Lucy's Story: My four years as a hidden child in wartime Netherlands

Lucy's Story: My four years as a hidden child in wartime Netherlands

On Friday evening, March 14, 1941, two Nazi collaborators and a police officer rang the doorbell of a modest home in the small city of Helmond, in Noord-Brabant province of the Netherlands. After a brief conversation, the young woman who answered the door left with them. Her four small children—seven, six, three, and just one year old—remained behind in the house. That was the last they saw of their mother for well over four years. Later that evening, two other officers came to the same house to arrest the father, but he had eluded them. The children were taken to the police station and from there handed over to their grandmother. However, she refused to take them in, and the very next day she delivered them to a convent serving as an orphanage. For Lucy, the oldest, this was the beginning of a long journey. While all four siblings became hidden children until the end of the war, her three brothers each found a permanent place to stay; Lucy was shunted across the country from one hiding place to another. Why were her parents arrested and subsequently sent to concentration camps? Lucy and her family were not Jews, Roma, or Poles. Their persecution revolved around their religion: they were Bibelforscher , [Bible students] a faith community condemned to annihilation by Hitler. Lucy survived. Her brothers survived. The family survived. This is their story, told by Lucy, six months after the war.