JACK HES

3/1/92 TOLEDO, OHIO

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     I am Jack Hess, I was born in Zaltbommel, Netherlands, February the 16th, 1932, I lived in a small town about 6,000 population of which 25 families were Jewish, out of the 25, there were eleven relatives, eleven families were relatives, we went to school in Zaltbommel. I had one Jewish friend, I had my cousins, I didn't have any non-Jewish friends, because we were very close knitted together until 1940, when the war broke out. We didn't feel anything until 1941, when the decree came that the Jews could not go to public schools anymore, we have to go at different times. I go to school, but not all Jewish people do. A couple of incidents I remember, I will backtrack, right at the end of 1940 or 1941, I don't remember, we had to wear the Jewish star, and it was made out of an orange cloth with black letters, so we always made a joke that the non-Jewish people were forbidden to wear orange, and Jews were allowed to wear orange. The Queen and royalty color was orange, their name is Orange.

     We wonder if the trains go to the other towns, do we have to always stand for German Officers? Occasionally a non-Jewish person would stand up for us, and the Germans were very upset when they saw that. One time we were coming home, and we went in the bus to go to our homes from the station, and a German walked in and he said all the Jews out of the bus, walk, and I think four or five people that day were in the bus, Jewish people with kids. When the German pulled his gun out of his holster, the driver took a tire iron and stood behind him, if he were going to do something, he would probably beat his head in. There were righteous acts going on with people, even early. Once in school, before I went to the Jewish one that we had to, a boy told me, the “Nazis will put you away.” I fought with him and put him on the ground. We did not have many problems, the people in Holland were tolerant. It was not like in Poland, we had the doctors, we had lawyers, and businesspeople, so we all made a living. I was only 10 years old, when I went in hiding.

We did not feel or see the footstep sounds, until in August of 1942, when people from the underground were talking to my father. She was a nurse and she said, “We cannot do anything about you and your wife, but do you want to save the children?” They said that they wanted to save the children. My father and mother started to look around and talk to some people, and right across from our store was a hotel, the owners said that they would take my father and mother. When the underground came back my father said OKAY, we have a place for us, you can find a place for the children. My brother said, “I'm not, I'm not going just give me money, and I will travel through Europe just to stay alive.  My father talked him out of that and then the three of us, we got homes and I lived with the family XYZ, I stayed there for two years and seven months. The first three months after I came there, they told everybody I was a cousin from Amsterdam, and I would go to the church with them. I played outside, and then it became too dangerous, because the Nazis, the Dutch Nazis, would go in gardens and yards, and backyards and ask kids who lived there, and are strangers there and so on. It became too dangerous, I cannot be in sight, and I lived for two years and four months, in a small room, at night I could come downstairs and stay with the family. In the morning I would peel potatoes, when there were potatoes, and then in the afternoon, I played. They gave me some books to read. I did not do any learning, school learning. I was in the 3rd grade when I went in hiding, and I did not know if my parents were alive, or my brother, or my sister, until after the war. I found out that my mother's sister wasn't hanging in very well. The nurse came and picked me up there and took me to a place where a few days later, my father and a man and the son of the family who saved my sister they came on bicycles. I went on the back of the bicycle and we went a good five-hour drive on bicycle, I was with my father. I felt freedom before, but it became intensified, I don't know, at that time I was only 13 years old. If you are children, you don't grow up as fast in Europe, as you grow up here in America. You do not analyze it like you think you know it all.

I'm 60 now, so it's quite different, coming back to Zaltbommel, my hometown after the problem was done, I had to go back to school. I was 13 years old and as a 13 year old boy you would go already to the second grade of high school. I had to go back to the third grade, so I did the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grades in two years. I had to make new friends and that was the hardest thing, to find a non-Jewish boy that you can be close with them. I never was as close to them, as to my cousins or the Kosher Butcher’s son; we were very close. There was one boy, he was three years younger, his father had a business selling eyeglasses and housewares. I would go to his house once in a while and he would come to mine, but very seldom. This was after the war, and there was no anti-Semitism in our town. There were two public schools, and the Catholic school, and the Protestant school, we had a good size class, there were twenty or twenty-five kids in class. I felt that we were accepted, that was the best part. We would walk or we played together at lunch or dinner, we would go to our own house and eat. I never ate there. He had a heart of steel after the war.

On Friday nights, the whole family would go to my grandmother’s and have a family get together and have coffee or tea, the kids would be there, the grandchildren, it was a tradition. My father started the business in 1895, then my uncle went in with him in the early ‘20s. He had fifteen tailors, my uncle was a tailor, and my aunt was a seamstress and had thirty seamstresses. Then my uncle started his own men’s store, so that took business away from my father’s store. My aunt married a German and lived there for a while until the pogroms, then came to Holland. So, my father cut out some things, so he would make a living. There was never any disharmony, it was always helping each other. I do not think the non-Jewish families were as close as the Jewish families, generally speaking.

     In 1940, when the war started, my father went to his mother and said, ‘We are going to England, you go with us.’ My grandmother said, ‘talk to your brother first, you have to talk to your brother.’ So, my father talked to his brother and he talked him out of it, he said, ‘it could not be so bad.’ So, then in 1942, when the underground came to him about hiding, my father did not say anything to anybody, except for my grandmother, who said the same thing again, ‘talk to your brother.’ My father said, ‘no, please don’t say anything, I am not going to talk to him, because I am going into hiding.’ We went into hiding October 3, 1942, about six weeks later they took almost all the rest of the Jews from our town, the Mayor of the town, who was a Nazi, wrote down on a piece of paper, delivered, thirty-six Jews, Heil Hitler. He became mayor in 1941, he came from another city and became the mayor. In Holland, the mayors are always appointed by the government. Up until that point we could practice our religion, we had a Chazan, a Cantor, there were so many small towns, you could not afford a Rabbi, but we had a Rabbi, and at that time the Rabbi was offered to go in hiding, and he refused, he said, ‘he should go where the congregation is going.’        None ever came back. My grandmother was seventy-eight years old when she was deported.

      I was sitting in a room in hiding while this took place, most likely reading. The family gave me three books a week, they were quite observant of their beliefs. During what they call, the hunger winter of 1944, we would get a piece of bread in the morning, a potato in the afternoon, and some soup made of god knows what. They had soup kitchens there, where you could get soup, three or four times a week. The food situation was the same for Jews and non-Jews. The underground was very good at making ration cards, people who had Jews in hiding, would get two or three extra of the phony ration cards that were good enough to get accepted. This way they got more food than their normal ration. My parents that were not taken by the underground, they found their own hiding place, my parents paid twenty-five thousand guilders to go in hiding, to stay alive. They also did the laundry for the hotel, because they were upstairs, they also cleaned the upstairs. They didn’t have maids because it was too dangerous to have maids. One thing I didn’t tell you, when my parents came to the hotel upstairs, this was done during the night, they found one of my father’s cousins and his wife and a son, and some other people from Amsterdam, in hiding. They were hiding, including my parents, twelve people. My brother found a place also, he stayed with our bookkeeper, and the next morning the bookkeeper comes to my brother and says, ‘I found this in my mailbox, it was a letter saying, do not get involved with Jews, because you are going to have the Nazis, come to your house. My brother said, ‘hey, you wrote it yourself, nobody knew that I was coming here. My brother said, ‘don’t worry about it, I will leave tonight, when it gets dark, I will leave.’ He went to the hotel where my parents were hiding, my father told my brother, that if anything happened, he should contact the owners of the hotel. He went to the hotel and found out they were upstairs. Those people were doing a lot with the underground, the owners, they took in pilots that were shot down, this was a throughway, they would stay a night or a couple and then were taken back to France, then to Spain, and back to England. They also had meetings of the underground in the hotel.

            A problem had arisen when one of the underground had been caught by the Nazis. He had a piece of paper in his pocket that stated where and when a meeting was to be held. It was on Saturday night, the meeting was at five o’clock, but the papers said seven o’clock. So, the Nazis stormed in at seven o’clock. My parents and my brother, and my father’s cousin, wife and son, and my mother’s sister were all safe. The other five people, Jewish people, were in the hotel, because they were helping downstairs. The Germans were right away, all over the hotel, they were on the roof, in the gutters, with their machine guns, because they expected an underground group of people that will fight. The couple walked into the kitchen, and when the owner saw this, he wanted to go out the kitchen, to warn the people upstairs, and he was shot, and a Jewish girl in the kitchen from Amsterdam, she got shot. Because of the shootings, they heard the shots upstairs, there was a hiding place. When they came upstairs, they were already in the hiding place. The wife of the owner told one of the policemen that there were still people in the hotel, because everyone had to leave the hotel. The Jewish people were immediately transferred to a concentration camp. The wife of the owner, because they were interrogated, blamed everything on the husband because, he was dead, so blaming him caused him no additional harm. They put her in a jail, she had three children. It was a Friday night when all this happened and by Saturday night my brother said, ‘we can’t stay here we will starve to death.’ So, Monday morning, early, six o’clock, he says, ‘ok let us go and see how we can get out.’ They walked out to the back, and they saw somebody open the back door, three times, and they waited, and they opened it again, three times. My brother said, ‘that is a sign for us to get out.’ So, my brother and my cousin, they were playmates, they went out first, then my mother and father, and then my aunt, she went to the train station because she had a pass for it, and my father’s cousin, and they all went different ways. All of them lived, they survived. My sister was at a farmer, the difference between her and I is, she gained forty pounds, and I, when the war was over, I was thirteen years old only, I weighed sixty-five pounds.

        We were very lucky that the family came back, my parents. I call them aunt and uncle, the people that hid me, they sawed out a piece out of the living room floor, and they put a mattress underneath the living room. Because my uncle was with the underground, he knew right away what was going on with the Nazis. They would go into an area and check every house; the underground would get hold of this information and they would let everybody know that this was happening. The people had a big organ, they would move the organ and I would get underneath, and they put the organ back. It looked so heavy; they did not think of moving it. I would stay there for a night, I would sleep there, until the next morning when everything was quiet, and they would move the organ and I would come out. It was short, you have to slide in on the top of the mattress and there you were, you lay there. When the Germans came into the house, I could hear them walking around, I held my breath, as a child, you don’t have the fear you would have as a grown up. I left the house when I was thirteen years old, May 5, 1945. I stayed with my aunt for a few days and went back home. My father was pretty smart. I was in hiding with real Christian people. I had to learn the bible; I knew the beginning from the Jewish side of it. So, when the war was over, I came home and told my father I wanted to become a Christian. My father said, ‘ok, before you go to the minister, why don’t you stay with us for half a year and see how we used to live.’ So, I said, ‘ok.’ Same thing with my brother, my brother told my father, ‘I want to be Catholic.’ My father said, ‘why do you want to be a Catholic?’ My brother answered, ‘who wants to go through this again?’ My father said, ‘you know what they call me, the Jew Hess, the Jew Hess. You can convert to Catholicism, but you will still be, the Jew Hess.’ My brother married Jewish, and my sister married Jewish. I spent two years in the Dutch army after the war.

       I had two aunts living in my hometown, both related to my father. They had to go to a concentration camp. My one aunt cleaned the whole house, because she could not leave a dirty house. My other aunt said, ‘if I can’t have what I acquired, nobody can.’ Our whole family made preserves, she opened all the preserves and threw it on the floor, ‘if I can’t have it, nobody is going to have it,’ she said. They all had the idea that all they had to do, was go for six months to a concentration camp and work, and then come back home. The Nazis did a very good job of keeping secret what goes on in a concentration camp. To me it is water over the damn, it is forty years later, I feel the people who saw them taking the Jews out of the city, the Germans that let it happen, they are all to blame. It could not have happened if all the Germans said no, there were only ten prevent Nazis, so ninety percent just let it happen. Even the Jewish people in Germany did not do anything. It would have only taken one bullet to kill Hitler, it would not have happened.

       After the war I said I will never set foot in Germany, and I never have. Not enough Nazis have been caught, they should absolutely continue going after them. By giving publicity to right wing hate groups like skinheads and Neo-Nazis, they gain followers, if there is no publicity it dies with them. There is a danger when hate groups multiply. Because of the Holocaust, I lost four years of my life, I lived in a room, and everyday life passed me by. I think my potential had not been what it would have been if I would have had four years of normalcy. I hope it will never happen again. It is sad how human beings can degenerate themselves, to the point that that happened, it is a sad world.