I was born on May 26, 1942, in Groningen, Netherlands. My parents were Herman and Henrietta “Hettie” Goslinski, who were also from  Groningen. My family on both sides had been in Holland for generations and considered themselves fully and completely Dutch citizens.

      The Nazis invaded Holland on May 5, 1940, and within three days they’d overcome any resistance they came across. Holland is a small country, and it didn’t have much of an Army at that time. Pretty soon after the invasion, edicts began to come out on what the rules were, what was and was not authorized. It seemed like each morning produced a new edict. The Germans didn’t target Jews in particular at first; they just wanted supplies and people’s automobiles. They wanted to take over the country.

      The Nazi occupation of Holland was particularly bad because it wasn’t for military reasons; there weren’t a lot of military objectives there. But it was an SS occupation, so it was very political. The German SS had much more interest in hunting down Jews, communists and many other undesirables. And though the number of Jews in Holland was much smaller than in Poland, for example, which lost millions of people, the percentage of Dutch Jews lost to the Holocaust was the highest to be found. Before the war there were between 110,000 and 130,000 Jews in Holland, but after the war only 10,000 were left. Only about 10% survived. The survival rate was very low. The majority of Jews were deported, and some were hidden. Many of those who were hidden didn’t make it either, such as Anne Frank.

      My parents had planned on marrying at a later date, but my father said they should get married in July 1940, two months after the Nazis occupied the country. They weren’t interested in having children at that particular moment, but it eventually happened. My mother became pregnant with me.

      By then events had evolved in Holland. By the end of 1941, as my mother’s pregnancy progressed, a lot of people had been gathered up and taken away. My father had even been in a labor camp by then. There were camps in the Netherlands, but they were gathering camps and not extermination camps. Those held in the camps were put to work. At first they felt patriotic about doing it, but my father was a smart man. He’d heard what had been going on in Poland and other areas in the east, and was inclined to believe what he’d heard. But no one really knew.

      The camp my father was in was staffed by German SS troops and also by Dutchmen who’d been conscripted. They’d keep those men happy by giving them liquor, and when they were drunk they’d open up and say things. “It doesn’t matter, you’re all going to go east anyways,” they’d say, or, “Where you’re going, it doesn’t matter.” Things like that. My father took those things to heart.

      The rules were very precise and inhumane, but on the other hand there were things that were permitted. My father had a deviated septum, so when he heard that you could have necessary medical procedures outside the camp he wrote to my mother, telling her to ask a doctor what sort of symptoms would require an operation. He was so nervous and upset that when he finally did see the doctor, he actually had the headaches and other symptoms my mother had written back about. It turned out that the camp doctor was Jewish, and he knew what my father was trying to do. The doctor wrote a note stating my father needed the operation, and they let him leave with a promise to return. My father got out of the camp but never had the operation.

      There was almost nobody left in my parent’s neighborhood, and things had tightened very much. People had been told not to return to their apartments, to stay elsewhere. My parents were desperately looking for a place to hide. At the same time my mother’s 24-years-old brother, Bert, got into a conversation about Hitler on a train as he traveled to a town south of Groningen, and got into trouble. I don’t know if he was tricked into getting into the conversation, but he said he didn’t like the Germans, or Hitler, and some of those who overheard him followed him to his aunt and uncle’s house after he got off the train (Holland had a large number of Nazi sympathizers). The guy who followed him went to SS headquarters in Ossen, and 20 minutes later Bert was arrested. He was never seen again.

      My mother would go to the SS commander in Groningen to plead with him to find out about her brother. He’d flirt with her and tell her stories, and he told her she had a nice apartment and wanted her to sign it over to him because, as he said, “you won’t be needing it when you go east.” My mother told him she wasn’t going east and he said, “Yes, you are. You all are.” There were plenty of warning signs if you were looking. Shortly before they went into hiding, my mother received her brother’s personal effects, as well as the death notice that claimed he’d died of “natural causes.” I was born shortly after that, and that’s how I got my name: Bertie.

      It’s difficult to explain, but in places like Holland, where my family had lived for generations, people knew who was Jewish long before anyone had to wear the star and do all those things that labeled you as being Jewish. It was a small country, and there were no places to hide. There were farms, but there was no logical place to hide. Houses were close together and the borders had been sealed very quickly, within three days of the invasion. My parents still tried to walk out as refugees with me in a basket between them, but unfortunately the quotas were full. They were paying people to do this, and those people who tried were simply picked up at the border. It was a trap. My parents managed to miss that trap. The theory was that anyone who survived had two things going for them: Chutzpah and Mazel. You had to have them both. Chutzpah means “moxie,” and mazel means “good luck.” If you had them both, you just might make it.

      My father met a man, Mr. Egbert Star, who’d come to my father and said it was terrible what was happening to the Jewish people and wanted to help. This was during the period after Bert had died and my father knew that the noose had tightened and there was almost no time left. My parents knew they had to find a place to hide, but couldn’t find anywhere that would accept a baby. Babies cry, after all. My father ran into Mr. Star again, who we called Opa, which means “grandfather,” who said he’d help my father but couldn’t take a baby. They’d tried one woman who said she could take me, but wanted my parents to ask permission from the authorities first. My father ran from that quickly. Someone from the underground – those who were doing what they could to sabotage the Germans – came to my father and said he’d heard that they needed to hide a baby. The woman they found to help was Gnirrep, a real righteous gentile who was very involved in finding homes for unwed mothers. My parents were instructed to put me in a basket with an extra set of clothes, and they put a note on me that said, “I am Jantje van de Velde, my mother has been abandoned. Can you help me?” They hoped this would indicate that maybe I was an illegitimate child and the mother couldn’t keep me.

      A particular time was arranged for them to drop the basket off, but not at the house. They were not to know where the baby was going. Oma Gnirrep arranged for people to be over for tea so there’d be witnesses who saw the baby, and when there was a knock on the door she’d answer and see me with the note, and it would appear to be just another abandoned baby and not a Jewish baby. I’ve known this story my whole life, but it wasn’t until I held my own firstborn baby, when she was three months old,  that I completely lost it. It was the first time I’d confronted what it would mean to give away a three-month-old child. To this day my mother says it was as if I sensed it, because I held onto her so tightly.

      Because Oma Gnirrep was active in the resistance, I wasn’t the only child there. When there were rumors of razzias (raids), when the Germans would cordon off the block and search homes, she had to find another place for me. In that way they’d take me somewhere and leave me. As I got older they’d simply put me in a room and distract me with a toy when I was left alone. I was abandoned probably 40 or 50 times in those three years: the people who’d left me there would be gone.

      Oma Gnirrep saw me again when I was two and a half or three, when I’d failed to thrive and had nearly lost a leg from infection, and she couldn’t stand it. After she saw that, she kept me right up to the end, only turning me over to my parents once the war was over.

      As for my parents, they hid in Mr. Star’s home along with my mother’s parents, who Mr. Star had also taken in. He was hiding five people in his apartment. After a few months, my aunt (who was then 14) and my grandparents were at someone else’s home, and the homeowner got nervous when they wanted to visit someone in the south of Holland. They couldn’t leave hidden people in their home without food or light or heat, and because they were nervous, they said my family members had to go elsewhere. They wound up at Opa Star’s door as well, who took them in and said they’d figure out what to do. The solution they found was to hide them all in his apartment. Opa Star was a single man, and there was a spinster housekeeper who helped him, but she was dating the Nazis.

      They would all hide in a crawl space in between the floors, under a trapdoor, when the Nazis conducted raids. My father used to say, “You have no idea how loud the beating of your heart is when you’re that frightened.” Those men would come in expecting, or wanting, to find something or someone, and tended to look at about two in the morning. Opa Star was such an honest Christian man who visited with prisoners after the war ended. My father would say that the drunkards would come to Opa Star for money, and he’d said to my father, “I know, you’re probably right Herman. But I’d rather give the money to three extra drunkards than take the chance on missing one hungry person.” He also couldn’t tell a lie, so when the Germans came around he’d be sent to a neighbor’s house; not because he was bad but because he wasn’t able to lie.

      There were a lot of people who helped those five people survive. Opa Star’s brother was a farmer, and he brought extra potatoes when there was no food to buy without coupons. He never asked, and never knew until we honored his brother posthumously. My father said at one point, “If the Canadians or Americans don’t liberate us we’re going to get found.” He lived in an apartment building, so there were times when a neighbor had to wait to get in, or sometimes there were a suspicious number of extra plates. Many people came around: there was the garbage man, the milkman, the postman. None had the courage, perhaps, to do what Mr. Star had done, but on the other hand they were all willing not to say anything and let it be. It took the cooperation of a lot more people than just those who hid us.

      It’s hard for people today to comprehend that when we came back into the world after three and a half years, keeping away from windows and radios and out of contact, everything in the country had been destroyed. My father had left his business in the care of someone else, and when he returned he was told they didn’t need him anymore. My parents’ apartment with all the furniture and personal belongings was gone. My grandparents still had a home, because the nuns who lived there had watched over the place. But they had no way of making a living. The synagogue was gone, the rabbi was gone, the Jewish community center was gone, all their friends and relatives were gone. The entire matrix that they’d grown up with had disappeared, and they had to figure out how to reinvent themselves. My parents rebuilt another business and started over. However, when the threat of war was imminent again, during the Korean War, they decided not to chance occupation again and we immigrated to the US.

            I arrived in Los Angeles in 1953, and graduated high school in Bellflower. I attended Long Beach State University and the University of California, Berkeley. By then, I’d met my husband to be, and after college we married. We moved to Tucson after that, which is where I’ve made my life. My husband was always about community and service, so we were very active here. We have two children, Howard and Helene, and four grandchildren.