reborn

Reborn

By David Verveer

Several weeks ago I wrote you about my identity crisis, as I was told to send a copy of my birth certificate, a document that was destroyed by my parents on the day (3^rd of September 1942) when we fled and went into hiding from the Nazi regime terrorizing the Dutch. Since that day I did not have this happy tiding, announcing my joining the human race, as third son of Emanuel and Henrietta Verveer.

The Germans, from which we fled, operated in Holland, using the documentation and lists provided by the municipalities, which included the religion of their citizens, which made it easy for them to find the Jews, that poisoned the purity of the Aryan races, such as the Germanic Dutch.

In September 1942, most of the Jews living in the large cities such as Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam had already been round up (razzias), and transported in cattle wagons to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe. People who assisted the Jews in their effort to hide from the Germans where considered criminals and punished by being sent to concentration camps or death.

We however were living in a small village, relatively safe, until the existing mayor was forced to resign and a Nazi sympathizer was appointed to the job, who of course was a potential danger for our lives, thus our family consisting out of 4 small children aging from 1 year old to 8 year old, and my parents, were helped by the local resistance in finding places for us to live. Due to the fact that in local areas, a Jewish family of 6 souls would be difficult to hide, we were advised to split up as family, and separately we were taken to hiding places (mostly in the large towns of Western Holland, were many people were looking less Aryan than the rural Dutch).

Thus on the day after my third birthday we fled and never were united again, as my father was shot by the Germans (as member of the resistance, caught red handed with drawings of military installations) 13 October 1944. We, the children and my mother survived and finally were all united approximately one year after the war was finished, and my mother had accepted the function of Director of the Jewish elder house, which was functioning at that time as reception center for surviving Dutch Jews returning from the concentration camps.

It would take another year before the Dutch Government recognized that my father was killed as freedom fighter, and not only because he was a Jew, and started paying us a pension, that enabled us to leave the before mentioned institution, in order to set up a normal household, in which we spend united the next 7 years, until the family cell fall apart, as my oldest brother immigrated to Israel, my second brother was send to Suriname with the Dutch army, and I left for England to study agriculture and after that immigrated to Israel. My sister and my mother remained for some years in Holland, until they also immigrated to Israel, joined by my second brother about 7 years later.

And all that time, I did not have a birth certificate, and never missed it. Until last month, when I was asked to send a copy of this certificate, in order to be included in a type of pension fund, and at the age of 68 I realized that I need to produce a proof that I am really born. I unjustly panicked and wrote an article about a identity crisis, but really my panic was uncalled for, because after requesting by email, a birth certificate from The Hague municipality, 10 days later I received by mail the confirmation that I really was born.

I have to admit that I was surprised at the administrative efficiency of the Dutch, and apologize for any bad suspicions I had, however, on the other hand, precisely this efficiency, has caused so much misery to us personally and our people in general.

I know that I am repeating myself, boring my readers if those really exist, but this subject, even though, like a storm in a coffee pot, occupied my thoughts for the last few weeks and really bothered me, as it really accentuated our fragile survivor status from the Holocaust.

As closing note, the clerk signing my birth certificate is called M.S.H. Ibrahim, thus somehow, the Germans did not succeed in their efforts to create a real Aryan state in Holland.