DUNNVILLE—For Dunnville resident Gerry Krumhout, World War II was over before he celebrated his fifth birthday. In that short time, like many families who resisted the Nazi occupation in his hometown of Leiden, Netherlands, he lived in a home that served as a refuge for Jews travelling through the Dutch Underground.
Krumhout’s father, Cornelius, a bookkeeper, and his mom Petronella were committed participants in that underground movement, which began in 1940 shortly after Queen Wilhelmina ordered her country to surrender.
“It was a united effort by everyone to fight against the Nazis. We were brutally invaded by the Nazis in May of 1940. Rotterdam was bombed very heavily and the Nazis said ‘you either capitulate or the next city is going to be Utrecht, after that, Amsterdam, and so on.”
Instead of going to work in factories powering the German forces, fighters like Cornelius went underground, helping Jewish people evade captivity when the Nazis began to round up and deport them.
Krumhout’s mom and dad weren’t the only family members working in the underground. He also recalled his grandmother, who was once nearly caught red-handed by German SS Troops who came to her house unexpectedly as she was in the middle of falsifying papers.
“She had an apron on, that had pockets in it. She stuffed those papers in the pockets,” said Krumhout. “In those days, there were no furnaces. We heated our house with a stove with coal. That was the norm. She was standing beside the stove and feeding all these papers under their noses. My grandmother had nerves of steel.”
Krumhout explained what made his parents’ home an ideal hiding place.
“We lived right on the outskirts of the city,” said Krumhout. “We were fortunate that we lived exactly in the center of that street. There were 17 houses on that side of us and 17 houses on the other side of us. We could see if there were Germans coming to do house searching. We had enough time to hide the Jews.”
Inside the house, an unassuming closet concealed a panel cut into the floorboards, leading to a tight space beneath the foundation. Once the closet was refilled with household items, it became a perfect hiding spot.
“That’s how we hid the Jews, right in there,” said Krumhout. While he doesn’t have a tally on how many Jews his parents helped save, he did recall a time where eight were living with his family at one time.
The first of many Jewish people to find refuge inside the walls of the Krumhout family home were four-year-old Jenny and her six-year-old sister Hanna.
“They came to us late August or September of 1942. I was born October 4, 1941. In ’42 they began rounding up Jews and shipping them out,” recalled Krumhout. “The parents of these girls (Isaac and Rita Leijdesdorff) went into hiding, but they decided to split the family up; the girls in one place, the parents in another.”
Krumhout explained that the decision at the time was made so that if the sisters’ parents were found or arrested, “the family wouldn’t be done away with in one fell swoop.”
The girls would only stay with the family a short while, moving to another location in January 1943 as the Krumhouts prepared to welcome a Jewish mother and her newborn child into their home.
From there, Hanna and Jenny were taken to a location in Ede, where their parents were also hiding in a nearby home. From the windows of that house, Isaac and Rita could watch their children play in the streets, while never revealing their proximity.
It was the closest the couple would ever get to their children again.
“Their parents were betrayed for seven and a half guilders (the Dutch currency of the time) a piece. At that time, that would be about $3.50 to $4.00…. Food money,” said Krumhout.
After the girls had moved on but before their arrest, Cornelius received a set of sealed letters addressed to the girls from their father but was unable to get them to them at the time, instead hanging on to them in the hopes he could one day hand them over.
Krumhout continued, “They (Isaac and Rita) were taken to Oosterbeek, which is a camp in Holland where every Tuesday, a train full of Jews would leave from there to Sobibór in Poland. Any Jew that arrived in Sobibór by train, their life expectancy was eight hours. It was out of the train into the gas chambers.”
While some Jewish prisoners managed to escape the camp in October of 1943, going on to tell the tales of the horrors endured there, Jenny and Hanna’s parents weren’t among them.
“Their parents were betrayed in July of ’43,” recalled Krumhout. “They arrived there and within eight hours they were gone. They never saw their parents again after ’42 when they came to our house.”
Unbeknownst to the Krumhouts, the girls had indeed survived the war; sheltered by a succession of hiding mothers, liberated by the Canadians who helped drive the Nazi Forces out of the country in 1944, and raised by an aunt and uncle following the end of the war.
It wasn’t until the spring of 2003 that they would re-enter the Krumhouts lives after Jenny embarked on a mission to find out more about the many families and individuals who had helped protect the sisters, and about the small boy in a photo of her and her sister; one that had been taken shortly before the girls left the very first home to shelter them.
While the pair had met some of their protectors following an interview given by Jenny to popular Dutch newspaper The Trouw about her search, she didn’t have any luck identifying the boy in that photo until she met a man named Ben Verduijn.
“His dad was in the underground,” explained Krumhout. “He was shot by the Germans in front of his house in front of his wife and kids two weeks before the war. Ben was just a baby. He never knew his dad.”
When he retired, Verduijn went on a quest to learn more about what his father did during the war. Jenny and Ben often commiserated, sharing stories and showing pictures, including the one of Hanna and Jenny with the boy.
When Verduijn first spoke the name ‘Krumhout’ to Jenny, after discovering it in his search for people who knew his father, she was dumbfounded, as her sister Hanna had just recently revealed to her that she also knew the last name of the first family to hide the girls.
From there, it didn’t take much to connect the dots.
In April of 2003, the sisters travelled to Holland to meet with Cornelius and the Krumhout family.
“What’s surprising to me is that after 60 years they found us again, because we thought they were dead,” said Krumhout. “We never heard anything from that family again after the war. Nothing. We thought they were all gone.”
Shocking everyone but Krumhout, who knew of his father’s refusal to part with sentimental items, when the sisters came to visit, Cornelius promptly produced the set of letters, written over 60 years ago by their father and still sealed, handing them over to their rightful owners.
“Jenny can now quote those letters word for word. She’s read it so many times. It’s the only tangible thing they have left from her parents,” said Krumhout, who noted that he remains friends with both all these years later, routinely trading calls with Jenny on their respective birthdays.
Now, as Canada celebrates the 80th anniversary of their role in the liberation of the Netherlands, stories of families like the Krumhouts and the many people they helped flee persecution survive and endure, a shining example of the resistance that stood against the fascist efforts of the German army and lived to tell the tale.
Krumhout, who is willing to share his story with any who will listen, concluded, “The reason I do this is because we should not forget. We need to remember what happened in history. We need to remember what the Nazis did and how we’ve got to prevent it from happening again.”
