News of the arrest of our cousin Karel Bosmans reached our ears. The reason for his seizure by the Gestapo was anyone’s guess, perhaps you could say for ‘Deutschfeindlichkeit’. Mum saw fit to comment,’ he had it coming,as he can’t keep his big mouth shut’.
Karel was 28 when the Germans arrested and deported him, probably to do slave work in their factories, as all their menfolk were drafted in the army. It worried everyone not knowing where he was kept.
Karel was engaged to Fien, a nice and jolly girl who lived at Frans Hals Avenue in Arnhem, she came from a large family, all girls. Earlier when friendship with Fien was blossoming, Karel’s mother Rika a staunch Lutheran was not happy at all when she found out that Fien was Catholic, she had an intense dislike for anything Catholic. However Karel’s 68-year-old mother Rika had died the year before his engagement to Fien.

One day in October 1941, it could have been around Joke’s first birthday, our parents were told to keep their kids at home for a few days, as the Gestapo claimed the Eusebius School for their use.
Soon we were to be confronted with the stark facts; hundreds of Jewish residents were rounded up by the Nazi’s and brought to our school. As the building was less than 100 metres from transport, the railway station across the road, where the goods trains were waiting to receive their ‘cargo’, destination the concentration camps in Germany and occupied Poland.
How can we ever forget the anguished cries of the Loper family from the Alexander Street, just around the corner from us, when hauled from their home, passing our place?
They used to live next to the butcher Derksen and ladies hairdresser Diepeveen and opposite the van Amersvoort family, their son Chris, being Kees’ friend.
‘Bye, bye Bosmannetjes, we won’t see you again, we won’t’, their shrieks cut through our hearts. Even now putting down this sentence, I’ll get misty eyes thinking about this nice ordinary family going through such extraordinary awfull experience, doomed, for no other reason than they were Jews. After a week we were back at school, hit by a weird smell unknown to our tender noses. It was the reek of Lysol, used to disinfect the classrooms. Traces of straw were still lying in the odd corner.
Imagine the surroundings, you could have thought it was a stable where cattle had been herded for the night.