Mirjam Lapid / Mirjam Andriesse (F / Netherlands, 1933), Holocaust survivor

Mirjam Lapid / Mirjam Andriesse (F / Netherlands, 1933), Holocaust survivor.

• KEYWORDS : <Westerbork> <Bergen-Belsen> <Troebitz Train>

Biography

Mirjam Andriesse was born April 17, 1933.

Yad Vashem, 2018 Torchlighter

Mirjam Lapid was born in 1933 in Deventer, the Netherlands to a Zionist family. After the Netherlands was occupied, Mirjam had to wear a yellow star and was expelled from school. The Germans confiscated Jewish houses, but a notice on the door of Mirjam’s house stating that she was sick with scarlet fever meant that their house was ignored.

Mirjam’s father Herman Andriesse refused to put his Christian friends in jeopardy by hiding his family with them. In April 1943, they were taken to Amsterdam and two months later deported to the Westerbork detention camp (Mirjam’s oldest brother hid with the Dutch underground).

Working as a cleric in Westerbork, Herman managed to obtain a forged permit for the family to immigrate to Eretz Israel, putting them on the list of prisoners destined to be exchanged.

In January 1944, the family was sent to Bergen-Belsen and imprisoned in a sub-camp designated for prisoner exchanges. The young people in the camp conducted activities for the children and taught them songs in Hebrew. In February 1945, Herman passed away. On 9 April, the prisoners were marched to the railway station. Mirjam's mother Batya, who was sick with typhus, was carried by Mirjam's brother and sister.

The family was put on the "lost train." For two weeks, they traveled around, stopping intermittently and burying the dead. On 23 April, the train’s passengers were liberated by the Red Army on the outskirts of the village of Tröbitz in eastern Germany.

A few months later, Mirjam and her family returned to the Netherlands, where she joined the Habonim youth group. She became a leader in the movement, and served as its secretary in the Netherlands. In 1950, she traveled to Jerusalem to study. When she returned, she joined an agricultural training farm near Amsterdam.

In 1953, Mirjam immigrated to Israel. There she met Aki, and the couple joined a Habonim group from South Africa at Kibbutz Tzora, central Israel. Since 1960, she has run the bureau of the kibbutz’s secretariat.

Mirjam and Aki had six children and 14 grandchildren. When their late son Ran, a helicopter pilot in the Israel Air Force (IAF), was asked to fly the German chancellor during a visit to Israel, he made it contingent on Mirjam’s approval. “Nothing could be greater for me than to have my son, a pilot in the IAF, fly the German chancellor,” she said. “That is my victory.”

BBC News (5 August 2019)

Mirjam Lapid-Andriesse was 10 years old when she was taken from her home in the Dutch city of Utrecht and placed in an Amsterdam "ghetto" with her family in April 1943.

As a child, she was unaware of the gravity of what was unfolding around her.

More than 100,000 Jews from cities and towns across the Netherlands were being gathered up to be deported during World War Two, mainly to death camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor.

The victims included thousands of children. Only 5,000 people survived.

"I was a little girl during the war, so my memories are child memories, not political," she tells the BBC.

"I was the youngest of four children, two boys and two girls. I remember we were taken from the ghetto by train to the Westerbork transit camp in June 1943."

A stolen childhood

Now living in Israel, Mirjam recalls her memories of life in Utrecht, the Amsterdam ghetto and the Westerbork camp.

"In the beginning it affected the adults more, but then it affected us," she says.

"We couldn't go to the swimming pool or the cinema, we had to hand over our bikes and we weren't allowed to go to public schools - so I actually lost three years of schooling."

Despite this, she considers her family to be very fortunate, compared with others.

"Out of the six of us, five of us survived. Only our father died - so we were lucky."

Mirjam's father, Herman, died from severe undernourishment and exhaustion on 24 February 1945, just six weeks before her family was liberated. The Lost Train In the days before the war ended, the Nazis began destroying evidence of concentration camps - including sites and documentation - and transporting prisoners to other locations within Germany. It was at this time, as Mirjam was travelling through Germany in 1945 on one of three trains that had departed from the camp at Bergen-Belsen, that she recalls the moment she was freed.

"Our train was known as The Lost Train," she says, after the vehicle intended to travel to Theresienstadt - in what is now the Czech Republic - was forced to reroute due to bombing, before stopping in the small German village of Tröbitz. Many of the people on board died in transit due to malnutrition and illness. "I celebrated my 12th birthday on the train, on 17 April 1945. "Since then I celebrate my second birthday on 23 April - the day we were liberated by the Russian army in Tröbitz, where we were held for two months. We were then returned to the Netherlands. "I am, to this day, in contact with a family there," she adds.

Is the compensation offered enough? The involvement of Dutch rail company NS in assisting the Nazis in the 1940s had a direct impact on Mirjam and her family, but she does not blame them for what happened. "Remember this was the Nazis," she says, "the Germans paid for the use of the Dutch railways - but the company had no choice. "I don't think they could have said no - I can't blame them for that." And what about the compensation now being made available to victims, will it make a difference? Is it enough? "I never expected anything - €15,000 [£14,000; $17,000] is a lot of money. I'm planning to do something special with it. "Next year it will be 75 years since I was liberated. I'm planning to take all of my family - the children and grandchildren - to Tröbitz to celebrate my personal victory."

Mirjam moved to Israel in 1953. Her entire family relocated there "because we didn't want anything like this to happen again". "I got married, my husband is South African. We live in Kibbutz Tzora and have raised five children. I have 14 grandchildren." She adds that, unfortunately, one of her children was killed in a helicopter accident while employed as a pilot in the Israeli army. What was the railway's role in deportations? A representative of the National Westerbork Memorial, Dirk Mulder, said in a TV interview last year that the NS had "complied with the German order to make trains available". "The Germans paid for it and said the NS had to come up with a timetable. And the company went and did it without a word of objection," Mr Mulder said. Westerbork became a transit camp in 1941 and the first deportees left on 15 July 1942. The final train left on 13 September 1944, with 279 Jews on board. Among those deported from the camp were 245 Sinti and Roma.

n November, NS said its role in operating trains on behalf of Germany's Nazi occupiers during World War Two was "a past we cannot look away from". NS, which formally apologised in 2005 and has described the deportations as a "black page in the history of the company", has promised each survivor €15,000, while up to €7,500 will go to children and widowed spouses of victims. "It is estimated that several thousand people are eligible for the allowance, including an estimated 500 survivors. NS will set aside several tens of millions of euros for this in the coming years," NS said in a statement in June. The World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), which pursues claims over Jewish properties stolen by the Nazis in Europe, welcomed the move, but also urged NS to provide additional funds as a "collective expression of recognition of the suffering and fate" of the victims who did not survive. These additional funds, the group said, could be used to "perpetuate the memory of those who perished" through a variety of educational programmes.