Avonturen: Marja's story of Sara Dresden

One day, just after the (second world)-war, my grandmother, my aunt Annie and my mother
were sitting around the kitchen table. The radio was on and suddenly, to their shock, they heard their own name mentioned. A call for Greetje and Annie Dresden: their half-sister Sara Dresden was alive and lived with people in the town of Delft.

Their father, Samuel Dresden, in 1941 divorced their mother (Christien) and married a Jewish woman (Rachel) who already had a child. Together they afterwards had Sara. Just before they were deported during a razzia, Samuel and Racheltje in their panic, handed the baby over to the neighbors. Samuel and Racheltje and her daughter Judith did not survive. Sara did. The neighbors, scared, handed her to the Germans, who dropped the baby in the Jewish Nursery opposite the Hollandsche Schouwburg and from there she was saved, together with several other children.

Overjoyed Annie and Greetje set off to Delft. Meanwhile Greetje was now seventeen years old and Annie fifteen. Seeing their half-sister, a tiny, cute girl, they wanted to hug her and called her “our little sister Sara”. But the woman asked them not to do that. They didn’t want Maria, as they called Sara now, to know that in reality she was Jewish, and not their own child. Annie and Greet could imagine her line of thinking and were already happy that those people had taken Sara into their home.

My father used to cut out articles from the newspaper and when I asked why, he answered:
your mother can’t bear to read sad tidings. It turned out later that this meant articles about the war. If Hitler or anything about the war came on television, my father ran to the tv-set and switched it off. Ma did not want to know anything about it. She only wanted to direct her attention to the beautiful things in life. That was her way to deal with the past.

One time the doorbell rang, I was around four years old. My mother pulled the rope to open
the door downstairs. I heard some voices and the footsteps of my mother on the stairs and
then I heard screaming. I was so frightened that I crawled under the table. Some minutes later she entered our apartment with a very beautiful girl. “This is Sara, my sister....” I found it extraordinary that my mother suddenly had a sister, and I did not bother to think about the why and how. Sara was a magic girl for me, so beautiful and so sweet.

One day Ma told me what had happened during the war. I must have been around eight years of age. It was a huge shock. My mother, who had been through all of that. Her own father and her grandfather and grandmother and all her cousins were gassed? What is that, gassing? Ma explained. They had to get naked under the shower and thought they would be washed clean, and instead gas came out of the tap and they were suffocating. It was incomprehensible. Then they were dead. All of them: children and old people and everyone. How could people do this? How was it possible? I felt dizzy and nauseous.
Ma told it quietly and explained everything. How life was during the war and that they had been so terribly hungry. That her father was Jewish and almost everything was forbidden for Jews.

She herself had also received a call-up to report to the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Jews had to stay there until they were transported to Camp Westerbork and from there in cattle cars to
Sobibor. The Jewish Council had made a mistake and my mother was registered as Jewish. Her father ‘corrected’ that before his own deportation. She was half-Jewish because she also had a Christian mother, therefore she did not have to go.
I was in tears, it was too much to process. She told me that Sara/Maria was her half-sister.
That her father after divorcing her mother, married a Jewish woman who already had a child Judith at the age of three. Together they had another child during the war, that was Sara, who was the only one who survived, through a rescue operation by lawyer Kees Chardon, who had smuggled her out of the Jewish Nursery in Amsterdam. When Sara was sixteen, she discovered that she had two sisters and that in reality she was Jewish. Her real name was Sara Dresden, she did not no better than her name was Maria. She began searching and that’s how she, age sixteen,came to our home the first time.

In one way or another the sisters weren’t in touch for years. It’s never been clear why not. I
often thought of my magical young aunt. When I was sixteen I went looking for her. She lived near the town of Hoorn and when I arrived at her home she recognized me immediately. It was lovely to see her again. Meanwhile she had gotten married to Fred; they had two young children who settled down on my lap. We stayed always in touch, sometimes with an interval of one or two years.

Just before Greet and Annie passed away, one day after each other, I took them to Sara and
it turned into a beautiful afternoon. Sara didn’t ask much about her parents. She thought, I’ll
do that next time. But there was no next time.

A couple of years ago I was drinking tea at my aunt’s home when her phone rang. She turned pale: it was Kees Chardon’s sister. She had found out about Sara through an article in
the paper and had been curious if the child had survived. Since that phone call they have met.

Recently when working at the VU (Vrije Universiteit) I noticed the student magazine Ad Valvas lying around. In the twelve years since I worked there I had never even looked inside the magazine, and now I took a copy home. In the evening I flipped through the pages and to my surprise found an article about Kees Chardon. There is a portrait of him in my aunt’s home and my parents had a picture of him in their photo album, with the subtitle: Hero! I sent a mail to the author Wim Berkelaar, he invited me for coffee and we had a good conversation. It turned out that Chardon had been a student at the Vrije Universiteit...

Read also the interview with my aunt: The Story of Sara Dresden

English translation: Eva van Sonderen, journalist, Jerusalem

Sara/Maria