My name is Andrew Schot. I was born in the Netherlands on February 2, 1931. When I was nine years old, I went to school and life was good. Then the German forces invaded the Netherlands, even though the Netherlands was a neutral country. It was very obvious that Hitler could in no way ignore Holland because of its coast right across from England. In May 1940, they invaded. There was not much of a war; just about as long as it took for the Germans to move across the country. I remember our mobile forces were soldiers on bicycles and the Germans came with airplanes, tanks, and everything else. The only place where there was any resistance was the city of Rotterdam, where the Marines had their garrison. They decided to put up a fight, so the Germans sent in the dive bombers, the Stukas, and just about leveled the city.

      I’m not a Jew because, by Jewish law, you are who your mother is. In my case, my mother was a Gentile and my father was a Jew. But the German rule was if you had three or more Jewish grandparents you were considered a full-blooded Jew. If you had two Jewish grandparents, you were considered mischling^[1] in the first degree and if you had just one, you were just mischling in the second degree. In my case, both of my grandparents on my father’s side were Jews; on my mother’s side my grandfather was a Jew but my grandmother was a Gentile. By the German rule, I was a full blooded Jew although by Jewish rule I am a Gentile.

      Things started to go badly quite quick for Jews and homosexuals. The German trucks went through Amsterdam and rounded up Jewish men of working age. I had a brother who was eight years older than me and he got caught in that. They explained in the media that the reason they had to do this was because the German working men were in the Army, so they needed to bring in factory workers. But actually the Jews were taken to Auschwitz.

      A few months later my dad got a notice of relocation. He refused to go and went into hiding instead. He would come home on weekends to have dinner with the family. One Sunday afternoon he was home for dinner. After dinner I went outside to play with my friends (I was 11 years old then). Four German soldiers came up to the house, big guys with big steel helmets and big machine guns. They went into the house and when they came out they had my dad. I went over to talk to my dad but they wouldn’t let me near. It was the last time I saw my father. As I learned later, he ended up in Bergen-Belsen.^[2]

      I was going to school, and one day the teacher gave me an envelope to take home. There were two pieces of cloth in it made into a Jewish Star. The instructions read that I was to wear these stars on my outer garments from that day forward. Failure to do so was punishable by my death.

      Then they banned all Jewish kids from educational institutions. For the elementary and secondary levels, they had one smaller school that they opened up for just Jews, so I went there. In Amsterdam, I lived across the street from Mr. Frank’s business, Anne Frank’s dad. I had been there because I had an uncle who bought spices from him. I met Anne at school, and I had seen her sister. After school, they walked to their dad’s place of business to go home with him. We walked together quite a bit, and I got to know Anne. She was a regular tomboy and her sister was a real nice lady.

      Places were put off limits for Jews: theaters, city parks, ballparks, and swimming holes. They also put the grocery stores off-limits. They allowed only one store in each neighborhood to open up once a week so that Jews could buy food. There was a sign in the window that really explained how the Nazis felt about the Jews. It said: “No Jews allowed when humans are on the premises.” More and more people were rounded up. My mother was saving some grocery bags and filled them with necessities.

      One day my mother took me and my sister, who was six years older than me, down the street carrying those bags. She picked out one of the canal houses within short walking distance of the Frank’s house. This house had been abandoned. When we got there, we went inside and found that the stairwell had already been torn out. There was a homemade ladder with a rope on it. We went up to the third level, which was the attic. There was just a wooden floor and a tile roof with some of the tiles missing. There was no heat, no water, and no toilet facilities. When we got there, my grandmother (my mother’s mother) and two of her sisters were already there. My sister looked at me and said, “There’s no way you and I can survive here with this bunch of old people.” My sister was quite a feisty character. She went to mother and told her that we wouldn’t be able to stay as quiet as we needed to be. It would be better for everyone if we (my sister and I) went to dairy farms in the northern part of Holland. She talked our mother into it and that same night we went to the harbor in Amsterdam, where she talked one of the freighter captains into taking us with him across the lake.

      My sister had it all planned out. The dairy farmers there grew their own feed so they had workers in the field all the time. We followed one of the wagons with most of the workers in it (usually four or five). When they got to the fields, they went to work and we stayed by the wagon. The most difficult time was at night when the workers went to the farm for dinner and we were left in the field. We used to find a haystack to hide in, out of sight of the roadways. As soon as it got dark we would move. We never spent the night in the same place where we spent the day, and we had to find a place to sleep. We couldn’t sleep on the grass because in Holland it is always wet; it rains a lot there. Each farm had a brick barn that we got in, and the following morning we would start the same thing all over again. We had to get out before the farmer caught us sleeping on his property.

      We also had to eat. We did pretty well because we were in farm country. Every night before bed we would go into the vegetable garden and get something, whatever there was: carrots, radishes, and so on. We found out that the farmers didn’t appreciate that because they did not grow vegetables for the market—they grew them for their family’s consumption. Farmers started putting barbed wire around their farms, so we stopped doing that. My sister insisted that we had to eat eggs. We had no way of cooking them so she showed me how to eat a raw egg. There were no chicken eggs, so we ate wild bird eggs. One of our main staples were the grains that we found on the floor in barns where we stayed. Before we left in the morning, we filled our pockets full of grain. When we got hungry, we would just get a handful of grain, blow the dust out of it, and chew it. We also ate sugar beets. In the field they had stacks of sugar beets.

      My sister and I did that for two years. We had no idea where the rest of our family was and we didn’t know how the war was doing. One Sunday, we found a new barn. The following morning, a noise woke me up. When I looked out, I saw about three German army trucks coming right at us. I turned around to get my sister and saw about 18 more people sleeping in that attic. After being so careful for so long we had bedded down in a barn where Jews had been hiding for three weeks. You couldn’t get away with this because somebody would turn you in. I got to my sister and told her we had to get out of there. When we were halfway down the steps, I hollered back to the rest of the people there. I had to make sure we got out of there first. We started running and heard gunfire. I lost my sister there, but kept running. I got between two buildings and all of a sudden I felt a sharp pain in my right leg. I looked there and saw a little blood. The next thing I saw was a German soldier with a rifle right at my nose. He took me to the trucks where other people were already there. When the shooting stopped, solders loaded us into those trucks and took us to a concentration camp called Vught in the Netherlands.^[3] Actually, Vught  served two purposes: it housed political prisoners and it also processed Jews going out.

      The next Wednesday I was marched to the railroad station. As I walked down the platform I looked between the cars. There was another platform and another train. There were women on that platform, and all of a sudden I saw my sister. I was overcome with joy and hollered at her. She didn’t hear me, and before I was able to shout again one of the soldiers hit me in the back with the butt of his rifle. I kept quiet and then the Germans loaded us in those cattle cars. They packed us in there very tight; my arms were at my side and I couldn’t get them up to scratch my nose. I heard the other train leave. We stayed there a long time, and finally our train took off. After the war somebody helped me to research what was going on there. Both trains were supposed to go to Mauthausen.^[4]Going to Mauthausen was the same as going to Auschwitz.^[5] But the night before, the allies had bombed the railway going into Mauthausen. The train with my sister on it had already left. Down the road her train got the message they were to turn south and ended up in the Dachau, one of the oldest camps.^[6]  Our train was told to go to Bergen-Belsen. If we had gone there, I wouldn’t be here today. They were also told to drop the last two car loads off at Papenburg.^[7] It was a labor camp. I was in the next to the last car. Somebody looked after me. I went to a labor camp instead of an extermination camp.

      I ended up in Papenburg Concentration Camp without my sister. I was 13 years old. The biggest thing was going through my mind was, why this is happening? What did we do that was so terrible that we deserved this kind of treatment? I never layed down. I don’t remember if I cried or not. I stayed awake all night and early in the morning the whistle blew. Guards opened the door and everybody inside started to run out. I had to get out too. We had roll calls every morning and if somebody didn’t answer the role, the guards sent a team to the barracks to get the body out. There were approximately 65 people in the barracks. There was disease and malnutrition. When we were liberated, about a year later, there were only five of us there still alive.

      Germans supported the shipbuilding industry; Papenburg is still one of the biggest shipyards. They also had a couple of automotive plants there: one for Mercedes-Benz and another one for General Motors. They supported labor for them, but I never went there. With a couple of other young people and some real old people, I worked on the farm or performed cleanup in the camp. When these people that I worked with couldn’t do it anymore, guards hauled them off to Bergen-Belsen and let them die there (I learned about it after the war).

      We didn’t get anything to eat in the morning. When we were working on a farm, if we were lucky enough at lunchtime, one of the ladies on the farm would come out with a basket with thick slices of dark rye bread heavily coated with lard. Each one of us would get a slice of that bread. Once in a while I was lucky. When we had an Orthodox Jew working there with us, he would turn down the bread because of the lard. Since I was the youngest there, I would get that extra slice of bread. That helped a lot. At night, when the workers came back to camp, they fed us a cup of soup. They called it potato soup, but I called it mud soup because they just shoveled potatoes into the big kettles with the dirt and everything on them. When the potatoes were cooked, they gave potatoes to the guards to eat with the skin on it. The water that those potatoes were boiled in, with the dirt, was our soup. Frequently, when they had turnips, they would slice some and put them in the soup. Nothing else. That’s what we ate.

      One morning we were standing outside for roll call when we heard guns firing. We also heard the sound of motors in the sky. The following day the gunfire continued and we noticed the guards were kind of jittery. Early in the morning we saw a tank stopped in front of the camp. We had no idea whose tank it was but we knew it wasn’t German. All of a sudden the turret blew off, an antiaircraft gun was leveled at the tank.

      Two more days passed by and we saw another tank that had come through the gate. Soldiers came from behind the tank. Our guys busted out the door and came out outside. The soldiers went behind the tank. When sixty men are locked in a room without toilet facilities from seven o’clock at night until five in the morning, the place can get awfully smelly. And it was. We never had any clean clothes. When they came back from behind the tank, a couple of them had gas masks. I guess we were a mess. Many people in camps had dysentery and typhus. Our liberators made us take off all of our clothes and put them into a pile. They burned them with a flamethrower. Then they gave us a piece of cloth, like a horse blanket, to put over our shoulders. They spayed our heads, and underneath the blanket, with white powder to kill the lice and it was very effective.

      Then liberators started feeding us. They gave us crackers about as thick as my finger. I put that cracker in my mouth and I chomped down on it. They had learned not to give chocolate bars to people who didn’t eat real food for a long time. A lot of prisoners died from that. It took me an hour and a half to eat that cracker. Later that day they gave us another one of those crackers, but this time they also gave us a little container of lukewarm tea. We learned that we were liberated by the British and then they started transporting us to town. I didn’t go on the first truck, but I went that same day. Other guys stayed at the camp for another three or four days. We got to a processing center and I met a nurse there who was from Holland. Finally somebody I could talk to! She brought me up to date on what was going on.

      Every day I went to see my nurse and talk to her. At the processing center, they started feeding us slowly. The first thing they gave us was some broth. I don’t remember what flavor, most likely chicken; it was great. The following morning, they gave us a bowl of cereal, oatmeal or cream of wheat. I was there for over a week, maybe two. One day, I went to see the nurse and she asked if I would like to go home. I said, “I’m ready.” She confirmed that I was ready. She told me that people come to the processing center in three categories. For some of them, it was too late. All they could do was  make them comfortable and let them die there. Others were sent to hospitals because they needed treatment. The third category was people who were well and responded well to the food. She said that I had gained 17 pounds since I got there. I was 79 pounds when I came; I was 96 when I left.

      They took us on a trip to Holland and I found that my mother and my grandmother were alive. About 10-12 days after I got home, an ambulance pulled up. They brought my sister home, the one I had been in hiding with. She came from Dachau. She was in terrible shape, but she made it.

      Sometime later my mother got us together and said that everybody that could come back was back, and there were too many empty chairs. She said that she would apply for immigration to start a new life. We applied for the United States, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and one other. When the paperwork from New Zealand and the United States arrived, we decided to go to the U.S. because my mother had relatives there already. It took a while to get the visas. When we did, we boarded a ship in Rotterdam and sailed to the United States. In 1950, I had my 19th birthday on the ship.

      We stayed with my uncle for a while; then we got our own apartment. Very soon after I got drafted in the U.S. Army and went to the Korean War. After couple of extensions there I joined the U.S. Air Force. I served for 25 years.

      I spent another 15 years working with my oldest son in his painting and contracting business. I didn’t make a lot of money but it was a very big reward to work with my son.

       I have three sons, five grandchildren, and nine great grandchildren. Life is good. My sister got better and married another survivor. She also has a big extended family

^[1] Mischling means “mixed blood” in German, and was used as a legal term in Nazi Germany to denote a person deemed to have both Aryan and Jewish ancestry.

^[2] Bergen-Belsen was a concentration camp in Germany.

^[3] Vught — the only concentration camp in Holland.

^[4] Mauthausen – Nazi concentration camp in Austria.

^[5]Auschwitz – network of Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps in Poland.

^[6] Dachau – Nazi concentration camp in Germany.

^[7] Papenburg – labor camp in Germany.