A Holocaust survivor opened up to UH students Thursday about how her childhood experience as a Jew during World War II changed her life and the lives of her family.
Chaja Verveer said she was part of an ordinary family in Holland. No discernable difference existed between her family and any other family, except hers was Jewish.
‘ ‘We all think that we are done with war when it is over,’ Verveer said. ‘We haven’t even begun to solve the problems associated with war.’
Her family separated when they went into hiding in 1942. She stayed with a family who hid her for two years before a 14-year-old boy betrayed her.
‘If the German house-to-house search didn’t turn up anything, then they would bribe people with money to get information about Jews in hiding,’ Verveer said.
She went to Westerbork transit camp before spending three days and four nights on a train bound for Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
‘The trip should have taken three hours, but our train was sided to let other military trains go by,’ Verveer said. ‘There was no food, no water and no fresh air. An 18-month-old girl had died before we got there.’
Verveer was transported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. A nurse wrote that when the children arrived they were all ill, Verveer said.
Russians liberated Verveer on May 10, 1945, but she didn’t get the chance to reunite with her entire family.
‘My mother had learned that my father had been killed, and she said if she didn’t have children she would have died,’ Verveer said.
Verveer said the war took away her childhood and none of the children who survived knew how to be kids.
‘People don’t want to talk about what happened,’ Verveer said. ‘People who collaborated with Germany don’t want to talk because they didn’t want to get punished. People who were a part of the resistance didn’t want to talk because they had to do things that were not pretty or nice and the Jewish people never got a chance to talk about what happened.’
She also said her generation didn’t do enough to make sure that this didn’t happen again.
‘Racism is a substitute for thinking, we can’t judge people based on their religion or the color of their skin,’ Verveer said.
Young people can influence foreign policy as well as the policy here, Verveer said.’ ‘ ‘
