hop on a boat when there is a group going to Israel. You joined the group, and I hopped on the boat in Naples where I was working at the time. And this group came in from Dutch and British Halutzim, and there was one blonde there whom I liked pretty much. So I hopped on the boat and went to Israel as a deckhand.

How did you go from the Netherlands to Naples?

Oh, I worked, like I said, there were some peregrinations. I was with the band, and the band fell apart in Marseille. And so I worked for a while in Marseille. I worked for a while on a ship there, and the ship went to Naples. It was in Naples, broke down. And I went off the ship. I worked there for a while, and then they came along. All that happened in a year and a half, within a year and a half.

Was this an organized group?

Yeah, it was an organization from HaBonim.

That was looking for orphans?

No, no, no, no, no. They were just going to Israel. They were just going to Israel. It was a group of Halutzim from Holland and from England. They joined. They were going to go to a kibbutz in Israel.

So you joined that group then?

Yeah.

This was in what year again?

50. 50.

Now can you tell me what took place then?

Oh, well, I didn't stay too long in 50. I had a, in the kibbutz, after about a year, year and a half, I felt that I needed some help. I felt depressed, very much very depressed. That's when really the effects of the war started getting at me. You know, you don't feel worthy. Why are you alive? And why not the others? You know, this is one of the questions you ask. How the hell did you get out of there? Why you and why not the others? Why not your parents? Why not your friends and all that kind of stuff? And so I asked for some help from, and that was after I'd been in the army. Or I was still in the army then. Wait a minute. When was it? Let me think. That was after I'd been in the army.

In the Israeli army?

In the Israeli army, yeah. And so I felt pretty bad. I got myself into an institute. I asked for it to be admitted so that they could have somebody to talk to. And I had, I think that helped me a lot. Some people say it didn't help you, damn thing, but okay, that's a question of opinion. But it helped me a lot. And when I got out of there, I didn't want to go back to the kibbutz. In the meantime, also during the time that I was going to go to the army, I had also married that blonde girl because that marriage would keep her out of the army. And we needed working hands in the kibbutz. So you just get married. You go to a rabbi, give him his, give him your name and her name and so forth. And we're getting married and so forth. And that was it in the kibbutz. In fact, when we went to the wedding in Nahariyya, we had to hitchhike because the tractor and the tractor, which was supposed to pull the wagon with the whole wedding party broke down. And so we had to hitchhike and we hitchhiked with an Arabic truck. And I still have somewhere I have a photograph of that. And so that marriage fell apart because of my problems. And so then I worked for a while in Israel and all kinds of places. I went for Salal Bonais. I worked in Africa and I worked on tractors, in tractor stations. I did all kinds of things. And then I worked in a machinery factory in Ramatayim where I met, for the first time I met Rose and that was 30 years ago, quite a bit longer than what we've been married. And then we separated off again, but I worked and then I started working for an American professor who set up, who worked for the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. And we hit it off pretty good and I was his technical man, his technician. He stayed in Israel for a while and set up a Department of Agricultural Engineering there, which is now called the Lowdermilk Faculty of Agricultural Engineering, Lowdermilk. Walter Clay Lowdermilk was the American professor. And I decided one day that I wanted to study at the Technion at the Department of Agricultural Engineering. So he got me into that place without having to do entrance exams because I didn't know a word of Hebrew practically, except street Hebrew. And I made it. Here I am.

What kind of a degree did you get from Technion?

S.B., and later an M. too.

Both from the Technion?

Yeah, both from the Technion and later on my Ph.D at Purdue University.

How long did you stay in Israel?

Well, on and off, you know, on and off that first time I was there from 1950 to 1964, about 14 years. But that was on and off because in the meantime, I was in Africa for a year or so and things like that. And that was it. And then I came to the States and started doing my doctorate and finished that in 1969.

Did you come here specifically to study for the doctorate?

Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

And how did you, did you end up staying in this country at that time?

Not immediately, no. I had a job with the Stevens Institute of Technology and the Transportation Research Group. And we did a lot of work, off-road locomotion, as it's called, for the U.S. Army work. And then I got some sort of a funny type of contract with the U.S. as a liaison between the U.S. and the Israeli Army. And since I was a Dutchman, they didn't get into trouble when the 73 war broke out. There was no American at the front there, but I was a Dutchman working for the Americans at the front. And so that's how I got back there in 73. Actually, I went back there in 71. The end of 71 started in the beginning of 72 January and stayed there until January 7th, December 7th 74, and then 75. I came back to the United States here.

Was this after you had completed your Ph.D work?

Yes, yeah. My Ph.D I completed in 69.

And when you came back after the 73 war, how did you end up here in Lincoln, Nebraska?

Well, I didn't want to work with the military anymore. I'd been working with Warren Michigan and with Aberdeen Proving Grounds and things like that. And I didn't feel like the military was a career I wanted to pursue. So I decided that I was going to look for something else. I had a lot of friends. A lot of people knew me. And so I asked them to look out. Well, here was this job here at the university. I figured this is a nice place to live for a year or two or three, and then I'll see it. I'll move somewhere else. And I got to Nebraska. And it's not the Cornhusker football which caught me, but it's Nebraska which caught me. And I wouldn't want to leave unless they kick me out of here. I like it here. And I enjoy what I'm doing at the university and hope to go on until fate tells me that I'd better stop.

How long have you been at the university now?

Since 1975, 20 years.

During this period of time, after you finished your education, after your tour of duty in Israel, have you had an opportunity to go back to the Netherlands?

Oh, definitely. Yes, yes, yes. Several times.

Were you able to find friends?

Yes. In fact, yes, I have some, an old school friend from, actually from the war days yet, whom I, we see quite regularly when we are in Holland. But that's the only one. Nobody else is left. There's just nobody there. Nobody there that I know of anymore. Even from the kids in the orphanage, a lot of them have gone by the wayside, they're my age, and a lot of them have, a number of them committed suicide quite a while ago, or, you know, it's really very tragic. Most of these kids, the psychologists, were just worthless for them. They just didn't do the job. They couldn't, didn't know how to help them in the beginning probably too.

This man, Karel Brouwer.

Yeah.

Did you get to see him at any time after the war?

Yeah, sure. We've been, I've been there twice now. He's been here in Lincoln as well. I, he's had a tremendous time when he was here. He was honored by a lot of people. And yes, we still correspond. He's been gone for a while. He's got, you know, he's 11 kids. He's got them spread all over the world, so he travels a bit. Has he always been a father-type figure for you? Yes, he always has been. I still respect him greatly, even though he's not that much older. I still respect him greatly, and I listen to him sort of. He's still, he's a very standoffish gentleman. You know, he's from one of the old schools. He's a marvelous guy. I mean, you know, he's really something.

Do you feel that you owe a great deal of your survivorship to Karel Brouwer?

Everything, everything. Well, you know, Karel and luck. But then it was luck who brought me in contact with Karel, you know. I mean, I escaped the first time. It was luck. I can tell you probably why I did what I did and how I escaped. But that's another story. I mean, you know, that's another story again, which has nothing to do with it. But this, I still think, yes, I owe my life to Karel, to Karel Brouwer.

You mentioned that he was honored as a righteous...

Christian, yes. Righteous gentile. That was two years ago in 19, when was it, 1993, yes. And in 1994, he went to Jerusalem to be honored again at Yad Vashem there, or whatever it's called, Yad Vashem. And he is, in the meantime, he is a, he was knighted by the queen, and he's had several, you know, they came up with all kinds of awards for, or recognitions for people who did the tremendous amount in the war. He's always been a very, very reluctant to talk about it, same as I was. I actually started talking about it when he started really talking about it. That's when I felt that it was right, when he started talking about it. And he took him a long time, too. Now that all these years have passed since these times in your life, what experiences can you relate back and have, you can see that were an influence on your life today? Well, to, first of all, the type of person, Karel was, the type of stand he took. When you ask him, why did you do it? He says, you can't let such an injustice happen. You can't let such an injustice happen. That's what he said. And I think that is, that is one of the things. And then, yeah, there's so much which you learn and experience. And that is, that life is very precious, precious. And, you know, that we are living off the fat of the land here. But I still, I still clean my plate sometimes with my finger. I take the latest crumbs on, and I'm sure that's a leftover from those days. But there are certain things of survivorship, which you cannot, you cannot forget. You're always looking for, well, you're looking for love, because a lot of that you haven't had, you haven't had a normal life. And you're looking, you're looking for love. And sometimes you don't know how to get it, really. Because with all the good things with Karel, it was a respect and a certain type of love. But it wasn't a love, the warm, the very warm love which you, which children crave. And so that's always been one of the things which I have missed, sort of. I don't know if that's a lesson, but it should have been a lesson. But it never was a good lesson until I became awarded. I could talk about things like that.

Do you think that this has affected your relationship with Rose today?

Definitely, definitely, definitely. Rose is a very patient person. And so, and she understands quite a bit. So she allows for my bad upbringing, my falling of the tree, instead of being born in a normal family, sort of. She allows for that and she understands a lot. So she has a lot of patience with me.

November 19, 1995 interview with Lou Leviticus. Lou, during this period when you were in hiding, did you have any kind of identification?

Yes, we, everybody had to have a identity card of some sort. The ones for people above, a person who's about 15 years old had to have a photograph on it. Below that you didn't, and so I was free. I didn't have to have a photograph. But I do have my own, I still have it, what is called a Stamkaart. And that card was used to obtain the various permits for buying food, clothing, and so forth, ration cards and so forth and all that. It also served sometimes as a passport to, as a passport to go two places. You had to have that with you at all times. And those were extremely valuable objects, those cards. And if there was one which was not falsified, at least which could not be traced, it was worth its weight in gold.

Did you have this card with your own name on it?

No, that was in the name of the person I was during the war. And his name was, or my name was Rudi, R-U-D-I, van der Roest, V-A-N-D-E-R, typical Dutch, and then R-O-E-S-T. And I knew Rudi very well, the other Rudi very well. I knew the whole family. In fact, I stayed with the grandmother quite a bit. I loved the old lady, and I loved the whole family, and we still know them. And we've met them since then again, and since the war. After I came to America, I really lost contact with a lot of, or after I left Holland, actually. I really lost contact with most of them. We have renewed that, and from time to time, we write. And Rudi is still the same. He still looks the same, sort of.

Have you had any visitors here from Holland?

Yes, we have. I call them my Karel and Rita, my adoptive. I call them my adoptive parents. Were here. They were here. It was now, it's now two years ago already. Gosh. Two years ago, they were here, and they say they had a wonderful time, which I believe they did. They met up with the governor. They met up with the bishop. We had a special occasion for them in the synagogue with Rabbi Weisser, who, because he was at that time the chairman of the Interfaith Council, honored him on a Friday night in the synagogue, and there were a lot of people present. It was the first time that the darn synagogue had been full in a long, long time. And we took them out everywhere. We showed them a lot, and they were very happy with it. So, yeah, they, he met the governor and so forth and all that. Ben Nelson.

From the time the war ended until now, what lessons do you think you've learned from your war experiences?

Have I really learned much? Tolerance is one thing, and it's sometimes hard to come by, especially when you live in this day and age. And I think with age, you become a little bit more intolerant sometimes. Tolerance is one thing which you have to have, and you have to have guts at one time to take a step, which is unprecedented, which you have never done before, whether it's to save your life or the life of others. You've got to make that step sometimes. To be honest in your dealings with people, that's one of the things, I think, and I got that from Karel. He was always absolutely honest. I mean, very, very honest man. And that's why he never became a millionaire during the war, because he could have been very, very rich because there was a lot of money floating around in those days. He never misused the trust of people, and so that's why I still look up to him as much as I do. I mean, it's really...

In closing, Lou, can you give me some of your thoughts of why you were willing to be interviewed for this foundation?

Well, I tell you, it was very difficult. I told you, until Karel started talking about it himself and started reaching out, I never reached out either. I never told people. I always felt that to tell about these horrifying or fantastic experiences, these abnormal experiences you have when you are in a war, when a child is suddenly confronted with a danger, what does he do? And if you do the right thing, then you are a hero. If you not do the right thing, then you are dead. And so why do you take one way and not the other way has always been sort of a mystery to me, and it's always felt to me even that my own life has been sort of, is bragging. if I talk about it, is sort of... It's not real. It isn't real to people, although it is in the end. It is. Because now that I've talked about it, and really with Karel have talked about it mostly, we sat talking for hours there. And since I've done that, it's become easier to talk. And I also feel that it's absolutely necessary that the history, even though my story is probably trivial compared to some of the horror stories others went through, that those stories be known to children of this world and to the grown-ups, plenty of grown-ups that have absolutely no idea what really transpired there.

Do you hold any animosities today from those experiences?

I'm uncomfortable in the presence of Germans older than I am, you know, say ten years older, but I've got some very good friends in Germany. Really, I like them very much, and they're nice people. They were born, most of them are born after the war, so I can't blame them for their fathers, you know. I can't blame them for what their fathers did. You might as well, you know, gee, if you go back, well, why didn't you look, then, at what the grandfather did and so forth and all that and things like that.

How do you feel, do you feel that the Dutch people did all that they could during this period?

Definitely not. It was a small minority of the Dutch people who did much. The Danes did a lot, but the Dutch did not. In the beginning, the labor people, the blue-collar people, were very much with the Jews in the beginning, most of them, and there was a big strike in Holland because of the measures the Nazis took against the Jews, a big strike. However, in general, people stood aside because they had families to think of, and I can understand it in a way, you know. They had families to think of. They were worried about where the bread was coming from. Food was scarce. You could get extra food if you gave somebody, if you gave somebody's name or if you gave some suspicion to the Germans and so forth and all that. So I don't think the Dutch did enough. They could have done more, let's say it like that.

Is there anything you'd like to add to your story?

Heck no. I hope to live a long and fruitful life from now on, you know, and do my thing. And I hope that I can help some people by telling this story and letting them see what really happened and telling them stories of others as well, being sort of a storyteller, keeping this, not tradition, but this history alive. And maybe if that'll make the world a little bit better, I think I've done my thing even more than what I did at the university and all the other years which I've worked.

Well, Lou, I would like to thank you both personally and for the foundation for allowing us to come into your home and to get your story.

It was a pleasure to do that. Thank you.

Lou, can you tell me what this photograph is?

Yeah, this is a photograph from my father's days in the work camp in Dalfsen, D-A-L-F-S-E-N. It was one of the work camps in which Jewish people were, Jewish males were rounded up before they were going to be sent to Germany. And this group here, and the Germans sent these photographs out, allowed these photographs to be taken for propaganda purposes. And my father is the second from the left on the picture there. And some of the others, it just happened to have the names of all these people who are in this photograph. The first from the left is a gentleman by the name of Catan. Then there is Leviticus. Then there is Laimer, Halberstadt, Chapin, Salamons, and Mr. Brunt with the long coat, who is the straw boss of the group, also Jewish. And then the two who are at the bottom are kneeling are Mr. Jaz on the left and on the right Mr. Polak. So these are names of people, I presume most of them have not come back because they were deported.

Lou, how did you get this picture?

Well, when the Germans sent these pictures out, my mother obviously got one and I somehow kept a number of photographs from home. I kept them in a hiding place in the house. And after the war, I picked those up. With the policemen, we went into the house where somebody else was living by now and we opened the hiding place and there they were.

Lou, can you describe this photograph for me?

Well, this is another photograph. It's the same group. My dad is the third from the left there. As you can see, I'm sort of surprised that the Germans let a picture like this get out because they all look healthy. Of course, that's why they did it. And they don't have the star on them.

Can you explain this for me?

This is what's called the Stamkaart. This is the identity card for those younger than 15 years old. And my name is at the top. Van der Roest is my last name. Rudolf is the first name. And then my birth date here, 27th of October, I think it is, 1929 in Amsterdam. And I'm living in Leusden, E41. And this was issued January 15, 1943.

Lou, can you explain this photograph for us?

Yeah, this was when I was 11 years old, approximately, and, a little bit older. And this photograph was taken just before we were, before I escaped and the shirt which I have on is the shirt I had on when I escaped. That's all I had on as a matter of fact. Well, I had pants on, of course.

Lou, can you explain this photograph for us?

Yeah, this is the whole group in the orphanage in the beginning when I came there with the... Yeah, this is all of them. And I'm on the second from the right. I'm the serious looking guy there. And several of those, a number of those kids, the guy who's sitting beside me is dead. He committed suicide. And the one on the other is... On the other side was the glasses, is in, Hermann, is in... Or at least he was in an institute. And so a lot of these people in there are very sick when they got there and they were never cured, really, of the trauma of the war.

Lou, who's this photograph on?

Well, it's me and my wife, Rose. And about three years ago, four years ago, that was taken. You see, we look a hell of a lot younger there.

Lou, who's in this photograph?

This is our daughter, Melanie, and her husband, Alan, in the UK. They live in Westcliff.

What's the twins? Yeah.

Lou, who is this in this photograph?

Well, these are our four lovely grandchildren, Chen, Amy, Lauren, and Talia. And the two latter ones are twins, as you can probably see, fat twins. That's what they are.

Lou, who is this photograph?

This is our other daughter in England, Joanna, and her husband, Steven, who's in the British Army at the time.

Lou, who is this photograph of?

Well, if we start with the most important ones, it's Karel and Rita Brouwer. Karel is, of course, the man who saved my life and who was my stepfather, my adoptive father, sort of, for a long, long time, and who saved a lot of other people, and then, of course, Ben Nelson, who was gracious enough to receive him, the governor of the state of Nebraska, and Rose and myself.

This is my wife, Rose. She's from England, and I'm very happy to have her, and it's wonderful, wonderful to have her. She's been my support for all these years, which have been pretty difficult, and I hope that everybody has a chance to have a wife like that.

I'm very pleased that I was able to help Lou give this interview, and I hope, from all the interviews that are done, that people will learn to be more tolerant of one another and of one another's differences, and that hopefully something like the Holocaust won't happen again