Chella Velt Meekcoms Kryszek

Tanzer: Introduce yourself, please.
MEEKCOMS: My name is Rochella Meekcoms. My maiden name is Velt. I’m called Chella. I was born on May 15, 1928. My earliest recollections are that my mother died when I was five, and that we had a cosmetics shop in the city of The Hague, Holland. The store was located right next to a big theatre. All the actors used to come in and out of my father’s store. I remember that very well, associating with the actors. I used to go backstage with them and all. I do remember going to the hospital when my mother was dying. I was about five. Then I went to live with an aunt. My father had seven sisters. When my mother died, she was 40 and he was about 42. We lived with this aunt for about a year or so.

Tanzer: How many children were there?
MEEKCOMS: My sister and I. Flora is three and a half years older than I am. We stayed with this aunt for a while. All the sisters of my father were older than he was. One aunt had daughters the same age as we were, but a lot of them had older sons and some of them were widowed. So the problem came up of where we would stay. My father at that time had sold the business after my mother died, and he went as a traveler on the road. That was his business. Some of the aunts wanted to have one child. They would either have Flora or me, but they couldn’t cope with two because they were older and there were some problems. They were a close-knit family, but there was just the problem of raising two young girls, and so my father said he didn’t want to split us up. 

There was a very Orthodox Jewish orphanage in the city of The Hague. It had at that time about 60 children, boys and girls, from the age of five to 18. By the time they were 18, they would find them a job, get them established in life, give them schooling. It was supported by the regents, by very well-to-do Jewish families in that city. So he talked it over with the family and decided that it would be better to put us there for a few years and maybe one day he would get remarried and give us a home again. He did not want to split us up. I remember, not of course them talking about us, but I do remember very well going to the orphanage that day. I was eight, and it was quite an experience. 

But having all the other children there my own age, we felt very quickly at home there. We came to love all the kids and loved the people in charge. It was run very, very strict and very Orthodox. I’d had no prior Jewish training at all. I knew I was a Jewish girl, but we had absolutely no Jewish background; it was a very liberal family I came from.

Tanzer: Your parents were not observant.
MEEKCOMS: No, they were not observant. My mother, of course, I don’t remember because she died when I was five. My aunts were also mostly not observant. We were a Jewish family, but we were not really observant Jews. This was my first introduction to Orthodox Jewish life and I loved it. So did Flora. We both loved it, and the warmth and the closeness of the people who ran the home. He was a man with a long white beard and with this little black yarmulke on, and he had that warmth. He would have a Hebrew class in his study with the kids. We went to Hebrew school after school the same as you do here, but we went every day after school to Hebrew classes. My father was very happy about it. He really enjoyed that for us. He’d had some Jewish upbringing. He knew all about it, all the holidays and everything. He was bar mitzvahed when he was a child and all that type of thing. He came from a large family, but he was the only boy with all the girls, and his father died when he was quite young.

We were there in the orphanage approximately four years, and finally in the end of December ’39 he got remarried. He married a lady who had been widowed, who was born in England but had been married to a Dutchman before and lived in Holland. We were so upset to leave the home, would you believe it? We wanted to go home to papa. Every Sunday we had two hours out with him; it was our weekly outing. And every Sunday when he used to kiss us and bless us, he would say, “I’ll take you home soon with me. I miss you so much. I want you home with me. I’m going to go find a mother for you.” But we were very possessive of him. We really didn’t want that; we wanted him. And [the orphanage] was our home. At that age, four years is a long time out of your life. 

Tanzer: What was the name of the home? 
Meekcoms:   There was no name. It was called Weishaus [Dutch for orphanage]. It was a Jewish orphanage, and it was in the Pletterijstraat in The Hague. I remember the name: Pletterijstraat 66. I still remember the building and everything. And so we left it, but we never really left it. We went back nearly every week to visit them. When we left I remember the director of the home kissed us goodbye and said, “Now remember all the High Holidays and everything you want to celebrate, you can come and celebrate with us.” And we did the first few years. 

We went home about the 7th of January, 1940. It was wonderful to have a home and have papa home every night. We really had missed that close contact with my father every day. It was difficult getting used to a stepmother and there were hard times. It was difficult for her. I realize now how difficult it was for her, but it was very difficult for us, especially my sister. Six months later the war broke out in May, so really we didn’t have much wonderful free time with the family because right away war started. I mean, things happen, but we’re talking about right away. 

I remember very well that on my birthday, May 15, the Germans walked into Holland. It was on my birthday, and that is why I remember it so well, walking through the streets and seeing the soldiers march through the streets. Because Holland is a very small distance from Germany, they just walked in. In an hour they were walking through the streets; they were everywhere in Holland. The boots and the noise. Just as you can imagine it, that’s the way it sounded. We stood on the side of the street watching them come in. 

I went home to my father and said, “I watched the German soldiers go by in the street. There were so many of them.” He looked very pale, and he said, “I’m afraid this may be the beginning of the end.” I said, “What do you mean, Papa?” And he kissed me. But he felt a foreboding. He was really frightened. I could feel it, and I was 12 years of age that day. 

All that week had been terrible because the bombs had been dropping. The war only lasted five days in Holland. They didn’t have a chance against the German Wehrmacht. It was just ridiculous. They lost a lot of people just in one night, and they were not that big, that army. But the thing was that they [the Germans] were very powerful. It took five days. I remember the bombing of Rotterdam. We could hear that so much. The bombs were dropping all over the place, and all night long the noise was frightening. We crept into bed with my mother and father. We were so frightened. It was such a terrible noise. The next morning we went to school, and the schools were full with refugees from Rotterdam. That city was completely bombed flat. 

Tanzer: Was The Hague damaged? 
MEEKCOMS: No, not much. Spots here and there. Rotterdam was the city they had concentrated on for the Dutch to give in, and they had completely flattened that city out. It was rubble. My father tried to get a train to Rotterdam. It was his day to go. He used to travel to Rotterdam that day to see his clients. The train ran on the railroad up until that city, and then you couldn’t see where you were. I remember that he came home and cried, he was so upset. It was absolutely flat; there was nothing left of that city. In the night especially, the bombs would drop and all that, and we would go and sit in the house. We would have everything dark, shades down and everything. It was a terrible week, and thank God it only lasted a week. It was so terrible. 

After five days the Germans walked in. For a while there you didn’t feel a change too much. It was gradual. Wherever you went you saw the German soldiers. They were quartered everywhere, in the big houses, and the families had to get out. They were there, but other than that my school went on, back to normal. I went to school.

Tanzer: Which school did you attend? 
MEEKCOMS: At that time I was 12 and in the sixth grade, something like that. A regular grammar school. Then instead of four years of high school, you had what is called the mulo [?]. It was kind of like a higher school, but you could also after sixth or seventh grade choose a different type of schooling. You could go to the gymnasium, it was called. It was almost like a university, the gymnasium. The mulo was kind of like a high school. Our days in school were from 8:00 a.m. till 4:00 pm. They were long days. One month vacation. You got a lot more learning done in six years than they do in six years here. I think six years were almost like grammar school and high school.

So life went on for a while as normal as it would seem to be. Life just went on from day to day. My father went to business every day, and we enjoyed our beautiful home after all those years, which we really appreciated. My father traveled, and it just went on. 1940. 1941. Then 1942, I think, is when they really started with the Jews. I remember the first heartbreaking thing to me was — I had a bicycle for my birthday, and of course, being in the orphanage for four years, I had not been very spoiled. Whatever you had, you had to share. It was all community property. You had a little box of a few little things of your own. So that bicycle meant so much to me, and that day it was announced in the paper and letters came in the mail that all the children had to give in their bicycles. 

Tanzer: All children or all Jewish children? 
MEEKCOMS: All Jewish children. Everybody who owned a bicycle. People, too. It was just heartbreaking for me to give up my bicycle. Then it came in that you had to go to school and bring up all your gold that you had in the house. Of course, what people did, they gave it to their friends to hide and just brought in a few things, in case they would check on the house. 

They had names and addresses for all of us. It seemed like they had gone to the Jewish community and had — I don’t know how much they helped them or what they thought that it would help them, but everything was turned over. They knew where everybody was, where everybody lived, and what you did. There was a complete history it seemed like. They had really worked it over. And of course, there were always people willing to give information about where the Jews lived. There was a National Socialist Party, the NSB [Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging in Nederland], the Dutch Nazi Party, who were willing, if they knew of anything, to gladly do these things. 

My grandmother lived in an old Jewish neighborhood like the old downtown Portland, Oregon. She lived there for I don’t know how many years. On the street over there lived kids from the National Socialist Party, and they would throw rocks up to her window or rocks into the Jewish shops. She was 80 at that time — 81, 82. She said she couldn’t understand. Those kids were so terribly brought up, she couldn’t visualize or imagine what had happened. It was just frightening. This was just the beginning, little things. They were so minor at the time. They seemed big at the time, but they seem now minor to what happened afterwards.

Tanzer: Prior to this, though, you as Jews had not been subjected to any discrimination in Holland? 
MEEKCOMS: No. How I compare the Jews of Holland to is to the Jews of America today. Holland is a very democratic country, and Belgium; all those countries were like that. A Jew was something else. You were Dutch. I never thought of myself as Jewish first. We were Dutch people. My father was born in Holland, his mother and father were born in Holland, his grandmother. They went back so far they can’t remember when they ever were not born in Holland. They probably came over in 1490-something when Columbus went to America, when it was the Inquisition. They came from Spain and they came from Germany at that time, too. There is a mixture somewhere there. But they went back so far. We were Dutch. We were Hollanders. Really, I had not felt antisemitism or anything like that at all. I do remember when I was in the orphanage that when I went to school they would say the “joodse weishaus” [Jewish orphanage], kind of like the “Jewish children,” because we were all Jewish children — it was only for Jewish children, that home. My father had a business close to there. It was in the city. There were lots of Jewish businesses there. And my friends at that time were from a lot of the Jewish homes. 

Now when my father remarried he lived in the suburbs, and when I went to school there, there were not too many Jewish children there. Like when you have gone to the suburbs in any other city in the beginning, there were not too many Jews in the suburbs. I felt a little bit then [antisemitism] because I remember some kids saying, “Are you Jewish?” or something like that. But the war was on then. It struck me kind of funny. I said, “Yes, I am Jewish.” But it didn’t mean anything. It was like here, like the children are raised today, like my children are. They’re American. They’re Jewish. But of course it didn’t last long because they made everybody aware that you were a Jew. The star came out. You had to wear your star, your orange star. 

Tanzer: How did the Dutch react to that? 
MEEKCOMS: In the beginning when they first came on, a lot of people on the streets said, “We are proud of you.” I remember the German officers would come to the school to check to see if you wore your star in school. That was in the beginning, when we were still in school with the non-Jewish children. It made me feel very bad. I was very conscious of that on my coat. I felt that it was almost — here I was always being Jewish, and I felt terrific being a Jewish girl. It was fun. I felt everybody was looking at me because I wore that star. And I was only 12 at the time, remember. I felt different all of a sudden. It made you feel different. 

I remember walking to school — in Holland you walk or you bicycle — and I remember people stopping me in the street and patting me on the shoulder and saying, “Wear it with pride; it’s wonderful being Jewish,” and things like that. And there were some people [non-Jews] who would sew stars on their clothes in the beginning, too; other people would wear them. The people were hurt by it, that we had to do it. But at same time they were a little bit afraid to commit themselves maybe too much. They spoke up, but the minute you spoke up there were repercussions. People, if they spoke up, would get arrested, and they would be interrogated, and then — in the beginning they would be kind of gentle, but they still would be under pressure. 

Right away there was a Dutch underground. They had a tremendous Dutch underground movement in Holland. I remember when we went to school and Flora, my sister, was about 15. She went to a girls’ school where they learned training of being nurses or ….

Tanzer: A vocational school.
MEEKCOMS: Yes. A girls’ vocational school. She went there, and she also had to wear the star and everything. And on the bicycle. When you go on the bicycle and you wear a star, people would raise their hand and say, “Good luck! Bear with it. We are with you,” and all that. That was a good feeling that everybody was behind you. I never felt that anybody would say a nasty remark about it, the Dutch people. They were very hurt about it. But really, all they could do was maybe also wear a star some of them. Some of them did, but not many. The kids in school wouldn’t, for instance, because their parents were probably afraid that something would happen to them. So that did not happen. 

The next thing that very vividly sticks out in my mind is that there came a letter in the mail — and my sister had just had her 16th birthday — that all the 16 year olds from every home had to identify themselves at a station. Come with a suitcase, bring their favorite clothes, their favorite books, gather there, and they would all go to a camp. They would be there all together because they wanted to have all the young Jewish people at that age, training them for something. They put in the letter that it was an order. You had to be there or else the whole family would be persecuted or the whole family would suffer. All the 16 year olds had to go by themselves. This was also printed in the newspapers. That was about 1943. I went hysterical when that letter came in the mail, for my sister. I was just berserk. Flora and I were always very close. There were just the two children in the family, and being in the orphanage together, losing our mother at an early age and being with different aunts and all that, we had tremendous close bonds and more so than the average sisters. 

Prior to that time they had done other little things. Jewish businesses had been taken over by non-Jewish people. They had put Dutch people in charge who were with the National Socialist party, the Nazi party. The businesses had already been confiscated, and the pressure was beginning to build up. There were signs in parks, “No Joden Allowed,” that on this bench — you couldn’t ride on the tram anymore. You were beginning to feel the pinch. My father was still able to do business because he was so well known in Holland, in all these different cities and by different people. He still kept up his business and made a good living. We were a middle-class Jewish family. He made a good living and had a nice home. He went about his business, but it was beginning to get harder. He was not a man to complain. He was a very brave man. I look back at him now and I think he was a very brave man. 

But that night when my sister got home and my mother got home and my father got home, I was in tears. I was absolutely hysterical. I had opened that letter, and it was this order that said that Flora, that all the sixteen year olds (she’d had her 16th birthday) had to gather at that place. I said, “I don’t want my sister to go. I don’t want my sister to go.” There was a feeling there that — you don’t know what went on. I had no idea about concentration camps or anything like that. It was something that we couldn’t believe. We were Dutch. They wouldn’t do that to the Dutch people. I went berserk. I said, “Don’t let Flora go! Don’t let Flora go!” I didn’t want to let her go. I hung onto her, and I cried and she cried, and we were absolutely berserk. It was a nerve-wracking night. 

It was about two weeks hence that we had to go there. There was a time limit. I don’t remember how many weeks. But they had given you that time to prepare. Anyway, that night a doorbell rang, and a man we had never seen came to the door. He said, “I’m from the Dutch underground, and I know you have a young girl in your house. Now give us your child, and we will see to it. We will hide her.” We were confused. We didn’t know what to do. He said, “We cannot let the Germans have all this young blood. We don’t know what they are going to do. There are terrible things that we hear, what they do to people. You may not give your child to them.” I said, “No, no we may not.” We were so afraid. There were so many people who would give you [away], who were with the Germans. There were people, quite a few. You never knew if it was your neighbor across the street; they were all over the place. The Dutch were very pro-Jewish, and they were very good people as a whole, but we still had those people in between. And you never knew who it was. Later on in my story [there is something] that proves it. So we said, “We will see. We will think it over.” He said, “I will be coming back again next week. Think it over, but whatever you do don’t let her go because you may never see her again.” 

We didn’t sleep that night. I crept into bed with Flora and we trembled all night long. It was so much fear and pain and anxiety. My father stayed up all hours of the night. Anyway, that whole week long more and more people came to the door who would say the same thing, “Let me help you.” In the meantime, they prepared the suitcase for Flora. There was a list of things, like you had to bring sheets, and you had to bring blankets, and you had to bring this and prepare certain pants and boots and all that type of thing. So we prepared all that suitcase to show everybody in the neighborhood that we were going along with the plan in case. The underground had said, “Prepare yourself. Prepare like nothing has happened and you are going to do as the order said because there are eyes and ears everywhere.” And really, you were not safe to tell anybody, your best friend. You can’t tell what they have in mind or who comes to the door, and they never gave names. There would always be contacts. You would be contacted. 

In the meantime, as soon as the war had started the underground had begun their movement; it was getting bigger, and more people were getting involved all the time. One day a man came to the door who had a shop further down in the neighborhood, a grocery store. He came to the house and said, “I know you shop at my store. I know you are a Jewish family. Give me your daughter.” 

They did not tell me that Flora went, and one day I came home and Flora was gone. They didn’t even want me to know because there had been talk of some people that this happened to. The Germans would come to the house, take the children out and ask, “Where is your brother? Where is your sister? You can tell me. I won’t tell anybody. Your family will be safe. If you don’t tell me, we will send them away. We will hurt them.” So I didn’t know where she was. While I was gone somebody had come to fetch her, and she had gone. When I asked my daddy where she was, he said, “She is just gone.” I asked, and he said, “Please don’t ask me. She’s gone. I don’t know where she is, you don’t know where she is, and Momma doesn’t know where she is.” So I didn’t know where she was. That was it. But I said, “Please tell me she did not go to the station. Just tell or I can’t sleep.“ He said, “No, she did not go to the station. “ I was alone in my bedroom that night, and I remember crying as I went to sleep. I thought, “What will happen next?” 

At that time I was 14. I had gone on in school. In the meantime, what happened in my school was that all the Jewish children had to go out of their own school and go into another school where only Jewish children were and Jewish teachers. All the Jewish teachers had lost their jobs in the regular schools, and they now had only a Jewish school. Of course, it means that there was just one school, and so they came from all over town. I had to walk for a half hour, forty-five minutes to school. We were not allowed to ride the tram, remember. We were not allowed to have a bicycle anymore. It was snow and wind, and no matter what it was, we had to walk to the school. Jewish teachers, all Jewish children. There was a tremendous bond in that school among all the children. We all were there for the same purpose. We were not allowed to go to the other schools. They were all fine Jewish teachers, and they were discriminated against too, of course. They could only teach there, and they also had problems. 

We went on with our education. I remember that I had French, German, and English from three different teachers, and I had algebra from another teacher. All different, just like in a high school curriculum. We went on just as normal. We tried, and they graded and tried to do as best as they could. There were a lot of people in the classes because there were all these kids in one school. Quite full classes. A lot of people. But every week there were less. Every week. One day we had 40 students, and then the week after there were 36 students, and then the week after there were 32 students. And it went on and on like that. Eventually one day there were 18 students, then 16 students. 

What happened is that the Germans had started to haul them away out of their homes in the middle of the night, that type of thing. Or the families had gone into hiding. There were very well-to-do families who could afford to pay to go into hiding, and there were also many families who could not afford. Day-to-day living, they had saved a little bit of money, but families for children who just hadn’t the money to pay for that feared for their children. And then there were people who were afraid to go into hiding.

One day when I got home, my father had had to go away. He’d had a letter in the mail that all the men would have to go at a certain place, and if the man didn’t show up, the children would be taken separately and the mothers would be taken separately. They had to come. They would just have to work; it was a labor camp. Nothing would happen. They would just have to hold the men together. They were still in Holland, in a camp in Holland in the provinces. I didn’t want my father to go, and I went again through that whole deal. 

My uncles came over that night. They all had the letter too, and they were all talking together. I remember them sitting in the living room talking over the dinner table. They were drinking tea and discussing it, what they should [do]. Should they go into hiding? Should they risk their families? It was just very, very frustrating, and I was so afraid that papa would go. I would say, “Don’t go away from us. Maybe once you go away we will never see you again.” He said, “No, it seems like this is just all the men. You will be safe, and then they will send us home for vacation.” 

It was just unbelievable the way they thought what would happen. It is still so unbelievable what went on. You still try to grasp it. You were still in Holland, and the Dutch people wouldn’t let that happen. You were safe; you were in Holland. Although the Germans were in charge, you were still in Holland, and it proves that while they were in Holland they didn’t do those terrible things. They had camps and all that, but none of the really terrible things went on until they left the country. Anyway, one morning my father left. I went to school. He didn’t tell me what day it was, and when I came home he was gone. 
 
Now there was just my stepmother and I left. He was gone and was in that camp about six months. He was able to write to us, and I wrote to him every night. I remember that. I don’t know how many he got, but about once a week or so we would get a letter from him. He would say, “The work is hard but they give us enough to eat, and as long as we are in Holland we are all right. I’m here with Uncle Harry and so and so, and this friend and that friend. Be brave and everything will be all right. Maybe we can get to come home soon.” 

Anyway, life went on as best as we could. My stepmother had taken in boarders in the meantime, because life went on and we didn’t know for how long it would last. So we had taken in boarders, a very old man and his daughter, and they stayed with us. They were Jewish people. We made like a family with them, a little bit. We used to give them their meals and they had their room. And I still went to school. But one day I came home, and I said to my stepmother, “There sure aren’t a lot of kids left in my school.” 

I had a little boyfriend. We were both 14. One day a German soldier came to the school and was asking for this boy who was in the class. His name was Leon. I still remember it so well. He said, “We have got your family, your sisters, your mother and your father, and they said you were in school here.” You see, when they came to pick up the families, they would say, “Where are your other children?” Then they would say, “My child is in school,” and they would pick up the children. They had picked up that whole family. He had two sisters, a little sister and a sister a year older than him. They picked them up from school. By that time the school had really dwindled down. 

And so I came home that night and said, “I’m afraid to go to school anymore in case what is going to happen if they’re going to pick you up and they’re going to pick me up.” It had happened to so many families. Most of the time they would take them in the middle of the night off their beds. Many families had gone into hiding by that time. The families of the kids that didn’t show up in the school had gone into hiding, or they had picked them up from the school. We would see more and more German uniforms on the trucks stopped by the school. Your heart stopped in your throat because you thought they were coming for you. 

One day I came home and there was nobody home. The people had gone. The old man had gone, the daughter was gone, and my stepmother was gone. I sat in the living room and I thought maybe she had gone out or something. There was no note or anything. I waited around a half an hour and my aunt showed up. She was the oldest sister of my father, a widow. She said, “Chella, your stepmother went to the hospital. The doctor said she’d better go to the hospital to be under observation because they are picking up so many people from their homes that it is a good idea.” The doctors worked very much with the Jewish people. They would put them into hospitals all over the place because they hadn’t raided the hospitals yet. They had raided the homes, they had raided the schools, but they hadn’t raided the hospitals yet. That was next. So she said the doctor put her in the hospital under observation until we know what to do, until we can maybe find a place for her to hide. 

“In the meantime,” she said, “I am going to bring you somewhere. You just wait here and somebody will come to get you. Don’t be worried. Just pack up a little bag with your clothes that you need, a nightgown and a clean set of clothes. Don’t make it took like you are carrying anything. Just a school bag.” We used to wear those school bags over our shoulders. “Just put some stuff in there, some books and stuff.” She kissed me and said, “Don’t be afraid because everything will be all right. Don’t worry. People will be in touch with you. You will know what is going to happen. You will know what happened to your stepmother, and you will know what happened to your sister. Just wait here.” Anyway, she waited with me and it got dark.

A man came. I knew him. He had a shop somewhere in the neighborhood where I used to do some grocery shopping. He said, “Hello, Chella. You are going to come with me. You are going to be very happy because I have a surprise for you.” I was terribly nervous because now I was all alone in that house. Everybody was gone, and I had to leave all our belongings there as it was. My aunt kissed me goodbye. She said, “You will be hearing from us.” She went away, and the man took me and we went for a twenty-minute walk. 

We got to his store, we went into the backroom, and my sister was there. He was the one who had taken my sister all this time. I can’t tell you that reunion — I was just beside myself. I was so happy it was my sister. I felt safe that she was there and I felt good. I didn’t know what had happened to my stepmother and my father, but I knew she was there. We hugged and we kissed. We slept together in a little bed, and I was so happy and delighted to be with her. I said, “What will happen now, Flora?” She said, “Who knows? We are together now, so let’s see what happens. At least we are together.” 

Then the next thing we heard, in the next two weeks, is that my father had a terrible accident. We had a letter from the hospital. They had to ride on a bicycle to work every day in the camp that he was in. There were only men in that camp. It was in the provinces. They had to ride, and they would pass dykes. They said he had fallen off the bicycle down the dyke and had broken his legs and hips in three different places. He was very badly hurt, and they had transferred him to a hospital close to the city near where that work camp was. Somebody had written a letter that he was in the hospital there, and that they had put him in a cast up to his neck. He was all right and hoped to be better soon, but he was in a cast and couldn’t move. He was in that hospital for about seven or eight months, and he was in the cast for months. The doctor was very pro-Jewish and was very helpful, and there were lots of other Jewish people in that hospital too. They taught him how to walk again. Finally he got out of the cast and he got better. 

One day we got a phone call. Somebody called to the man we were staying with, would he come to get Mr. Velt because things weren’t as good as they could be. The doctor had news that the Germans were going to raid the hospital and all the Jews are going to be taken off their beds from the hospital. Now I knew that had happened before because I had one aunt who had a stroke and was put into the hospital. Her husband was also in a work camp. They had taken her out of her bed. She was helpless. She’d had a stroke. They had taken her off her bed into a wagon and had taken her away. So I already knew it had happened. And then some of the other aunts had letters to meet their husbands in the camp and they would stay together. Several of my aunts had done so. They had gone to meet their husbands, and they did meet them, and they were sent to Westerbork. But some of my aunts had married children already, and many of them had gone into hiding. 

Tanzer: Were you in hiding? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes.

Tanzer: All this time, you and Flora together? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes. We were together in hiding in that place. 

Tanzer: What was the hiding situation? 
MEEKCOMS: The hiding situation there was not bad. We lived behind the shop. We were staying in the backroom there and could not go through the hall or anything because the shop had a door to go into the backroom. You never know, anybody might come through and all that. But my sister, who had been there already for six or seven months — or a year maybe she had been there — she was there longer than I was because they had started with the 16 year olds and I had gone to school all that time. She had passed for a cousin in the family who helped in the house. She was a big, fair-looking girl, and the people who came to the back were the people who worked in the store. She had passed for that, but not now with me. It was getting a little bit too dangerous. People were up to this type of thing; you never knew who was on your side and who wasn’t, so I really had to stay out of sight more. 

Tanzer: Chella, how long were you with this family? 
MEEKCOMS: About six, seven months. While we were staying there, the man had that call that my father had to leave the hospital, so he went to the hospital by train. It was quite a long train ride. He picked my father up, took him in the train without any luggage, just as he was, with a false passport with another name on it — a completely different name. He picked him up, took him on the train, and when they came to a station on the train, took a tram and took him home. 

I hadn’t seen my father then for about a year, so we had a reunion. He was also brought to that house that Flora and I were staying at. It was fantastic to see him again, but he had changed so much. He was a cripple. He was very much a cripple. He had great difficulty walking. He got very, very thin and somehow had a look on his face that he’d seen things and he’d been somewhere. It was fantastic to be in his arms, and we cuddled and kissed him. It was so wonderful to see him again. At least he was alive.  In the meantime — I neglected to tell that also my stepmother had gotten out of the hospital. She had been at a different house all that time, at another place, but she had just got into that home prior to my father’s arrival there. She had arrived there too. So now they had the four of us, which was really too much for them. 

Now other dangers came on the horizon. We lived close to the coast in The Hague. It was called Scheveningen. They were afraid for the British invasion, the Germans, and they were going to evacuate that whole area there. The people had to go out and find homes in the city or other places because they were putting up wires and mines. They were mining the dunes there; everybody had to leave their homes because they thought they were going to blow up parts of the city. They were convinced that the British would come through there one of these days unexpectedly, the invasion would come. So now another danger set up. Where were we going to go? Where were they going to go? They got in touch with the underground, and shortly after that we were moved to different places. But before we were moved, we had another very frightening experience. 

Tanzer: Chella, you mentioned a frightening experience before you were moved by the underground. 
MEEKCOMS: Yes. Everybody had to be evacuated out of that area. The Germans did a house-to-house search. Many people in the area had already left. They’d had notice that they had to leave their homes. In Holland the big houses are divided into apartments. There were sometimes doors into another apartment. They would have a different front door, but the door to the kitchen, or something like a den, would go into the apartment of the people who lived below them. They were double doors, and they were locked. These were big, old homes. It was an old city. 

Just before we had the notice to evacuate, one day there were people in the grocery store in front of where we were staying behind the store, and all of a sudden the woman we were staying with came to the back. She said, “Quick! Go!” We knew what that was. We had already experienced that once, and we had tried to go into the other apartment. There were German soldiers, SS men, who had come into the store and wanted to come into the back to look how many people were living in that house. 

Now don’t forget my father was a cripple and couldn’t walk very fast, and they were already in the store. The man engaged the SS men in conversation. I think they were plain-uniform men. They had talked to the man and said they wanted to go in the back and see how many people were living in that house, because of the evacuation.  Maybe somebody had said there is something going on there that isn’t quite kosher. I don’t know if anybody had said anything, but they did do at times this house-to-house search. 

So he kept them engaged in a conversation in the shop, and his wife went in the back and said, ”Quick! Go!” We went upstairs into the bedroom. In the bedroom there was a closet, but instead of a door in front, it had a drape. Dozens of clothes and suits and dresses were hanging there, and there was a suitcase below the clothes. Behind the clothes was another drape, and behind the drape was a door, and behind that door was the other apartment from the house next door. It was, as a matter of fact, their kitchen. It was a double door. 

We got up the stairs, and we just got through the clothes. You could feel your heart in your throat. I was so afraid for my father. He could hardly walk. We helped him up the stairs, and the four of us climbed behind the clothes closet, behind the door, just closed the door, and they came up the stairs. We heard those heavy boots walk up the stairs, look, open up another closet door, look in the clothes. We heard them talk, “How many people are living here? What is that bedroom down there?” They asked all these questions. Don’t forget that we all slept in that house, four people, without showing where you had your goods and everything. My mother and father had a bed that you put against the wall, so you couldn’t see that. The bed was made. Flora and I had one little bed that we slept in together. The clothes were in a suitcase underneath the bed, so if they had pulled out the suitcase they would have said they had a guest or something. The boy slept upstairs with his parents in the bedroom because we had the boy’s bedroom. They had one child. 

We were standing there behind that door in that kitchen, and my father put his finger on this mouth and said, “Don’t breathe.” We were standing there not breathing. If somebody had coughed or sneezed or anything — it was so quiet, and it as such a terrible, frightening experience. I felt never anything could equal the fright that I felt at that time. After a while they left. They went through the whole house. They went through every room, looked in every closet, looked in the toilet, everywhere. So we surmised that maybe somebody had let on something, that they were looking into something. 

Finally when they left, we got out and I got the worst pains in my stomach. I was rolling on the floor. It was the first real nervous tension. I had been nervous so many times already before and upset, but it was really the first time I thought I was growing an ulcer. I had such pains. All of us had to be calmed down. We were shaking like leaves, especially my father. He was shaking and was as white as a sheet. He said, “Chella, we don’t ever want to be caught by them. We are going to stay in one little attic room if we have to, all of us. We will never complain about what we have to go through while we are in hiding. We will stick it out. We will never see daylight; that will be fine. But we will never be caught because that will be the worst thing that can happen to us.” Evidently, all the time that he had been at work he’d had a taste of it, what was maybe ahead of us. 

Anyway that passed, and in the next few weeks we had contacted the underground, and the underground had come. They had found another place for my sister to stay, another place for me to stay, and maybe another place for my parents to stay until they had evacuated themselves to another place, and then maybe they would take some of us back. I went to stay after that with a family with five children. They were working people, not at all wealthy. They took me in their home as one of their children. I never felt more loved or wanted in my life. It was marvelous. They were very good to me. A lot of their kids were around my age group. They ranged in age from nine to 16. One daughter was 17. They went to school, and so they used to bring their books home and I continued my school education with them. They played piano. They taught me to play the piano a little bit. They played guitar, they played mandolin, and I did everything with them. 

It was a normal type of a home while they were home. But when they weren’t home I had to be very quiet. I helped the woman I was staying with. I cleaned the house with her, and I did the laundry with her. I did everything to help her. If people came to the door, if any time the doorbell rang, I went into my bedroom. I had one of the children’s back bedrooms, and I would stay there till the person left. But if the children were all there at home, they treated me just like their brother or sister. It was a happy time in the unhappy times, though at night when I went to bed, then I would think, and I would worry and cry, wondering what would be ahead of us.   

My sister had gone with a family in Rotterdam with small children. She passed as their nursemaid. She went to church with them, she cleaned house, and was like a live-in maid and nursemaid. Flora at that time was 18. So she stayed there and managed pretty well, too. 

In the meantime, those people we had stayed with before had evacuated to the inner city. They had opened a grocery store there again, and they took back my stepmother and my father in their home. It was a small place, much smaller than they had before, and my father was in an attic room upstairs. It was a very old house, much older than the house that we had stayed in before. Papa stayed in that attic room day and night, a very small room with two beds in it and very little else. My stepmother passed again for a member of the family there. She looked a little bit like the man. He was a tall dark man, she was a tall dark woman, and they could have passed for relatives. She stayed in and helped the woman in the house, never in the store, but always in the back of the place. It had worked before in the other house that they had stayed in, so it seemed it would work again. 

In the meantime, I stayed with that family and things worked out pretty good there. At one time there was a house-to-house search in that area, too. They would do these things unexpectedly. What had happened is that a neighbor had come and had said that in the street next to them, a man had come in and had done a house-to-house search. I thought to myself, “Where am I going to go here?” This was a small house and you couldn’t really hide. If they came and they knew that I was there, they could get me. I couldn’t hide anywhere. There was a little balcony, but I never went on it. If you know anything about European houses, the way they are situated, all the balconies go in the back of the place, and everybody looks into each other’s house. I was never on that place so that nobody could see me. I dyed my hair into kind of a ginger to look different in case somebody would see me or glance at me — and I was kind of a redhead. It looked pretty good. 

When that house-to-house search came they had gone next door and we really didn’t know what to do. I went to the bathroom. The toilets in Europe are in the hallway. It’s a toilet in a closet. I went in there, and I locked the door with a little key on the latch.  These two men came in. They went into every room. I had such pains in my tummy. I thought, “Oh my God. This time they are going to get me. I can’t escape a second time like this.” They talked to the mother and they said, “How many children do you have?” “Five children.” “And where is the father?” “The father is at work.” “And where are the kids?” Some of the children were there, and some of them weren’t. I don’t remember exactly how many were there. They opened every door. He started to open the toilet door, but it was locked. So he said, “Open the door!” And she said, “Who is in there?” And so I said one of the children’s names. She said, “Oh, my little girl is sick. She has a terrible stomach ache. She has been on the toilet all day long today.” And he never insisted on opening the door. 

I couldn’t get out of the toilet for about a half an hour. I just couldn’t get up. I was so nervous, in agony. It was such a frightening experience. When I got out I had the shakes and I cried. I got over that, and then I thought, “Will they come back again?” But things passed again and went on to a kind of normal situation for me, day to day. We went on with our school work with the girls at night and everything. 

I also stayed in between that time with another family, a relation to the family that we had stayed with in the beginning, the mother and the father who had evacuated to the other place. It was a cousin of theirs. I had stayed a couple of months with them. This was a very frightening experience there. It was a young couple who really did it for the money rather than being good. There were people like that. People risked their lives, but so many of them thought that if they can get money out of it, then ….

It was a very rundown place, a contemptible house, and they had a little child about three years of age. They left me with the child all day long, and at night she would go out and he would go out. It was terribly frightening. I was there alone most of the time. Mice would run around there. The light would go out. They had no money to put a coin in the meter. It was a very frightening experience. I almost thought at that time it would be better to get caught, not knowing what it would be like to get caught. It was so miserable living in that hovel and so frightening. I thought I was going insane at times. It was in a very old place, kind of a condemned place, and when you looked out, you only looked at gray walls. It was a very dark place, and they never had enough money for anything. I did not want to complain because I was afraid, but I did get hold of the man my sister stayed with, and I did complain. I thought I was going out of my mind staying there. I was really going insane. That is how I got to stay with my sister again after that. That was the time in between. The last family I stayed with was the family with the five children. 

One day I hadn’t seen my father for a long time. I knew he was in that little room in town, and I was very anxious to see him. I was really homesick for him so much. All through the years we were so close to him. We had gone through so much, and he was the one main thing in our lives. Our stepmother was very new, and we were not very close with her. It was our father who was everything to us. We were very, very worried about him. It was his birthday. We asked, “Could I go and see him for his birthday, please?” 

I would hardly ever go in the streets, but once in a while when it was a really dark night, we would walk around the block just to get a breath of fresh air. I had been now underground about a year and a half to two years, and once in a while I felt like — if only I could scream or get some fresh air. One of the children would take me — four or five of them, we would all go for a little walk around the block for ten or 20 minutes. It seemed to be pretty safe because they were all kids my age, and there was not that much of a danger to it. 

So I said if only I could see papa for his birthday. Flora had said the same thing. She had also had that longing to just go on the tram in the dark and see papa. We knew he was not in very good shape. We were worried about him. He had been crippled. He just didn’t seem quite the same anymore, and we were concerned. So everybody had thought it was a good idea. Why don’t we go and take the tram in the dark, and we’d go and we’d do a good bit of walking. We all had falsified identification. We would take the chance to go and visit him. It was a very foolish thing to do, but people did this all the time. Nobody ever stayed all the time underground. Everybody came out once in a while. Take a tram to somewhere. Go and see somebody. Go for a walk. Every once in a while you’d come out for a little while. This was our big thing, that trip to see papa. 

We took the tram at night and carried a little bag on our shoulder to put in some night clothes. We were going to stay maybe a few days, a week. We were going to have really a celebration altogether there. My sister left that day from Rotterdam and I left that day. I lived in the same city. It was a 20-minute ride by tram. In Holland everything is very small, and you can’t go very far. I was standing on the tram on the way there, and it was so crowded nobody even noticed me. I felt conscious of myself. Every fiber of me, every hair was — I was there and I shouldn’t be there. I felt people were looking and it was not true. It was so crowded there at night. It was so dark in the city. We were being bombed by the British, and we always lived with dark shades pulled down. When you had a bicycle, you had black paper in front of your bicycle. The trams, the lights were covered. Everybody lived in a dark world.

We got there safely. Flora arrived there at night too. We went upstairs to the little attic room in the evening to see papa. At night he would come down and have dinner with the family. The shop was closed, there was a living room downstairs, and we would all have dinner together, with that family. We were so happy to see him. We hugged and we kissed. It was the need of knowing that we were still there together. It was very, very important to all of us. We had a nice visit with him and a celebration. 

People from the underground came to see us there. They would come at regular intervals to give us our food cards. You had to have that to get food, and the people would never have been able to get food for us if they didn’t have those stamps. The underground saw to it very well that everybody had falsified identification. Everybody would get those passports and everything. Every time somebody would come to us from the underground, they would tell us who had been picked up, who had been in the underground in hiding and who had been picked up. Every month it was other families.  We found out half of our family and half of our friends had been caught. Bit by bit, so many people got caught. They were given away, or they had gone out, or they had done things, or evacuation. Many, many people got caught. 

So she said, “It was very foolish what you did. You shouldn’t go out in the street. You should stay in hiding and don’t move. It isn’t safe. Too many people, too many dangers ahead. They are getting more fussy all the time. They stop people. They interrogate. Be careful. Go home and stay where you are.” Papa said it was right. We really should not take chances like that. It was too dangerous. But everything seemed fine. During the day we went upstairs. We went to bed. We slept with mama and papa in that little room. We stayed there all day long and we would read together. We’d just read, read, exchange books, and we would talk together what we would do after the war. My father had great plans for me, always wanted me to continue my education. He would open up a business for us, and all these plans. He would always plan ahead because that was what you would live on. He would say, “Whatever you do, don’t get caught. We stay here and we never argue. We do whatever they want to do with us because we have to be grateful that people like this will hide us. It’s too dangerous out there, Chella. It is too dangerous out there.”

I had so many wonderful conversations with my father. He was such a wonderful human being; he was a mensch in the true sense of the word. I learned so much from him about human nature. A whole life opened up for me that he taught me. I learned more in the time that I spent in hiding with him than I did in any part of my life. In all of our sorrow and worry, these were the most marvelous hours I spent with him. We were together the two of us, most of the time. I got strength from him, strength of character that showed me afterwards through the years in camp. He had tremendous will power and strength of character. 

Tanzer: And a sense of survival. 
MEEKCOMS: A tremendous sense of survival. He was crippled and was in pain constantly. He was never without pain because they let him go without therapy. He needed therapy, with all his bones and his legs the way they were crushed. He needed therapy every day, but he didn’t have any therapy and he was in constant pain. Things hadn’t healed normally. I never once heard him complain that he had a pain, but you could see it on his face that he was in pain. We had once a doctor come to the place, an underground doctor. There were people like that who made house calls on underground, who massaged his leg. He came several times to massage him because he was in constant pain. 

I stayed for about a week with him that time. When I talk about all the hours I spent with him and the strength of survival and the strength of character I got from him, it was the time before when I stayed with the other family. We were there for many months together. At times we were separate, but we did get together at times. It was just really wonderful that he was there in my background. He saved my life, I feel, in many, many respects. 

Anyway, we were staying with him for about a week, and one morning — it was about 7:00 a.m. in the morning — my nightmare came true. Night after night I would dream. I could hear those heavy footsteps coming up the stairs, and I would hear these voices say in a loud voice, in German and in Dutch, “Where is the family Velt? We’ve come to get you.” I would dream it, and I would wake up in a cold sweat. Afterwards when I was in camp I discussed it with other people, and they had all had that same nightmare. Everybody who had been in hiding would always have that fear of being caught. It was always with you. You were always tense. It was always in the back of your mind. 

We were asleep. My stepmother had gotten up and was working in the kitchen with the lady of the house. Flora and I and papa were still asleep in that little attic room. I heard a voice — it was about 7:00 a.m. We would spend all day long in that little room so we’d would get up late and take a long time to do everything, whatever you had to do to get ready. You’d take a long time for everything because the days and nights were very, very long, and a week would seem a year. Afterwards I thought — when people told me how long I had been in hiding, and it had been approximately two years — it seemed like twenty years, and I wasn’t that old yet.

I heard these voices say, “We’ve come to get the family Velt. Where are they? There are four of them.” I heard them and I thought, “I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming. This is not true. I’m dreaming.” My father sat up in bed, and he said, “Oh, God be with us.” We stepped out of the bed, all three of us, and within a second they were in that little attic room, two big men with guns, with revolvers in their pockets. They said, “Are you Mr. Velt? Are you Flora Velt? Are you Chella Velt?” They called all our names. They knew exactly who we were. I said, “No.” He laughed and said, “Get dressed, but quickly. We’re going to take you with us.” My legs, my hands started just to shake, and I thought, “I’m going to collapse. Something terrible is happening to us. It isn’t happening. It’s my dream. It’s my dream. It’s not true.” I said to papa, “It’s not true. It’s my dream.” But papa said, “It is true Chella.” He said, “Don’t cry. Get dressed. Do as they tell you, but be brave.”  

He asked the man would he please get out of the room while he got dressed. And could his daughters — at least, could he turn around. He laughed and said, “Don’t make a fuss. Just get dressed and don’t make a fuss. And do as quick as you can.” And a few cuss words in between. So we all got dressed very shakily. The man said, “Pack a suitcase. Whatever you have take with you.” We had a little suitcase there and put in some clothes which we never saw anyway. They took it, and we never did get to see the clothes. We took some clean clothes with us and an extra sweater and stuff like that. 

Then about half an hour or so later, we were all dressed. They took us down, and they walked with us through the streets. I still couldn’t believe it, what went on. I looked at my father and I wanted to talk to him. He said, “There is nothing to say, Chella. You’ve got to be brave. We will survive. There is nothing to say. We will survive. Be brave. Just walk, and papa will show you how he can walk.” I went up to the man and I said, “My father is very badly hurt with his leg. He can’t walk. You can’t let him walk. You have to help him. Don’t let him walk. He is in pain.” I went to him and said, “Please don’t let him walk. It hurts so much on these cobblestones to walk.” So he said, “Well, we’ll let him lean on the policeman,” and the policeman did hold his arm. He had a stick, and they walked us to the tram. Instead of walking us they took us on the tram. We went on the tram and there was one on each side of all of us. 

About ten or 15 minutes later we got off, and we did some more walking. We came to a huge villa. It was a huge house that the Germans had been quartered in. They had taken over that big house. They had all different rooms: one for interrogation, one for registration. The man in charge there was called the Captain. He was a very vicious Dutchman, a Nazi. He took Flora apart by herself. He interrogated her for two hours. Where were the rest of her family? Surely she must know some other people who had been in hiding. “Come and sit on my lap. You are a beautiful girl,” he said. “Are you hungry? Here, I’ll give you a nice meat sandwich.” He tried to really influence her, and Flora was so nervous she could hardly breathe. She could hardly stand straight she was so terribly shook up. She said, “I don’t know where anybody is. I don’t know where anybody is. I really don’t.” He said, “Surely you do. All you people know. You have a big family. You know where other people are. I’ll see that all of you stay together. If you don’t tell me where the people are, and where your family is, then you won’t stay together. You will never see your father again.” 

They knew so much about us that evidently somebody had given us away. We found out afterwards that there had been family members of the woman we stayed with. I had stayed with that young couple before. There was trouble in their marriage. She’d had an affair with the captain who interrogated us. He had talked to her and everything, maybe over drinks or whatever. She had an affair for several months with him, and she had told him that her aunt and her uncle had a family stay with them and all this and that and the other, and that had spilled the beans. It was just a clear-cut case. These types of things happened. No matter how secretive you kept your place of hiding, people knew about it. Some people knew about it. Sometimes it was kept very secretive, and other times it slipped out. And you never knew who it slipped out to. Somebody who would talk. 

We fortunately had been safe all that time. It was early 1944. After the interrogation, Flora did not say anything. The girl was so shook up, and he could see she was so shook up. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t know where anybody was. That was what we always tried to do. We never tried to know where anybody was, where they were stationed, who they were with. It was so dangerous. I’d had one cousin who had been caught. She had two little children who had been at different farms. They told her that they would take her husband and her — they would keep them together all during the war. They would be safe if they told them where their children were. They had known they had two children. She told them where the children were. They went to the farm and picked up those two children — one was five and one was seven — and they were never heard of again. 

This is the one thing we had heard of: Don’t let on to anybody else. And we did not. They had asked me had I stayed with a family. I said I only stayed with them; I never stayed with anybody else. They knew the family who had given — they knew that, but evidently they didn’t know the address of the people I had stayed with. I felt all the time I must not say that I stayed with that family with five kids. I must save them. I must not tell them. I didn’t tell them. They did not interrogate me personally. They just had asked me to fill in forms. I said no, I hadn’t stayed with anybody else. At that time they had left me alone there, thank God. I don’t know what measures they would have taken, of torture or anything if I would have spilled the beans. You don’t know. Many people did spill because they did terrible things to them. They did torture them. I was a girl of 15. Thank God they didn’t, and that family was saved. 

They took that man of that family we stayed with, and we were all brought to the big jail in Scheveningen. It was the biggest jail in Holland, a big jail with huge brick walls. After the interrogation, we had filled in forms and questions. There were many people there. We found some old friends there who had been caught. People were crying and were upset, and it was a terrible mess. It was frightening. Every time they took us in a different room for different forms, they took us separately. Every time I came out of that room I wondered if my father would still be there. 

Tanzer: Had they had a large roundup? 
MEEKCOMS: They had a tremendous roundup. It was full that day. Every room was full with people, and there were continually people coming in. This went on all the time. People were always brought in. Also underground people were being caught. People on bicycles, they caught people in stores. They had addresses of people they went to. They took the people out of bed in the middle of the night. Sometimes people who they had names would be sent back if they didn’t have enough to pin on. But most of the time when they had you they never let you go. 

When we were brought to that jail — it was a big jail and I couldn’t imagine; it was horrible even to its iron gates — we went in there, and right away they separated the men from the women. I didn’t know if I ever was going to see my father again. I was very frightened. My sister was in terrible shape. She cried bitterly and I said, “Flora, let us not cry and let us try and be brave. We don’t know what is ahead of us yet.” We had to stand with our faces to the brick wall. It was lined up with people. They had been there since early in the morning. They had been standing there. The jails were filled. All the cells were full with three or four people. They had some people in isolation, but the cells were full of people. 

Finally it was our turn to go into a cell. First they had taken my stepmother. I never saw the men anymore. The men were taken to another part of the jail. They had taken my father. I saw him walk away once we got there. But something happened on the way to there. Something happened which tells you something about my father’s character. 

From that house of interrogation, they had to walk to the jail. It was a long walk. The Dutch policemen took them there. There was one Dutch policeman walking with us, and he said that he had walked with a man earlier on, a crippled man. “He was so wonderful. He said to me, ‘You see the line, the cables in the street, on the trams, where the trams go on? My life hangs on that cable, and it can snap any time, but as long as the tram hangs onto that cable, I will hang onto that line and I will fight with all my might to hang onto that cable. And I hope my family will do the same because willingly I’m not going to let go of that cable.’” And so I said to him, “Do you know his name?” He said, “Yes, I do. He was a small man and he was crippled. He was so marvelous. It was just fantastic. He said his name was Velt.” I said, “That was my father.” 

So I felt again he came through to me, that that was his will. And he said, “What a wonderful man. What a wonderful example for you girls.” The man himself, it was his duty to do this, to take the prisoners to the big prison. Many of the Dutch policemen were very much against the job they had to do, but I guess they were forced to do it in some way. Some of them had resigned from the force, but some of them did not, and their life would probably be in danger if they had not done it too. I don’t know how to clarify that. They could have all rioted against it, and then they would have brought Germans in. The job would have been accomplished anyway. 

I did not see my father anymore. We went into the cell. We were brought with two women who would undress us, check for things, if we had anything on us. One woman said to me, “Why did you dye your hair? Do you think that they couldn’t tell that you were a Jewish girl because your hair isn’t black?” I didn’t know what to answer. I didn’t answer her.  

I did ask — they were very cruel and very hard; they were very mean-looking people. I was by myself with them in that office, and I said, “I don’t suppose I can ask for any favors, but if there is any way that you put me in a cell, would you please put me with my sister and my stepmother?” She said, “We put you anywhere we want to put you.” I said, “I understand it is up to you. You’re in power here, but it would be one nice thing you could do.”  

Well, they did put me in the cell with my stepmother and my sister, and there were two other people in there. There were five people in that cell. The cell was about 6’ x 6’, something like that, 6’ x 3’ I should imagine. About the size of this. There was straw on the floor. As you came into the cell, there was a pail in the corner you had to use for the bathroom, and every morning they would come in and give you a clean pail. You had to clean it out yourself. 

I couldn’t believe it. It still seemed so unreal. It seemed so unbelievable that this was really happening. I kept on thinking, “It is a nightmare. This is not true.” It was like I was walking in a dream, that all this wasn’t real. It hadn’t gone through my head yet. It was still all that day. The night hadn’t passed yet. It was still from that 7:00 a.m. in the morning. But now it was like 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. in the afternoon, and it seemed like a lifetime had elapsed. I couldn’t believe that this was happening. We were sitting in the cell and we all cried. We got there and we cried. There were two other women in that cell who were not Jewish. They were people who had worked for the underground who had been several months in that jail. They had books there. She said, “Look, there is only one thing to do. We play some cards, we read books, and we keep our sanity. We don’t cry. We try and be brave and see the day through. The days are long. They start at 6:00 a.m. in the morning and are very long, and the night comes early and the nights are long.” 

We stayed in that cell for six weeks. I can only say that I felt six years had elapsed. They were six of the longest weeks that I’ve ever spent up until that time. They opened the little piece in the door where they would throw your food through. I can’t remember really being hungry there. I was never very hungry. It was just something to eat. You just hold in your stomach every day. It was enough to last the day through. 

Once a week they would take you to the showers and you could walk outside. We would walk around in a circle, outside in a little courtyard. We would see friends. Every week we would see different people. We saw friends we hadn’t seen for years. We would say, “Are you here? Are you here? What a terrible thing.” New people would be put in the cells. You would knock on the walls, and you would say, “What is your name?” One day we found out after we had been there about three weeks a girlfriend of ours. We had been friends of that family since first grade in school. I hadn’t seen the girl for years after we had moved to the outer city. She went to school with my sister, in the same grade. They had been caught, and they were in the cell next to us. We had conversation through the cell door.

In the other cell was a girl who had worked for the underground who would sing at night. She had a beautiful voice and she would sing — Dutch National anthem, songs of freedom. She was in isolation, that girl. She would scream out. They would punish her and she would get another week for singing the songs, but she would not give in. Her spirit was such an example to all of us. There were people like that who would not bend under the power or the rule of the Germans. She was a fantastic girl. 

We would talk at night together. When it was dark we would talk. “Do you know who was put in the cell? Would you tell your name, where you are from?” We would talk like that all at night. One day I asked, “Does anybody know where my father is?” And we would find out through other people in another block cell. They would talk to another block cell over the walls that he was in a cell there and he was all right. That he was alive in that cell and he was still there. 

So six weeks passed. I did a lot of reading. I saved myself there because I delved into books from morning till night. I would read and devour the books. I had always been an avid reader, and during the years that I had been in hiding I had educated myself because my school was broken abruptly at the age of 15. I was in a high school, you might say, equivalent maybe. By that time I had graduated practically because we were that advanced compared to the American schools. But I studied the languages. I had really tried to keep up my education. And I loved to read. All the time that I had been hiding I had read practically a book a day, with all the other work. I had read, read, so much. Every week they would come in and give us five or six books. You could pick out books. They would come with a little trolley with books that the other jail mates had given back, and so we read a tremendous amount. We had a good selection of books. That saved me. That was my thing. I just read from morning till night. 

The six weeks passed, and one day they called us all out of the cell. Not the two other women, just my stepmother, my sister, and me. We had to stand in the hallway. We stood there for about three hours. More and more people came in that hallway. More and more people. More women, more men. They seemed all to be Jewish people. There were quite a few people we knew. We lived in that city, born and bred in that town, and we had known a lot of people. There were familiar faces among them.

All of a sudden I saw men coming out into the hallway. I saw my father, and I was so happy that he was all right. He was alive; he was there. I waved to him and he waved to me. I didn’t see him then anymore. We were put on a train and we were brought to Westerbork. Westerbork was a camp that was called a [some kind of?]lager. It was a camp where you registered. All the Dutch Jews who were caught were stationed there. They had some factories where they did some work. They had kind of a hospital they had built out of barracks. They had a registration. It was well organized, kind of a labor camp and a camp where the trains would come to take you to your destination, whatever your destination was to be. 

Tanzer: Where was this in Holland? 
MEEKCOMS: This was in Holland in the southern province. It was called Westerbork.

Tanzer: It’s a name that is well known in Holland.
MEEKCOMS: That camp. As we arrived there, it was in the evening. I saw my father again. He was in another part of the train. We got back together, we registered, and I met a lot more friends. It was amazing the people we knew who had been there, who were just recently caught, people who had been there for a year already some of them. Many who had been caught the last couple of months, who were able, had a job with the registration, some sort of a job that seemed important in the camp. They were doing something. They had been able to stay on longer than a few weeks. Some of them had been there for months, and some of them had been there several weeks. 

I found out when I got there that people had [been there and had] just left — part of my family, very good friends I had known for years, children I had been to school with, one of my best girlfriends who had just a week before been put on transport, the big cattle wagon trains. That was the place where the cattle wagon trains would be. They were standing in front of you all the time, and they would load you up in there when they had a good amount of people to go. They would really load those trains up. 

Tanzer: Chella, on our last tape you had come by transport to Westerbork. What happened at that particular camp?
MEEKCOMS: When we arrived in Westerbork, my father was put into what was called the sick bay, the hospital ward of that camp. It was in a different area from the other barracks. My sister and stepmother and I were put in a barracks on the end of the camp which was not part of the labor force, but was kind of a camp where you were put on transport quickly. When we found out about that we rather panicked. We thought, “How long will we be here before we’ll be sent on?” It was a very nerve-wracking thought.

Tanzer: Did you know that you were going to be sent on?
MEEKCOMS: Yes. Everybody knew that. That was the camp where you would be sent on from. But many people had been fortunate through one way or another, a job they had secured there. There could be very many different reasons why they could stay there a little longer. When you were caught, as a person who had been in hiding, your punishment was that you were sent on right away. It was one of the punishments. You went into those barracks that were called the dorshunlager [sp?] barracks, and you were going to be sent on to your destination.

Tanzer: Did you know anything about the destination?
MEEKCOMS: No, we did not. We had no idea what it was like. We thought a camp like Westerbork, that at that time seemed terrible to us but was afterwards we thought like a paradise. A paradise on earth compared to the camps in Germany, Poland. The Jewish people ran the camp, and then over them were the Nazis, and outside the camp they had the barbed wire. It was just like the other camp. The only thing was you couldn’t get out, but people did try to escape. Every so often you heard the sirens go and people escaped. Every day people would try to escape. Very often you would hear shotguns. They would shoot them and many people would prefer that. In that camp I met a boy in the barracks I was in who I had gone to school with. At one time I had thought he was kind of cute. He was panic stricken, the young fellow, and he said, “I am going to try and escape. I’m going to try to escape. I am going to get out of here.” He was at that time about 16. A very big, strong young man. He couldn’t. Some of them tried, but it was very difficult to escape. But they did manage, some of them. 

The man who helped run the camp was a brother of a cousin of mine, and I knew this man. His name is not necessary. We went up to him and he said, “I may be able to do you a favor. I know that in the camp in Vught [officially known as Konzentrationslager Herzogenbusch] — it is near Eindhoven, where the Philips factories are at work. There are some in the barracks in Vught who work for the factory.” He said that Mr. Philips had secured a position for all these prisoners to work for the Germans in the camp and then their lives would be secured. At least they would stay in Holland while they were working there. He said that they were always asking for young, able people, so that they can have some extra young people to work in these barracks that were set up as factories. There are quite a few of them. They had people trained to go over you, and you were a regular working force there. 

He said, “If I can get your sister and you there, would you want to go there?” And I said to him, “I don’t know if I want to do that. I want to stay with my father.” So he said, “I advise you, Chella, we don’t know what is ahead of you there in Germany. If you have possibly a chance to stay in Holland, while you are in Holland you are safe. Nothing is going to happen to you, at least while you are there.” He said, “I don’t know what is going to happen to you when you get sent on. I really urge you to think that over very hard and be glad that I could offer you this opportunity. I am able to get your names on that list.” And he said, ….

Tanzer: Let me ask, how had this man gotten this position? 
MEEKCOMS: They had been there quite a while. There are leaders in any community. These people took leadership inside and were clever enough to realize that somebody had to run these things, and they always put people in charge. No matter at which camp you were, there were always people in charge to run these camps. The registration part of it, any kind of office that needed leadership. He had made himself available and pushed his way through. He had been there already for about six or eight months. Eventually these people were sent to Theresienstadt, which was kind of a model camp. Any time that the Red Cross asked to visit the camps or anything like that, they would always take them to Theresienstadt in Germany because it was such a model camp. In the end, however, they did take the people from there and sent them to Auschwitz. I had family there, and they were eventually sent to Auschwitz. I found out that they had been gassed like everyone else. 

Tanzer: Did you not wish to mention his name because of his position, or  ….
MEEKCOMS: No. I don’t mind at all. His name was John Bromet [sp?]. 

Tanzer: Did he survive? 
MEEKCOMS: He did not survive. In the end he was sent to Theriesenstadt, and he stayed there till the end. While I was in Auschwitz later on, a crowd of people came through from Theresienstadt. I met a girl who had come from there. She knew my cousin and her husband and the brother, and they had all been sent there. They had come in together into Auschwitz, but they never came in. They had been sent right to the gas chambers. The whole family tried to preserve their lives and save their lives doing all these jobs. They were one of the last to leave Holland, and yet they perished. 

Going back to Westerbork then, I went to my father who was then quartered in the hospital ward. It was like a regular ward. They had Jewish people who had been nurses who were nurses there, Jewish doctors who were doctors there. They had some medication. They had at their disposal medical aid, nurses, a lot of things they needed. My father was sitting up in his bed when I got there. I explained to him what had happened, that John had come to us and said that we had an opportunity to go to Vught, and that I didn’t want to leave him. While we were together, we were together. So my father who had been, as I earlier told you, in that camp in Holland and had a taste of it and knew more of it than we did, he said, “Chella, as long as you can stay in Holland, you stay in Holland, because you are young and strong and your father is a little older and not quite that strong. If I get sent through, you can look for me. As long as you can stay in Holland you do that, and you come and find me after the war. I will be there waiting for you to find me. I will keep myself fit and strong, and I will fight with all my might. That is what I want you to do. Stay here with your sister.” I cried bitterly. He tried not to cry; he was very brave. And I went back. 

While I was in Westerbork — we were there about two weeks —I had a job to be an [inaudible]. It was kind of like a messenger. And my sister got a little job doing something in a kind a barrack. I don’t remember what work she did. So every day I had a chance because I was the [name of job] — that man had really arranged for me to get that little job — every day I went to see my father while he was there. When I came in he would save me half his egg, half his food. Actually, there was food; we did not go hungry there. There were adequate meals. He kept on saying to me, “You have to eat. You have to eat. You have to be strong. You have to keep your mind fit. You have to keep your body fit. And whatever happens, no matter how bad the food gets, you have to eat. It doesn’t matter what you have to eat, but you eat.” I promised him I would. He kept on printing that into my brain. 

Eventually the two weeks passed. A terrible thing happened just before the end of the two weeks. It was my first experience with what happens when a transport is being gathered up to send to their destination. It was dark and it was late in the evening. They called out people’s names. In the barracks were beds. They were about three bunks high, and three or four, five people to a bunk. They called out names, and the people had to get ready. They had a little suitcase packed and a roll, whatever they needed, and their children. As they called their names they had to come off their bed and they had to go to the train. Our names weren’t called out, Flora’s and mine, and several other people weren’t called out. There were so many people in that barrack. It was a huge building. I have never forgot the agony of one young woman. She was probably about eight and a half months pregnant, and she had two beautiful little boys with her. One was about three and the other was about five. They called out her name and her husband’s name and the children’s names. She wailed and she cried so much. It was such a heartbreaking sound, like a foreboding that they had to leave, and I cried so much to see the agony of those people. 

Tanzer: How long did you remain at Westerbork? 
MEEKCOMS: We still stayed about a week after that. That transport went, and I began to realize the agony of it, the pain to know you are going to the unknown and you were just being shipped off. I thought to myself, “If only I could escape from here. I want to escape.” I think if I had been alone I might have even tried it, but with the thought of my family there and everything. I thought, “What can you do as a little girl?” There were guns. There were rifles. 

People asked me afterwards how come you didn’t fight back. I was asked that by a young group one day in Sunday School when I gave a talk. “How come you didn’t try to escape? How come you didn’t fight back? There were many who tried.” But it is very hard to look down a barrel and have strong men stand around you with guns and to try and make a run for it.

Tanzer: Besides that you had the responsibility to your sister and your mother and father, and there were always the reprisals.
MEEKCOMS: Right. And you were always thinking of taking care of the other guy, the closest to you. Your sister, your mother, your father. To be close to them, to protect them. If one young person by themselves, maybe they could have made an escape. I often thought about it in camp. That walk from the house where we were caught to the house where we were interrogated and on the tram, being a small child I could have maybe found my way by myself out of there. A lot of people escaped, many times. But you didn’t consider that because there was your sister and your family. You wanted to stay together and protect them and be together, not realizing that maybe you would have saved your life — because many people perished. I am one of the few that came back. 

Anyway, they were put on transport, those people. We were left with very few people the next day in the barracks. We didn’t sleep that night. We were exhausted the next morning. I went back again to my father and told him what had happened, that they had people put on transport, and I cried. I said, “Papa, I don’t want you to go without me. I want to be with you.” It was such a frightening experience to see those people go, and I really couldn’t bear for him to go [cries].

Tanzer: Chella, when did you begin to work?
MEEKCOMS: We went to work — after we left that camp, we went to Vught. 

Tanzer:             When you went to Vught, who went with you? 
MEEKCOMS: There was a whole young group of people. But before I go into that I have to relate this story. Finally the day came that we had to go Vught. The day before we were told that we were going to go the next day. There were quite a few people that went. I think about 30 people from there, mostly young people. I went to the barracks again, to my father, and I said goodbye. I said to him that I would really try my best to stay in Holland as long as I could, and try to stay healthy and eat anything and do anything that I had to do to save my life. I would come and look for him when the war was over, not realizing at all how things like that would go. 

I said, “Papa, will you promise me that you will try to live so that I can find you?” He said, ‘Yes, I will.” He was quite crippled, and he said “Look!” He threw his stick away, and he showed me in the hall — in the barracks from the sick ward where he was — he walked for about five or six feet without a stick. It was humanly impossible. He couldn’t walk without that stick. But he showed me. “Anything you want to do in life if you put your mind to it, you can do that, Chella. I want you to remember that,” he said. “Look. I throw away my stick and I am going to walk without my stick, so when they ask me, ‘Mr. Velt, can you walk?’ I’ll show them how I can walk, and they will let me do. I’ll work. I’ll do anything. So you be sure that you do anything that you have to do, and you look for your old father.” Then we embraced and we said goodbye.

Tanzer: That is really a fantastic kind of attitude. 
MEEKCOMS: Yes. It was a marvelous attitude. I admired him so much.

Tanzer: I would say that probably is one of the reasons for your survival. 
MEEKCOMS: It really was. I guess if he had been a strong man in one piece they would have let him into the camp. I found out afterwards they never let him in. He was sent right to the gas chamber. But he would have survived. He had that mind. He was a thin, small man, but he had that tremendous survival instinct, and he would not have given up very quickly.  I got tremendous strength from him which has lasted me all my life. 

We said goodbye, and I was hoping and praying to God that I would see him again. I ran out of the barracks. I didn’t dare look back. I went back to the barracks to my sister, and she went afterwards to say goodbye to my father by herself. I don’t remember what passed between them, but I guess the same sort of thing. We never really discussed it. The next morning we left on the train to Vught.

Tanzer: How far was that? 
MEEKCOMS: It was just maybe an hour by train. Holland is very small. It was in the province of Brabant, near the city of Eindhoven. It was in the southern part of Holland. When we arrived in Vught it was quite an up-to-date camp. There were loads of barracks there. There were brick buildings there. There was a huge entry. It was very professionally run. It was a different camp than Westerbork. It seemed like it had been there for years.  It was built up. The prisoners who had been there all during the war years, they had been building barracks. There were factory buildings there. The Philips factories had set up branches there. 

When we went in there we were first put into a barracks, and everything we had was taken away. We had certain clothes that they gave us to wear. Prison clothes, striped clothing. In Westerbork we had kept our own clothing, but there it was a real prison.  There were German uniformed people walking around there, people speaking German. There were Dutch people, Nazi party people in charge of it. We were given these striped dresses. We were put into barracks, and there were a lot of people there. It was amazing how many people were there.

Tanzer: How many people do you suppose were in this camp?
MEEKCOMS: 2,000 people. The men and the women were separated. There was a kind of a wire that went between the men’s barracks and the women’s barracks. We would see the men, though, and many of the women that were in the barracks that we were in had husbands on the other side. When we went to work, they would meet their husbands at work in those barracks. For them it was very gratifying because they would see each other. Some of them who wound up there had even worked for Philips in Eindhoven, had had a regular job there. 

Evidently Mr. Philips, the director of the Phillips factory, had the idea that when people were caught, were put there, who were secured by him in that job — he had made arrangements with the German government. He had arranged that people would work in the barracks for Phillips factories, eventually working for the Germans that way because the Germans took charge of all the factories. Any type of store, factory, everything was taken over by the Germans. But they had left him in charge because he knew how to run the business, and he was very clever in that respect, that he had secured the prisoners to stay in Holland that way. When we got there we were just another 20, 30 extra people working in that factory there.

Tanzer: What type of factories were those factories? What were they manufacturing? 
MEEKCOMS: They were manufacturing lamps for radios, airplanes, anything to do with war materials that they needed, electrical equipment. We were taught how to do it. It was quite simple. There were different types of lamps that had to be made, and there were people in charge who taught you how to do it. They had seen to it that there was plenty of food to eat for everybody. You never went hungry when you were there. They served a hot meal every day. I remember that very well. It was quite good. Afterwards we looked back on it through the years in camp how good the meals were there. We might have complained at the time. They would gather you up in the morning. You had to go to [German or Dutch, sounds like “a towel” but means at attention] and stand up. They would call out your names. You were given a number which you had to sew on your dress. It was a regulation there. You had to obey the rules. They were strict, we thought, in a lot of ways. You had to abide by the camp rules. But we went to work every day, and there were shifts. They had day and night shifts.

Tanzer: Were all the workers prisoners?
MEEKCOMS: Yes. All the workers were prisoners. Even the people put in charge, the department managers, everybody in charge, everybody was prisoners. We stayed there for about six weeks. They had people come to inspect the camps from Germany. The rumor went around that Himmler had come there at one time to inspect the camp there. I don’t know if this is quite true. I don’t remember, but I know that high German officers would come into the camp to inspect the camp. 

The war was getting so that the Germans were not doing too good. This was 1944, and they wanted to empty the camps out. We’d heard rumors about that. One night there was a bell. We all had to get up in the middle of the night, gather our things and stand on [German or Dutch, sounds like “a towel” but means at attention]. We were all lining up for hours on end. Names were called out. We were all given a blanket. You had to take your dish and your cup, and we stood there for hours on end. Finally, we had to march towards the trains. As we were about to load into the trains, a lot of commotion happened and we were sent back to the camp. Such a relief went through everybody because evidently — what had happened we found out afterwards. You always found these things out. There was always a way of finding out everything. It is amazing how rumors get around and you always knew what went on with the war. We always knew what went outside. There were always people who had ways of finding out.

Tanzer: Who were these people, and how did this happen? 
MEEKCOMS: There were always people who talked. The German people or the Dutch people who were in charge, the National Party, they would blabber. They would say something. They were proud they knew something, and they would let you know. They said you were sent back because Mr. Phillips had flown to Germany and had told the German officials he would keep the people there and he would produce more. He had secured our lives again, had really saved our lives again. We were sent back to the barracks and we went to work again the next day. We thought, “We were really saved this time. Maybe we will never be sent away.” I remember I caught an ear infection that night standing outside in the cold all the night long. The next morning I had a fever, and I was sent into the sick barrack. I was about five days in the sick barracks. I had my birthday there. 

Tanzer:  How old were you on that birthday? 
MEEKCOMS: 16. So we went back to work and life resumed as normal. Two weeks later the same thing happened again. We were called out again. And again, “Get ready for transport,” they said. We thought, “Well, maybe we will be saved once more.” But this time it didn’t work. This time we were all put into the cattle wagons. We went to the railroad, and there they were. I don’t know how many of them. Half the camp was emptied out into the cattle wagons. There were quite a few of us. I don’t remember exactly how many. I would say maybe a few hundred. Also the men were loaded into the cattle wagons, the men with the men and the women with the women. 

We were in those cattle wagons for four days and four nights. They stopped, then they would go on again. We traveled through Germany, and when we passed through the border from Germany, we threw little bits of papers with our names on them through the slats of the cattle wagons. There were little openings. When the doors would open, we would throw little papers out, write to friends, people we knew in Holland — “We are now leaving. We are going to Germany. We don’t know where we are going.” Some of the station masters would pick up some of these postcards and mail them for you. Many, of course, were trampled. The railroad tracks went over them, and they were never found. 

We went on through Germany. We would stop at many stations in between the railroad stations, and we could see the countryside of Germany. Day went into night. They let us out on the side of the road to do what we had to do. I don’t remember getting any food. I don’t remember if we had any food with us. I think we had taken some bread with us. I don’t remember getting fed. 

Just before we arrived at our destination, we went through a station, and the landscape had changed. It had gone mountainous. There were lots of trees and a very dark, mountainous area. When we went through these strange sounding names I realized they were Polish names. One station we went through read, “Auschwitz.” It was spelled differently. It was “O-u.” I tried to read it. We looked through the slats of our cattle wagon, and then we noticed that on the railroad track next to us there were lots of cattle wagons. They were loaded with people. They were three times the size of our train. It seemed like thousands of people in there. We tried to shout back and forth to those people, and we found out they were Hungarians. They spoke Yiddish. A lot of them tried to speak Yiddish to us, tried to communicate with us. A few of us understood a few words of Yiddish, and we found out that they had been there many, many days in the cattle wagon. They asked us where they were. We didn’t know. We said it says on the station, “Auschwitz.” 

We rode on into the station a little further up, we stopped by a platform, and we stayed in the train for several hours. We heard people, heavy boots outside walk back and forth in the station. A lot of noise, a lot of voices. It was kind of a frightening sound. We had no idea what would be ahead of us. I felt very apprehensive, and I thought, “What will this camp be like? Would it be like Vught? Would it be like Westerbork? Will we find some of our family here?” We had been that many days in the train. I wondered how my aunts would be and some of my cousins. I was sure we would find them there. Maybe there will be other camps, but we had been so many days there, and the rumor had gone around that everybody went to that camp, that is where you wind up. 

Finally we got out of the cattle wagons. They had unloaded the other cattle wagons first before us, and evidently that was the Hungarian transport. They went down, and we heard noises of people talking, and screams, and crying, and marching, and loud voices. Then it was our turn. They opened our cattle wagon doors, and we went down on the platform. It was very dark. When I looked up to the sky, it was kind of like a red sky, flames going up in the sky. It was smoky, and I said to the girls around me, “Look at that pretty sky. It’s red. I wonder what that is?” We were standing at the station for several hours, at that platform, when finally I heard some German voices say to some other people who were in charge from the camp, “This is the Philips group.” They marched us five by five through a huge gate. We came through there, and a man was standing at the gate, the camp commander, a big man, and some other people on the side of him, some women in German uniform. They were called [inaudible German word]. Again, I heard the man say, “This is the Philips group.” 

We all came in. I was one of the youngest there. There were a few people younger. There were even some children with the group. There were some older people there. Every one of us came in, and we were brought into a sauna, bathhouse. In that bathhouse we had to strip off all our clothes. We stood naked for hours. I don’t remember how long. They opened the windows, they called out our names, and they said, “Your name is now Sarah and your number.” Sarah and the number they gave you. They tattooed a number on our arm. It stung. It hurt a little bit. But it wasn’t really important. You were so full of anxiety and pain on your insides that you didn’t really feel the pain on the outside. They kept us standing there for hours. It seemed like days. Actually, it was all through the night. They shaved us, cut our hair very short, and gave us a gray prison dress to wear.

Tanzer: When did you go to work, Chella?
MEEKCOMS: We did not quite really go to work in Auschwitz, or as it was otherwise called, Birkenau. That was another name for that camp. We were put into barracks, and the barracks there were not very nice. There were a lot of other nationalities there in that barrack. We met Yugoslavs, Romanians, Gypsies, Polish people, criminals. It seemed like they had opened all the prison doors in Germany and put those people in charge of us, the other prisoners. People who took delight in sadistic torture. I could never understand how people who had themselves been put in that situation as prisoners could torture other prisoners. Evidently these were people who had been in jails for years, who had maybe been put in there for killing their mother or some other horrible crime. These people were so vicious, the Germans delighted in putting them in charge of us. It was very frightening. 

There were three levels of bunk beds in those barracks. The Dutch girls, we all huddled together all the time and always tried to get strength from each other. We felt as long as all of us Dutch girls stuck together we were safe because none of the other people could hurt us. We really protected each other. The sleeping situation was just awful. There were five people in one bunk bed, and when one turned everybody had to turn. 

A terrible thing happened to me. As soon as I got there I got dysentery, and I was in agony all the time and in pain. I could not stay in the bed for long because I had to go to the bathroom continually. The bathroom was another terrible situation. It was several blocks away, and by a block I mean a barrack, and you always had to stand in line to go on these toilets. By the time it was time to go I would have had to dirty myself. I was so sick. What happened, they put a pail outside each barrack, and you could use the pail. I spent most of the weeks there sitting on that pail, and then when you were caught sitting on the pail, you had to go and empty it and carry the pail to the toilets. It was so muddy and rainy all the time there that you would slip, and the pail with all the dirt in it would fall over your legs, over your boots, and you had no water to wash. We were not allowed to wash. We used to wash ourselves in the rain. We would go onto the barracks, and as it was raining we would catch the drippings of the gutter and wash our hands and face with the water of the gutter. The only time that we got to wash was once in a while they would take us to the sauna and we would get through there and we would get a shower. It lasted exactly three seconds, but it was so heavenly just to get some water on your body. 

It was a frightening experience every day. Within a matter of two weeks I had probably lost about 20 pounds. I was sick, and I said to my sister and to the other girls that I couldn’t eat. My stomach hurt all the time, and I was going downhill rapidly. One day I wouldn’t eat, and Flora smacked me. “You eat,” she said. “You eat if you choke in it. You are going to eat and swallow that food. You’ve got way too thin already.” She made me eat, gave me her spoon. We used to have one bowl of soup to share with five people, and everybody would look at each other’s spoon, how much you would take; it was survival every spoonful. And we would get a piece of bread, one loaf cut into six pieces. It was called kuch. It was a very black bread. 

Most of the days we would get up at 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. in the morning. They would get us standing at attention, and we would stand there for hours on end. The German aufseherin [overseer] would come and inspect us, and the prisoner who was in charge of the group would walk back and forth, make you stand up straight, hit you, and do terrible things to you. I remember at one time the girl in charge of the group, the prisoner, had gone around all the girls standing to attention and had caught me that I had dysentery and that I had dirtied myself. She made me sit on my knees with two bricks, one in each hand, and left me sitting in that position for hours on end. I couldn’t hold the brick up anymore. I didn’t know how I would go through the day. I was convinced I was going to die. But I kept up, and I passed through that day too. 

Eventually I did get a little bit over the dysentery. My sister made me eat. She gave me her dry bread. You couldn’t drink the water there. They said that if you drank the water you would get typhus. “Don’t drink the water.” We were very dry and feverish. Many people got sick. Very few people got out of the sick barracks. German officers would go through the sick barracks and have a selection. They would call it a selection. If you looked sick enough they would drag you off your bunk and you were sent to the gas chamber. 

Every once in a while they would call up all the people and we would have to stand to attention. We went to the bathhouse, and they would have selections from the bathhouse. We would stand naked for hours. I remember more time spending there naked in that place than anywhere else. The German officers, you would parade in front of them and they would look you over. Bend over, do this, do that, to check what shape you were in. I remember that one time they made two lines, one in one line and one in the other line. Flora got into the other line and I was panic stricken. I thought maybe she was going to go be put through the gas chamber. Maybe it was our line. I thought, “If we go, we go together,” and I slipped over to her line. I thought, at least if we go, then I don’t want to know — anyway, we were together. But we were put to work. 

The next morning they called all our numbers. My number was 81793. Her number was 81792. Our numbers was always close together. We would always see to it that whatever happened we held each other’s hands so we would be called up together, so they wouldn’t split us. So when we were called up with our number, the next morning we were put to work near the gate where the people would come in from the transports. There was one huge pile of rocks, bricks. Huge bricks that they built houses from. You had to go over a ditch and make a pile of bricks on the other side of the ditch, then go back again, get some more bricks, and go again in that ditch. It started about 6:00 a.m. in the morning, and it had to go on all day long until about 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon. They didn’t stop for food or drink. 

I thought they just wanted to kill us in a very short time. If you didn’t go through the death chamber, they wanted to kill you from work. But we looked like we were working, and as they people came in from the transports they would see. As they came in, they would see you working. They saw lots of lines of people working, making this pile of bricks, so it looked like you were doing something. Evidently, this was maybe the idea they were giving to those people because all the people that came in that day from the transport were also people from the Romanians, Hungarians, Yugoslavian Jews, trainloads full. 

We started to work at 6:00 a.m. in the morning, and the load of people never stopped. The continual unloading of these people out of these cattle wagons it never stopped. We were just exhausted from the work and the pain because the road they put the people on was the road straight to the gas chamber. Not one came in of those people. They never even selected them. They just went on. Then you also had some of the wagons they would load with the old people and the sick people who couldn’t walk, and those people were so glad to get into the wagons so they didn’t have to walk, thinking they would be brought maybe to a hospital barrack. They went straight in from the truck into the gas chamber. 

Tanzer: Chella, you were telling me about the work that you were forced to do at the gates of Auschwitz. Can you give me more details about it?
MEEKCOMS: The reward at the end of the day of that work was that you got an extra piece of bread. You would line up again for hours to get that extra piece of bread. I remember at one time while we were doing that work and knowing the fact that all these people are going directly to that road to the gas chamber, I can see it in my nightmares years after. Many, many years after I can still see that road. It had a terrible effect on me, and it’s the only time of all the time that I was in the camp, all these months, that I actually prayed to God to let me go on that road. I couldn’t stand it anymore, the agony and the pain. The rocks, the bricks were so heavy in my arms. I had become very weak from the dysentery. 

I was sick. I probably ran a fever. I was jumping in and out of those ditches with those bricks, and I cried. I cried to God, “Dear God, where are you? Where the hell are you? Take me. Let me die. I don’t want to live another day like this. I can’t stand it anymore. How many more days do I have to go through this? I want to die.” I really prayed to die, but Flora heard me, she came to me, and she took my bricks off my arms. She said, “Let me carry it, Chella.” She was always very much stronger than I was in her arms, in her physical strength. She took the bricks and let me just carry two instead of four. So the aufseherin came up to her, took her whip and beat her, and said, “If you are so strong that you can carry that girl’s bricks, I’ll give you two more to carry.” And the rest of the day she had to carry five or six bricks, and it was a killing job. She watched her very closely, and Flora kept on saying, “Ist meine Schwester. Sie ist krank. [It’s my sister. She’s sick.] Please don’t let her carry that heavy load. She is sick.” There was no pity. There was no such thing as them showing pity for you, how sick you were.

Eventually that week finished, and then the next job we were put into was building a road. We sat on the side of the road cutting up bricks with little chisels. We could sit down on the side of the road, and we chiseled those rocks in pieces. After we had been there for several weeks — it actually seemed like three years. Those are the longest days of my life. The days they started so early in the morning and finished late at night, and early in the morning when it was dark, you had to come to attention. Everybody was very depressed. I thought most of us were going mental. We were going insane with the agony around us. It was very hard to live. Just to survive each day was a miracle. 

There was never enough food. Sometimes you had to carry the kubels [buckets] of food from the kitchen to the barracks, and they were very, very heavy. I never had the strength to carry it. Flora would take my duty, when it was my duty to carry those kubels of food over the rocks and the mud, and we were sliding from one side to the other. She would always take my duty and take my part in carrying those heavy kubels. She would say, “You stand in the corner, Chella. I’ll take your part.” She really helped me through those weeks because I was at that time sicker than she was.

Then one day we got up, we were called to a barrack, and we were told that a man would come and interview us. They said, “All the members of the Philips group come to attention.” So all the Dutch girls, the Dutch women, we were all standing at attention waiting to see what was going to happen. We thought, “Maybe this is it. This time we are going to go. This time they are going to gas us, the whole Philips group together.” We were all together. We held hands and stuck together. We were a very close-knit group. We tended to kind of hang on to each other. 

We waited several hours and a man came down. He was the manager, the boss director of the Telefunken factories near Breslau. He had come to interview the Philips group because he was told by people, evidently while we were in camp, that Mr. Philips had gone into contact with the German officials and had secured our lives so that we could work in any other factory in Germany. We were very valuable to them. We could work and not to gas us because they had kept our whole group in contact. We were all one group together. They never split us up. We were all together all that time, which was very strange, to be alive in Auschwitz, and that had happened to us.
 
He interviewed us all, asked what kind of work we had done in Vught, and we explained the work we had performed. At one time there were two girls, twins, I remember it well. Their mother had Parkinson’s disease. She was shaking very badly. So he said, “What can you do? I don’t think you are going to be of any use to me.” And the children said, “My mother is very good. She helps keep the place clean, all the mess we make from our lamps. She is very valuable to us”. He must have had one streak of humanity in him. He said “Okay, the mother too.” And the mother stayed with the children. 

Several weeks later all our numbers were called up., the whole Phillips group, and we got all together, had to get our dish together and our blanket. They put us through a shower, gave us a coat to wear, and put us near the train.

Tanzer:  In the several weeks, were you working? 
MEEKCOMS: Not in Auschwitz. Most of the time we were standing around the barracks. We did some of the chiseling of the stones. We did some of the hard labor like the rocks, making piles of bricks, but we really stood around most of the time. Huddled around the barracks from morning till night. They would select a few people to work.

Tanzer: But did you get any preferential treatment?
MEEKCOMS: No. We were just standing there, and we were thinking, “any day.” We would have [German or Dutch, sounds like “a towel” but means something like attention] every morning, and German officers would come and inspect us, and every day you thought you were going to go. They would call up your name. It was such a frightening experience. Every morning they would come by, call out numbers, call out names, and you would always think this was going to be the day that you were going to go. But they kept our group together. They would just let us stand near the barracks. We just huddled together. By that time, most of us were sick, had got dysentery, infections, right away the cold, pneumonia. Many of us were in bad shape, but we were still standing together, huddling together. 

We were there about six weeks, a couple of months, and I thought if we had to stay there another week or two, half of us would die. Many of us were really sick. Our minds were really far out. The living there was so unbelievably bad. The living conditions. There were so many kinds of different prisoners there, and as I said, many vicious people who did to us different things they could think of. And the food was terrible. It was never adequate, and we were very, very hungry every day.

After the end of two months, we were worn very thin. Finally they called up all of us girls and our numbers, and they asked for the Philips group in one unit. There we were, and we were being marched out of the gate of Auschwitz. I couldn’t believe it. We were going out of that gate. As I walked out I said, “Shema Yisroel,” and I said my prayer with all my heart and might. I said, “God, if you are listening, keep us safe and save these people out of this hell. Save them.” I prayed very, very hard. I had cursed God a week before that. I didn’t believe there was a God. I couldn’t believe there was a God. I was very confused, and I really was sick in my mind. 

They put us into the train, all of us together in the train. Right away something had changed. The people in charge of us on the train seemed like Waffen-SS, rather than the SS. They were more soldiers. They seemed very [kmoodlish?]. They put us there and gave us some food to eat on the train, some bread. We were in the train several hours, I don’t remember how long exactly. As we came into the next station, the sun was shining. It seemed like quite a bright day, and I felt like a good omen, something better was going to happen to us.

Finally they got us off the train, walked us down for about half an hour down the road, and we came into lots of barracks there. Very small camp compared to what we had just left. The bunk beds there were smaller so that you could just sleep with two people on a bunk bed. They said we were going to work there. There was a factory nearby.  Several German officers in charge of the camp talked to some of the women. There were some people who spoke fluently German, and again, there was always people to take leadership. There were some people who put themselves in charge. The [shtube eldester?] they would call themselves. Or they always did put people in charge. We found out that we were going to be put to work in the factory there. It was called the Telefunken factories. It was a huge factory. Lots of German people work there. A lot of people who worked in that factory had come from Berlin, a lot of Berliners. 

We went to work the next morning. It was the same type of work that we had done for Philips. Indeed, he really had secured our lives, this man. He had talked evidently with the Germans and really said we were valuable people to work at the factories. We were valuable to them. We were treated as workers during the day there. We were not allowed with talk to any of the German people there unless it was a question about the work. We would have those machines, and you would sit there and we had shifts. We worked hard, eight hours at a shift, but there was a break for a meal, and they would feed us a hot meal. We did not go hungry there. 

They would march us back to the camp. It was in the outskirts of the city, this factory. I remember the little children on the side of the road, and as we would walk to the camp they would spit on us, little kids five years of age. They were taught that those were Juden, and they would make remarks and all that. I couldn’t believe it, how they had burned hate into little children that age.

Tanzer: How did the German workers react? 
MEEKCOMS: The man who took us out of the camp, he had his office there on the same floor that we were working, and indeed he was the director of that factory. He would go by, and he would sometimes nod to us very quietly. He didn’t speak, but he nodded, and we felt kind of a feeling for him that he had taken us out of there. We were thinking he did select us as a group, and he did show some humanity when he took that woman with the children, the mother with the girls, and all of us came in there. All of us were working there. The German officials spoke strictly. They were forbidden to talk with us. They were strictly only to discuss work with us, show us how to do it, if there were any mistakes to be corrected, and nothing else. However, there was one woman on my line who was in charge of our production, the lamps that we made. Next to her was a girl, a German-Jewish girl who had lived in Holland because in — I would like to go back a minute here.

In 1938, when I was still in the orphanage, we had lots of German refugees came in who told us some horror stories of Nazi Germany, burning of synagogues, burning of stores, and there were lots of German refugees that Holland had accepted. Holland had always opened all the doors to everybody, not thinking that the war would come to Holland. So there were lots of German Jews in Holland. This girl had also been in Holland since 1938. She remembered Berlin. She had come from Berlin four years prior to that. She started to speak German with this lady who was in charge of our line. She said her name was Lila Sommerfeld — I still remember her name — that she had lived in Berlin, and that she still had an aunt in Berlin. 

The lady talked with her. She said, “I am not allowed to talk with you, but I want to tell you I feel for you, I do. I want you to make it through the war.” It was the only time that I ever saw any flicker of pity or wanting to help from a German. This woman talked with this girl any chance she got. She even went to see her aunt in East Berlin and — she almost lost her life, this girl — brought back some bread with meat on it, put it in the bottom drawer of the table we were working on. Then the aufseherin had seen something was going on. She was interrogated. She was almost sent to camp. She was interrogated. They told her she was, what you call it with the prisoners? She was ….

Tanzer: Collaborating.
MEEKCOMS: She was collaborating with the prisoners. She was a young woman. She said she wished the war would finish because her husband was on the Russian front. She never knew if she was going to see him again. And she escaped with her life. After that, we were very careful. She really couldn’t talk with her anymore. Her life was in danger. It just shows you that if any of them had any flicker of hope that they had for us, that they wanted to talk with us, or throw some warmth towards us, they were afraid themselves of the German officers.

All the time that we were working on these floors in the factory, there was always an aufseherin who was in charge of the prisoners, a German Nazi, who was watching every move we made. If we went to the bathroom, they went to the bathroom with us and stayed outside, or went in with us so that nothing went on. They really oversaw you all the time. You really didn’t have time to escape, to run away; they were there all the time. Their eyes were watching you all the time. This lady, I can see her in front of me very well. She made such a big impression on me. She did show that there must have been one or two who did maybe care, but they were so far and few between that — that’s why all these things happened there because there was not enough people who spoke up. They were afraid. They were very much afraid.

Tanzer: You mentioned that your sister had been involved in some sabotage.
MEEKCOMS: Yes. At that same floor my sister was working in a different department than I was. The girl in charge of that department was a very good worker. They turned out lots of lamps. They were working the night shift. One night they had made a tremendous production. They were always trying to increase the production. They were after us, “Faster! Better!” We would always try to slow down. We didn’t really want to help them. But we had to do it, and if we didn’t do it somebody else would do it. We were saving our lives with it. We were put to work at it, but we tried to do as slow as we could. 

Anyway, we had a tremendous amount of lamps finished, and as the girl brought them for inspection to the manager in charge, she dropped all the lamps on the floor, every one of them. It was a whole night’s work. 12 people in a row had done it. It was a tremendous loss. Right away the aufseherin was called in. The commander from the camp came in, and she was taken away, interrogated, if she had done it on purpose. They said she had. She said no. They said she had done it on purpose, all of them were guilty, and she got a tremendous beating. 

They took her to the camp, they opened the windows and the doors, and they beat her with a leather cane. We could hear her screams all night long. They were just beating her. Every time she got a beating we all felt a shiver through our whole body, our whole being. You felt the other’s pain. When she came away from there, they had shaved her head completely bald, and my sister and all the other girls were taken in and all their heads were shaven bald for punishment. They had to parade in front of us to show what would happen in case we got an idea that we were going to sabotage. If we were going to drop the lamps by mistake, this is what would happen to us. They would shave our heads and beat us.

Tanzer: Had it been done purposely?
MEEKCOMS: Yes, it had been done purposely. She would never admit it, but we knew that it had been done purposely. We tried to see how far we could get away with it, I guess. We couldn’t get away with it. The girl was unmercifully beaten. She was a cripple after that. She could hardly walk. When she came back into the barracks she didn’t cry. The other girls washed her off, put packs on her back, wet some towels that they had, tried to heal it. She was in terrible agony. I remember for weeks seeing her that she walked kind of bent over.

All the head was shaven off. I remember when they had taken my sister and we were sitting on top of our beds in the barracks. The girls came in. It was dark. It was a little light in the barrack, and it was kind of shadowy. When she came in, you could see the shadow of her face on the white walls of the barracks, and it looked like a little monkey. It was horrible. When they came in I said to her — Flora still remembers to this day — “Oh, you are so fortunate you have such a beautiful head. You are just beautiful. You know, you are a beautiful little boy.”

And so ,she laughed and cried ,and while her head was shaven off it reminded me of all the punishment and torture we went through all those months. It was a terrible thing, something of your dignity being shaved, the last hair on your body. She had to stand. It was very cold. It was winter. The winter there in the mountains is very cold, extremely cold, and they were not allowed to wear a scarf on their heads. And the big ears and the bald head. She was freezing to death, she was so cold. Of course, their nerves were shaken up. They thought maybe they all would get a beating too. But they did not at the time get a beating; they just got their heads shaved off. We cried that night, all of us together, and I kept on saying, “You are beautiful, Flora. Look how beautiful you are. You are much better looking than the other girls with the bald heads.” Eventually that passed.

We worked in that factory several months. Then finally the Russian front was getting closer. We were staying in Reichenbach, which was the name of that little city that we worked in, that little camp, and we could hear at night the cannons and heard the planes fly over. We realized that the Russian front was getting closer, and the Germans knew that also. They were bombing. 

One day there was a siren. They were trying to bomb the factory —  the English, the Russians, I don’t know exactly who it was. One factory was bombed flat. One day when the sirens went off we had to go out of the factory, and they missed our factory. We were all hiding in the field, and now the bombs were falling. We were going, “Hooray! Hooray! Terrific!” We never feared for our lives, with the bombs. Funny, we were never afraid of the bombs. The Germans were scared to death. A lot of them had come from Berlin, and they had been through those bombings at Berlin. They were very frightened, but we weren’t. We just thought it was terrific because we really wanted everything destroyed for them, and we went along with it. We really at that time didn’t care anymore.

After the Russian front came closer and it seemed like it was dangerous to be any longer in that factory — they were bombing that city all around very much — we were put on transports, and we walked to another camp. That one was not too far away from there. We walked to the factory over the ice. It was a very icy road. It was like an hour’s walk every morning in the cold. It was very, very cold. Our clothes were not really adequate. 

Every day when we walked that road we saw German people march on that road, too, with their wagons with their belongings in. They were evacuating because the war front was getting closer and they were evacuating their homes themselves. They really didn’t give us a second glance. They were themselves into plenty of trouble some of these farming people, small town people. 

Eventually that got too dangerous there, and we had to evacuate from that factory. The Germans one night called us all up, and the railroad had been bombarded near that too. There were bombs dropping day and night. One night they called us up, all the numbers again. Everybody had to get out of that camp. We lined up and we had to start marching. We were told that we were going to go for a long walk.

We walked over the Carpathian Mountains. We walked for four days and four nights. At night we would sometimes sleep on the side of the road or a farmhouse. There was lots of snow on the mountains. We were exhausted. There was no food. We had a little bit of food with us. They would distribute some bread. And my sister was sick. She had been sick at that last camp that we had been in, had suffered from terrible headaches, migraine headaches. She got a touch of pneumonia. She at one time had been put in one of the sick barracks in that camp, but they would even come into that work camp where we were. Once every few weeks a German official would come in looking through the sick shtuba [?], see who was sick and take them out of there.

I remember going in there one day. I said to my sister, “You have to get out of here.” She said, “I can’t. I feel so sick. I have these headaches. I feel so sick.” I said, “You have to get out, Flo. You’re better. Get out.” She said, “I’m not better.” She seemed to have given up on life. She was very sick, and she had no will power it seemed like. I thought, this was my turn, and I said to her, “You have to get up. You’re better. Now. You get out of that bed.” I made her get out of there, took her back into the barracks where we were. She went to work the next day, and she never really got over that whatever she had caught. When we walked over the mountains she was very sick.  She couldn’t get her breath. She kept on losing her ability to breathe. I guess with the type of pneumonia she’d had and the fever that she’d had, she wasn’t very strong and she couldn’t get her breath very well. Over the mountains you need more air, and she had problems. She kept on saying, “I can’t anymore, Chella. I can’t. I just can’t anymore. I’m just going to sit on the side of the road. You go on. Maybe then I can catch up.” I said, “No, you are going to walk with us. You cannot give up.”

All of a sudden she ran out of the line. We were walking five people in a row. She got out of the line, went to the German guard who was walking with a rifle over his shoulder — every few yards they had German soldiers walk with us. She went up to him and said, “Shoot me. Shoot me, please. I want to be out of this life.” I was frightened to death that she did that. I ran after her. He stopped everybody from walking, and he laughed at her and said, “Look at this one with the bald head. She wants me to shoot her. Shall we shoot her?” And so I said, “Pay no attention to my sister. she is krank [sick]. I’ll carry. I’ll help her.” I laughed with him, and I said, “She is just a little sick in the mind. Pay no attention to her.” She came back into the line, I slapped her face and said, “You are going to walk. You are going to lean on me and on the girl next to you, and we are going to carry you over these mountains no matter what. You are going to walk and lean on us. You are not going to do that ever again.” She started to cry, and I said, “Look, Flo, you just keep on walking and don’t look behind you or anything. Don’t go up to anybody anymore. Just walk.”

Well, she did lean on us. For days and days she leaned on us and we walked. God gave me the strength. I don’t know where I got it from. But we walked over those mountains hours on end, and we sang songs. All of us Dutch girls, we said, “Let’s sing songs. Let’s show them.” And sick as we were, and downtrodden as we were, we were singing Dutch national anthem songs, and ….

Tanzer:  How many of you were there?
MEEKCOMS: At that time, I guess maybe the group had gone down to about a hundred.

Tanzer: And where were they taking you?
MEEKCOMS: We didn’t know at that time. We were just walking. They were taking us to another camp where we could just stay and then to another camp. They didn’t know quite themselves from one time to the other where we were going. At night we slept in some farms on some hay. At one time we were in one farm, on a loft on top. We had to walk on a ladder. When we looked down there were Russian soldiers, prisoners of war, below us. They were talking to us in Russian, and one or two people understood a little bit. We found out they were prisoners of war. They were bringing them to a prisoner of war camp. The front was so close to them and the railroads were bombarded, so they couldn’t move us by railroad. They were walking the prisoners, too. 

The next morning early we walked on again. It seemed like we were walking on these mountains forever because we moved pretty slow. I guess we were not really all of us in good shape. At one time we were walking up the mountains and my feet were hurting. What had happened was that the boots that I was wearing, I had worn the sole completely off the boot. I had a blood blister on the bottom of my foot a couple of inches thick and the whole width of my foot, and it was killing me. I could hardly walk anymore. I remember that I showed it to my sister and she said, “We’ll have to get another pair of shoes for you to walk on.” 

There was snow on the mountains and gravel, and it was hard. We were putting snow in our mouths. We were thirsty, and we were eating the snow on the side of the road. Some of the girls couldn’t keep up with us, and they left them behind with some of the German officers. German soldiers in charge would stay behind and then shoot them on the side of the road when they couldn’t walk anymore. I knew that we had to help Flora walk, and there was another girl, several girls in our rows who weren’t well.  Everybody was leaning on each other who couldn’t. Somehow I got strength after all that I had gone through, and I had been so sick in Auschwitz. Somehow I had some strength, but I did walk over those mountains without really —  I felt I could do it. I had the strength to do. It may be because Flora was so sick at that time, and she couldn’t do it that I got more strength than her. I had the strength to walk over those mountains. 

The only thing, my feet were hurting so much. Flora was not well, either. She looked at my feet, and I said, “They are hurting me so much. God knows how much we have to walk. They are just killing me.” She walked up to a girl who had a pair of spare boots hanging on her belt. She said to the girl, “Are your boots good that you are walking on?” The girl said, “Yes.” She said, “Why do you have those boots on your belt?” She said, “When these wear out.” So Flora said, “These are for my sister,” and she took the boots off her belt. They had a fight. But the instinct of survival  — you had to do these things. And so she took the boots off her belt. She gave them very unwillingly to her. I put them on, and I walked on these boots. They hurt, but at least I wasn’t walking on my bare feet over the mountains. 

We walked for days, and finally we came to the Czechoslovakian border. We had walked a long, long way. This was another camp. We met lots of other people of different nationalities there, and there was ….

Tanzer: What was the name of this camp? 
MEEKCOMS: This camp was called Trautenau. Some of the names I have forgotten, but I remember that name. There were very few barracks there. It seemed like a kind of a put-up-in-a-hurry kind of a camp. A couple of blocks of barracks. A lot of people in one bunk. Lots of people in one barrack, hundreds. We were there overnight. We were there about two days. It was very confusing. We didn’t know what was going to happen, what they were going to do with us. Evidently, they had contact with the railroad there. That was the whole idea of the transport, was to put you on another train to another camp, and evidently, they didn’t know if they were going to go and kill us all or shoot us, or if they were going to find us another death chamber to put us to. Our future was so uncertain. 

But by that time I was convinced we had escaped out of Auschwitz, and I said to Flora, “We got out of that hell. We are going to live through whatever is ahead of us. Nothing can be as bad as that. I’m sure, nothing can be as bad as that camp.” Because that was really a hell on earth. And I was right, nothing was ever as bad as that. I was convinced that we were going to survive, and I got more strength after that than I’d had before. The will to survive never left me anymore. We were put onto transports from that camp on the Czechoslovakian border, and all the people were put together into different cattle wagons. This time they put so many of us in a cattle wagon that you could hardly breathe. They gave us a can of food. Canned food we had. They gave us a piece of bread. We were put into that train, and I don’t know how many days we spent on the transport. It seemed like weeks. 

We stopped off on certain fields. They would unload the train, let us out there. We didn’t have any bath. We had no water. Lice were abundant. We already had lice in Auschwitz. we were full of them. We used to delouse each other. I think that was one of the worst experiences to find out that you had those parasites on your body. To me it was worse than hunger. It was so frightening, so terrible. There were lots of diseases that you could catch from that, and there were a lot of people who were very ill in former camps who had caught typhus and all sorts of diseases. So many rotten diseases going on in those camps. When we got out of Auschwitz some of the people got sick in the other camps who had been incubated by a disease. Many people became ill during the time we had been in the other camps. In the meantime, we had lost quite a few people. We were still of course with the lice. 

When we came into those cattle wagons, there was a mixture of nationalities like you had never seen before: Gypsies, Poles, Russians, Czechoslovakians, Yugoslavs, Germans — all prisoners, from all walks of life. Many criminals were in the cattle wagons with us. I can only describe those rides in the cattle wagons as some of the worst experiences through the whole time. You had to secure yourself a little place in that wagon to survive, and if you did not you could be standing for weeks. Just standing, hanging, because there was room for 30 or 40 people and there were like 80 people in one of those wagons.

Flora was sick again. First of all, what I did I put my arms around her and found her a little place to sit so she could sit just in a huddled position. I put my arm around her, and anybody who came close to her, I would put my elbow in their face. Everybody kind of understood German by that time. I said, “Meine Schwester ist krank [my sister is sick]” to any who would come near her. “She has to sit down.” I would stand up with all my five foot and put my arms around her, and better not anybody come near her. At that time I would have just killed almost for her. I would just shoot out my arm and hit anybody who came near her. I knew I had to take care of her because she was not well. And we found a place then, for each other. I kind of hung in between there too. 

By that time many of the people in the cattle wagons were dying. There were people sick in there. Every once in a while they would stop, the German officers would stand outside of the cattle wagons, we would kind of line up, and they would say, “I have wasser [water]. Anybody want water?” And of course, it was the one thing you needed. If you could go without food, you can’t go — your thirst was so tremendous that you would fight, you would kill for a drop of water. I remember at one time we were in an open cattle wagon — there was no top to it; sometimes they were closed, sometimes they were open —he had a container of water, and he said, “Give me your beaker to fill up with water.” We were just almost ready to kill to get a drop of water, even your fellow prisoners, whoever was in that wagon, and I realized after what we had been doing. There were people in the wagon who had died during the night, and we put dead bodies on top of one another to stand on top of them to get a drop of water. It shows you how far you had regressed in your mentality. It had become really a fight for survival. We would share a drop of water between four or five girls. 

In one cattle wagon there were maybe five or six or seven of us Dutch girls among all the other people. We would stick together. We were really afraid of some of the others because at one time we were sitting there and a woman took out a knife and she said, “Move up. I need more room.” She was a Polish-German woman. I was afraid of that knife, and I thought, “We survived Auschwitz, but we’re never going to survive to get out of this cattle wagon.” By that time, Flora had got a little stronger. Days went by and nights went by. We would get stuck on the railroad for hours on end. I remember I thought I had become mad. The thirst was so strong. I had hallucinations of sitting on the boulevard in Svegenin. I called a waiter over and he was pouring me a cool drink in a big glass. I remember trying to reach for that glass. I’ve always remembered that vision that came to me. Every time I got hold of the glass and would put it to my mouth, the vision would disappear. I would wake up from that vision and I thought, “I am becoming numb. I’m going mad.” I was afraid of going mad. It would go and it would come back again. Evidently I did have visions of insanity. I was going insane, I thought. Hours of lack of sleep, we hadn’t slept for days. We would sleep standing up, hanging over each other. 

Finally we came to a wheat field and they let us out of the cattle wagon. We found all of the other Dutch girls who had been quartered into other cattle wagons with other prisoners. It was a huge train. It went on and on for miles. We found each other, we got together and hugged each other about 100 of us, and we said, “Can’t we make up a trainload just from us?” So one of the girls who spoke fluent German, we went up to her — she had kind of taken charge before — and we said, “Can’t you talk to some of these German officers,” SS or whatever they were, “and say can we make up a trainload from just us?” Because we were afraid we weren’t going to come out of there alive. There were so many people in there who wanted more room for themselves. They were willing to kill for it, and some of them had means of doing it. 

One of our Dutch women in another train had been killed. Some of the Gypsies, some of the prisoners there had gotten hold of her and had hit her and hit her in her kidneys. The German aufseherin — in every cattle wagon they had a German — she had watched them do that to the other prisoner. They had beaten her and beaten her, and she was just laughing. She was afraid of them herself, I think. They were so mad. They were so powerful. There was a group of them. They were criminals who were strong, who had means, who had knives and stuff on them. They had beaten her so hard. Some of the Dutch girls had fought with them, but there were so many more of them than the Dutch girls in that other cattle wagon that they had beaten her so much that finally she was unconscious. They had thrown her out of the cattle wagon on the railroad and left for dead on the tracks. We were afraid that we were all going to wind up like that. There were so many more of them than us. 

There were just four or five of us Dutch girls against some of them, and every German official in the car had a delight in them doing this. They were so vicious that they delighted in the tactics that they were using of killing each other. The prisoners were killing each other, and we were really afraid for our lives. I said to H[erpa?] — I remember the name still of this woman — I said, “If we go back in that train, I don’t think we’re going to come back out alive. They’re going to kill us. I’m going insane. I’ve had these visions. I haven’t slept for days.” We were starving hungry. We were chewing on grass when we got on that field, especially in need of liquid. I said, “We’re not going to come out of there alive.” She said, “I’m going to try, but is it worth it? They’re going to say no to me, but I’m going to ask them.” 

She went up to the German men — she was a very good looking woman still; she had tried to keep her looks, and the German officer kind of liked her. She went up to him and she said, “There’s a whole group of us Dutch girls here. There’s enough of us that we can go maybe in one carload. Why don’t you put all of us together? We are all here huddled together in one group. Why should we go in the train with all of the other people when we can all be together in one group? What will it hurt you to put us all in that one wagon?” 

Well, whatever she said, it made an impression, and they did. They put us all in one cattle wagon. We were hanging over each other, leaning on each other, but somehow we tolerated each other. We were pressing each other out, but we tolerated lying on top of one another, leaning on each other, because we all knew each other and none of us were going to hurt each other. That saved our lives again that time. I swear if we had gone back in the other cattle wagon none of us would have come out alive.

Tanzer: Chella, where and when were you liberated? 
MEEKCOMS: The 4th of May, 1945. 

Tanzer: By whom?
MEEKCOMS: Actually it was a transport. We were put again on a transport. After the last trip we had in the cattle wagons we wound up in another camp, and there we were put to work in that camp in a salt mine. There was a factory like the Telefunken factories, like the Philips factories, in that salt mine. You had to take an elevator way down to the bottom of the floor of the mine. It was a mountain. It was camouflaged. It was in West Germany, Westfalia. 

The barracks that we stayed in was right on top of the mountain. It was a beautiful countryside there. The first time we walked into that factory where we were going to work, it was unbelievable. You couldn’t see it. It was in the mountain. They had camouflaged it so because so many of the factories were bombed during the war by the British, the Russian, the Americans, that finally they had made  — the factory must have been there for years. Maybe they used it for different purposes, but they had elevations in that mountain and you went in through a door. It was like going into the  mountain, in the door in the mountain. It was unbelievable.

You took an elevator, and you went one level down, another level down. It was like a mine. It was supposed to be a salt mine. As a matter of fact, one day my sister came home with a chunk of salt. We licked it and tasted it, the salt. We couldn’t believe it was really a salt mine. We worked there. We were there for several weeks. I don’t remember exactly how long, but we had barracks on top of the mountain, and there was never enough food. The war was coming — the Germans were feeling themselves the pangs of going without enough food. They, themselves, didn’t have enough to eat anymore in the country, I don’t think. 

Some of my worst hunger pains were there, too. I remember coming home one day from working there. In all the other camps we had been in, if we had worked they would always give us adequate food to eat. Not so in this one. I remember coming home one day from camp. I was so hungry. There was a little bit of wet soup. We each got a half a bowl full. When I finally got that in my stomach I started to scream and holler and yell. I was so hungry, I was going berserk. I was 15-16, I was still growing in some ways, and I was really feeling it more than it seemed like anybody else. 

When I came home the next day, Flora had stolen potato peelings out of the kubel [bucket] from the Germans. Peels of vegetables and potatoes. She said to me, “Chella, I have a surprise for you today. I’ve made vegetable soup.” She had taken those peels from the vegetables and put it in her tin cup and put it on top of  — there was an old stove in one of those barracks in which they had burnt paper and some wood that they had found — and she had made soup for me. When I tasted it, I said to her, “That is the most delicious chicken soup I ever tasted.” That’s how hungry I was. It actually tasted like chicken soup. And we ate it, peels and everything. 

We were in that camp for several weeks, and we walked a lot. The barracks were right on top of the mountain. Way up and down, you had to walk a long way. The work seemed hard because by the time you went for that walk and back again, you were exhausted. By this time we were really worn thin. We were really exhausted, and many of us were sick. 

Finally, of course, malnutrition had set in with many of us, and especially with me, too. My strength was not as great anymore. This time Flora seemed to be the stronger one again. They would bring up barrels of food that had to be cooked for the Germans in the kitchen, and we would have to go and make a ring that you pass it through, the food, the cabbages and stuff like that. She would be able to organize a little turnip or something and slip it into her pocket and all that. It was a very dangerous thing to do. Then she would give it to me. Whatever she could snitch, she would give it to me so that I could get the extra food. I seemed to have needed it more than her. 

We were there for several weeks, and all of a sudden one day we had to leave that camp. We were put in a train again and brought to another camp. It was not very far away. I think maybe we spent a day on the railroad, stopping and going, stopping and going. The railroads were bombarded very heavily in West Germany too. Finally we drove by a city that seemed to have been in flames. It was in flames, and it was [place name?]. It was near Hanover, and Hanover was very badly bombed. It was in West Germany. 

There was a little camp outside of the city limits there, and that is where they brought us. By this time, out of our Dutch group there were many, many sick people. Some of them were very ill. We did not work there. They just kept us there from morning till night standing at attention, going back to the bunk beds, doing menial jobs around the camp. Sweeping and doing and cleaning and scrubbing and all very silly jobs. But there was really nothing else for us to do. At this time, we got a feeling from the German people around us who were stationed around the camp, kind of a change in attitude some. 

Tanzer: In what way? 
MEEKCOMS: They would go by — the Germans, the people in charge, the officers — and they would once in a while crack a smile at you. They would say hello to you. We had heard rumors that the war was coming to an end. It seemed like they were losing. We could see that by the way the cities were bombed, by the time we were kept on the railroads for so many days and days on end, that the war was closing in on them and that they were losing. We had also heard rumors of that. As I said, there was a way that you did find out these things, that the war was coming to an end.

We were there for several weeks too. We were worn very thin. We were sick. Most of us were sick. We were tired. There was never enough food to eat. We were very hungry in that camp. There was never enough to eat, and every week was like — could you last another week? There were some mean people in charge who still did beatings and still were very hard. It was getting to be hard. We were praying to God the war better finish fast because we didn’t know how long we could last. We were really sick.

One day in the beginning of May, we got called on to stand to attention out in the yard, in front of the barracks. We were told that we were going to go on transport. Well, every time you heard that word it was very, very frightening because you never know what it meant. Where were they going to take you next? Is it going to be a worse camp than the other one? In between the camps that I’ve told you that we had been in, we had been in several others in between, and some of them were very bad. The treatment was even worse at some of the other camps. Never as bad as Auschwitz, but bad, very bad. The food was bad, the situation was filthy, everybody was full of lice, and we were in a very degenerated condition. 

Finally then, we were standing to attention there and some new people came into the camp. This time they were German soldiers. They took us on the train. We seemed to have been on the train for a day and a night, and the train got stopped. We were put in a big field, the Lüneburger Heide [Lüneburg Heath]. I don’t know if you heard about it. The war took a big turn there. They had a lot of people lost there, a lot of British, a lot of German soldiers. They had a big war game there. But we were there just before that, and we were stuck there. The railroads again had been bombed. We were there for a day and a night, and we didn’t know what was going to happen to us. There was no food and there was no drink, and we had been a day and a night on that train also without food or drink. By this time we were going crazy from hunger and thirst and lice. 

We didn’t know what was ahead of us. It seemed like the war was coming to an end. The German soldiers were regular this time, just soldiers — the army, the Wehrmacht — who were put on the train. We did not have SS with us this time. They seemed quite friendly. They told us that the war was to an end and they really didn’t want to be in the war. They wanted to go home to their families. They didn’t even know if their families were alive, if their city was in one piece. They were the soldiers. We said, “Yes, sure.” They wished us well, and they were treating us considerably better. We were together. There was none of that fight that we had before in the other wagons.

We spent some time in the Lüneburger Heide. I remember we were so thirsty, and we drank bowls of water. We were just dehydrated. Finally they had the men to repair the railroad, and we were put back on the train. We went on for several hours and all of a sudden we saw the names change. We came near the Danish border. We thought we had been put on the transport because maybe this time they were going to do away with us; we were really a ballast to them. They really didn’t know where to put us. We had been going from camp to camp so much that we thought maybe this time they were really going to do away with us. The war was coming to an end, and the Wehrmacht that had been on the train with us had been nicer to us. Maybe they thought they were buttering us up. There were some people who kept on saying “This time we are going to go. This is the end.” You always had a few pessimists. But I thought, “No.” I wouldn’t give into that. 

Finally we come to the Danish border. We looked, and the names sounded different. I said, “Look at — it looks different here. This is like a Danish name.” And as we came into the Danish station, the German Wehrmacht left the train and Danish Red Cross people jumped on the wagons in their blue uniforms. They said to us in German, “You are in Denmark now. You are free.” We said, “Are you sure? Are you sure? Is it really true? It is not true. You are not telling us the truth.” We touched them and they said, “It is true. You are in Denmark. We are going to take you to a town and to a camp where you are going to get a bath and you are going to have good food. You are free. The war is over.” The war is almost over, or over. I don’t remember exactly the words. I remember sitting down in a corner, huddled and crying and crying and saying, “Thank you, God, that you helped us. You did help us. Oh thank you, God. Thank you, God.” I kept on saying it over and over again. We kissed each other and we hugged each other. “It is really true? We are really free? You mean we are not going to go to another camp? We’re free!” It was just unbelievable. We spent several hours in that train, and we came into the station of Copenhagen. 

Tanzer: Why do you suppose that train went from Germany to Denmark? 
MEEKCOMS: Afterwards we found out that Folke Bernadotte — a well-known name after the war years — he had made arrangements with the German government, an exchange of prisoners. Before that already a group of people had come in before us and exchanged the German prisoners for the prisoners of the camps. The Red Cross would take over some of these prisoners and free them. The war had not quite been settled then yet. It wasn’t quite over. It was over just a few days later, but it had come to the end. They had said that Hitler is dead, they told us. So he was the man [Bernadotte] who was instrumental in getting prisoners freed. By the time that we were on that heide, we didn’t know where we were going, but we already had been destined for Denmark or Sweden. We were to go on to Sweden, Swedish Red Cross. He was a Swedish man. He had been instrumental with the Red Cross, and I guess they had worked through that all during the war years. They’d had several people before that who they had freed. 

We arrived in Copenhagen, and there was a man at the station who kept on shaking hands and saying, “Congratulations. You are beautiful people.” We found afterwards it was the King of Denmark who had come to the station in plain clothes. We didn’t know who he was. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Denmark.” I remember one of the women saying, “:Lady? I’m not a lady.” He said, “To me you are very much.” She said, “Look at me!” And he said, “You are beautiful.” He kept on talking to us, and then he left and afterwards we found out who he was. 

They gave us a beautiful welcome. They had set up isolated camps. They had trains decked out as hospitals, and half of the people right away were put in those trains. They had x-ray machines. Everybody went through that. Right away two or three of my friends were put in that train. Lots of people were brought right away in that train on a bed to Sweden. We were in that camp several days. I remember on the station there was a huge barrel and they had hot Quaker oats, and everybody got a plate of hot Quaker oats. I’ll never forget it. It was so good. We got very ill afterwards; it was too rich. They learned to be very careful of what to give to people. They had to be careful what they fed you because people became ill after not having food for so long and water, soup, that they had to be careful what to feed you. 

Tanzer: You know Denmark then had been liberated?
MEEKCOMS: Oh, yes. The Germans were gone from there. There were no Germans. So we were in that camp in Denmark, in those barracks, for about a day. A day and a night or two days. Then the Swedish Red Cross came into that camp and a lot of people in charge from the Red Cross took us into a train and took us on a boat over the Skagerrak [the strait between Denmark and Sweden] into Malmö, Sweden, and that’s were our destiny was for the time. That was a neutral country. We were en route through Denmark. That was our destiny, to go there and to be taken care of there. We walked from the train to the boat. I will never forget that scene. We walked through the city to that little boat to go to Malmö, Sweden. They had evidently put it in the newspapers. People were lining the street, and as we walked people were crying. They were just crying so much. I said to my sister and to the other people around me, “I wonder why they are crying so much.” 

Tanzer: Yes. 
MEEKCOMS: We looked such a sight. We were like walking skeletons. After we saw pictures of it in the newspaper, and it looked like a bunch of dead people were walking in the street. By that time we had looked so terrible and we were so worn and so filthy and thin, and bad looking, that the people kept on saying, “Congratulations! Freedom! Freedom!” to us. It must have been a sight to behold. We were smiling, we were happy, and we were waving and throwing kisses to them. We were so happy. It was evidently a terrible sight for them to see, and they were very touched by it. 

We came into that boat, and the women in charge — there were lots of women with us from the Red Cross, very dear kind people — they talked with us and they asked us questions. We told them the story, and we couldn’t understand that they were crying all the time. They just couldn’t believe the atrocities and everything that had happened. We all opened our hearts to them. We just talked and we cried, it was so unbelievable that we were really free. We arrived in Malmö, and as we got off the boat, on the …. 

Tanzer: The dock. 
MEEKCOMS: The dock. The national anthem of Holland was playing. The Dutch Consulate was there with the whole Dutch legation. They were singing and music was playing, the Dutch national anthem. Well, that’s when I started to cry, and I didn’t stop crying for 24 hours. I was able to let go of it right away, of my emotions. I just cried and cried, but many people couldn’t. I just cried and I don’t remember when I stopped. The tears kept on flowing. 

Tanzer: How old were you at that time? 
MEEKCOMS: It was one week before my 17th birthday. I had my 17th birthday in Sweden, in quarantine. I was in quarantine, the 15th of May. We arrived the 4th or the 5th of May in Malmö. From there they gave us sandwiches and hot chocolate. Oh, it was so delicious. I said to Flo that it was the most delicious delicacy we’ve ever tasted. It was so good. Then they brought us to a bathhouse. I remember going in a bath tub, and two women stepped down next to the bathtub and scrubbed my back and scrubbed me, put stuff on my hair. All of us were there for hours in that bathhouse. It was a bathhouse which they used for refugees, ex-prisoners to come through. They washed and scrubbed us. I was red on my back from scrubbing. We were so dirty; it was imbedded from all those months going without a bath, without soap. You have no idea how filthy we were. They put stuff on our hair because we were full of lice. 

Then they brought us to a school and we were in quarantine in that school. We had to be there for six weeks, completely isolated. There were lots of schools set up for that purpose there. They had put beds in the gyms. There were doctors there. The whole school was made like hospital. It was unbelievable what they did. We all got kind of overalls, and they gave us all sorts of clothes to wear. Every day they would give us a spoon of cod liver oil and a spoon of sugar, and good meals, three meals a day. The purpose of having us there for six weeks was because after six weeks any disease which you might have would come out. It was the quarantine time. 

Again we were x-rayed and my sister was taken away to a sanitarium. They found that she had a spot on her lung. She was there for about four days when she had to go away to a sanitarium. I said, “Flo, you get better quickly, and when I get to Holland” — they will send us to Holland as quickly as we recuperated — “I will get a place for us and will wait for you to get better.” 

I was there about three weeks, and I got a very high fever and became very ill. They put me into one of the rooms in the school, the sick room, and found out — they didn’t know exactly what was wrong with me, but the fever went so high. I remember vaguely they put me into an ambulance and rushed me to the hospital. There were lots of people in one — they had one kind of a floor there in the hospital. It was a big hospital in Malmö. There were lots of sick people there. Lots of typhus had broken out, so they had isolated that floor for that purpose. I was very ill. The nurse told me after a few days that during the night I kept on saying in German, “I’m not going to die now. I’m not going to die now. I’m going to live.” I was very, very ill, and they didn’t know if I was going to pull through. I weighed about 70 lbs., and my sister weighted about 75 lbs. She was a much bigger girl than I am. We were just bones. 

I was six weeks in that hospital, and they fattened me up that by the time — we had all been given a suit of clothes, a little costume, a dress and all that. I couldn’t get into anything anymore. I had gained at least 20 pounds in those six weeks  even though I had been so sick. After the fever had subsided and I had gotten better, they had not let me go because they didn’t know exactly how to deal with it. They would fatten me up. They gave me such rich foods and I put on so much weight right away. By that time I was 90 lbs. probably. It was enough. 

My sister, in the meantime, was quarantined into a kind of a sanitarium in another city. When I got out of the six weeks in the hospital, again we went through x-rays and also all sorts of very marvelous treatment, and they found out by that time something had shown on my lungs. My glands were swollen, and they suspected tuberculosis of the glands and my lungs. They said you will have to go to a sanitarium for a while, and the Dutch government took care of all the expenses. 

This time I went to Göteborg [Gothenburg]. There were lots of people there from the camp who were quartered in all sorts of cabins in the mountains there. They had quartered all those people there before they were sent to Holland. They really wanted them to look well. The Dutch government and the Red Cross and everybody took care of that. I stayed there for a while. There were lots of people who were not well and they also had a sick room there. Finally, I had another x-ray and they thought it was bad enough that I had to go to a sanitarium. They were going to send me to Stockholm. We went on a train to Stockholm. There were about four or five of us who went on the train with somebody in charge.  

When I came into Stockholm to the sanitarium my sister had been sent there, too, so I met my sister there. They had tried to keep all of us together. They put all of us together in one villa that they had made into a kind of sanitarium. There were doctors there. There was a Dutch doctor who had also been in camp. Dutch nurses, everything. It was a whole huge villa with huge gardens. It was a huge estate that the government had put at our disposal. I guess there were about 35, 36 people there. We were taken periodically for checkups, for x-rays and all that. 

I was there for about seven months. Come January of 1946, we had x-rays again and the doctors said we were pretty good to go and we could go back to Holland if we wanted to. They had made everything ready for people, the fare paid, everything was taken care of. We were still in care of the government. Once you were in Holland you would go through procedures, and then finally, they would accept [?] you that you got on your own. In the meantime …. 

Tanzer: Had any of your family members survived? 
MEEKCOMS: My stepmother we found out had survived the war. We got a letter in the mail that she was in Holland. We had heard from other people that she had gone all through the camp. She was born in England, and she had three sisters living in England. She wrote a letter to us that she wanted us to come to England and she was going to go there.  In January of ’46, we took that plane flight from Stockholm to London, and there she was waiting at the airport for us with her three sisters. They lived in the suburbs of London. 

Tanzer: Had they paid for your trip from Stockholm to London? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes. The sisters paid for the fare for us to come over. We stayed with one of her sisters. One of her sisters had a son, Daniel Meekcoms, and his mother had died. He was in the Royal Air Force in England, and he used to come home on leave and stay with his aunt, who was also a step-aunt of mine because she was the sister of my stepmother. That was my future husband-to-be. I was 17 and he was 21, and we fell in love. This was to be my future husband. 

Tanzer: Did you marry immediately? 
MEEKCOMS: No. I did not marry immediately. When I arrived in England I wanted to go back to Holland. It was my first concern. I thought it was marvelous to go to England, wonderful. It was all a very romantic idea to go to England. It seemed such a wonderful world, away from everything that had passed. We stayed there for four months. We didn’t get right away a permit to work. I wanted to work and continue life, and my fiancé wanted to get married right away. He was in the Royal Air Force. He had been in for about four years by then. He said that he wanted to get married right away, and I said no, I didn’t want to get married right away. 

Although I was 17 going on 70 — I had had a full life and I was ready to settle down — I had this urge to go back to Holland and walk the streets and see where we had lived and see what was left in Holland for my family. Who else had returned? We were the only survivors? Was there somebody else? My father had a large family. Surely there must have been some other people beside ourselves. So I tried to make him understand that I had to go back to Holland. I had to check. My sister and I we just had this feeling, this urge, this need to go back. 

We were in England for four months and finally we did take that plane flight back to Holland. We arrived in Holland May of ’46. We walked through the streets. I looked everywhere. I looked where we had lived, if other people were living in that house. When we left that house during the war, we left everything the way it was, intact. We just stepped out of there like you went to go downtown for an hour. Everything was left there. It was confiscated, everything. The Germans had taken it over and there was another family living there. I remember walking by the door and touching it and crying because so much had happened, and what was left of it. We were so grateful to be alive, but the pain came back. The pain for what had gone. I walked through the city where my aunts had lived and where my grandmother had lived, and everything had changed so much. And yet, the same buildings were still there. It was a very weird feeling. We started to look for a job, both my sister and I. We decided to stay in Holland for a while. I just wanted to settle down there and see if we could make a go of it there for a while. 

Tanzer: Were you able to find any of your family possessions? 
MEEKCOMS: No. After the war broke out and everything, we had some valuables. You had to give them —  your valuables — we had given some of our valuables to friends. A few things popped up here and there. It was really not important anymore. A marble vase, a picture. Pictures were nice. A few pictures we got back. We found a few vases and some silverware, that type of thing. 

I did find one aunt who had been in hiding all this time, all during the war, and her two daughters. Her husband also had been in hiding, and he’d had a heart attack during the war while he was in hiding. She survived with her two daughters. One cousin survived, came back after the war. He was about 50, so he was quite an older person compared to us. He was very, very ill after the war. He was ill for many years. He died several years ago. Other than that, the whole family was wiped out. There was nobody who came back. Flora and I looked at each other and we often thought, why us? 
   
Why us? That question goes through your mind, from all those millions of people, how come we survived? Surely we were no better than anybody else. Surely we were no stronger than anybody else. What I can attribute it to is that the Philips factories were part of what saved our lives at the time that we went to the death chambers and we came as one group into Auschwitz. That definitely is a tremendous factor because I don’t think we would have come in. We were a small group, and I don’t think we would have come in. That saved our lives then. We were taken out of Auschwitz to work in that factory in [place name?] when that man came to ask for the Philips group. I don’t think we could have lasted. I personally don’t think I would have lasted that much longer. My will to live was very strong, but my body — I was very sick in that camp. Again, the Philips factories were instrumental in getting us out of Auschwitz. That was part of saving our lives. 

And then also, because we were caught during the war at a late date. We were in camp in 1944, 1945. Had we gone into in 1943, even 1942, like some of the people we met in there who had been in the camp for years and their whole families had perished — people from different countries — I don’t think that we would have had the strength to survive that long. I’m sure I would not have had the strength to survive that long. So we were lucky in part that we had been in hiding all this time. I’m very grateful to those Dutch people who did hide us. They were tremendous people who risked their lives. There was a tremendous underground in Holland. I can’t praise them enough for what they did. 

Tanzer: Chella, were you able to get in touch with the people who had hidden you? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes. The first people I went to visit were the people I stayed with during the war. It was fantastic seeing them again. I loved them. I am still in contact with them now. 

Tanzer: This is the family with five children? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes. A terrific family, marvelous people. I love them dearly and it’s returned. They are planning to come and visit me. The people who we thought were instrumental in getting us caught, we gave their name to the police. They were interrogated and one was put in prison. There were so many of them after the war who were put in prison that the prisons weren’t big enough. As a matter of fact, the camp Vught where I was and my sister, where we worked for Philips in those barracks, that camp was made into a kind of a concentration camp for the people who had done harm during the war, who were the Nazis. 

Tanzer: The collaborators. 
MEEKCOMS: The collaborators. One of the girls who was in camp with us became the overseer in there. She wanted to pay them back. She is the only one that I know. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with it. We wanted to get away from it. But she was so full of hate that she became an overseer in there, the Dutch, with the prisoners. Anyway, the people who we thought were instrumental in giving us away, they were interrogated and were put in prison, and after a while they were let loose. There were so many of them that they really couldn’t cope with it. Some of them were put in jail for several years. Many people right after the war took the law into their own hands, and there were a few killings here and there. I really don’t know what happened to them afterward. I hoped God would punish them. I prayed for that, that they would get their punishment. But I lost my father. I was never going to get him back. And all the sufferings. Nobody could every return what I had lost. 

I did meet people again in Holland who we had been in camp with. I am still in contact with some of the girls. They have had reunions in Holland from these people in Eindhoven, the Philips factory, and the man — evidently lots of things have been going on there. I went to England and I went to America. I haven’t kept in touch with everything that happened, but the man was praised. A lot of good things happened to him. 

Tanzer: Mr. Philips? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes, it’s been brought to attention. Everybody knew what he did in Holland. 

Tanzer: Did you then get a job and continue to live in Holland? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes. I lived in Holland for a year before I went back to England to get married. I stayed a whole year in Holland with my sister. My fiancé was then stationed in Germany. He worked for British Intelligence in Germany. He was stationed in Celle, very near Bergen-Belsen. It was the same town. He worked for British Intelligence hunting for Nazi criminals and also interviewing Germans who wanted to immigrate. He also ran into lots of different stories to do with repatriation from displaced Jewish persons out of the camps. 

He thought very deeply towards what had happened to me. I had told him so much about what had happened in my life in the last few years. He was in Germany, and when he got hold of some of the Germans who’d had something to do with the camps, he interrogated them. He said that he took it out on many of them. He got very vicious about it. He was there for all that time in Germany while I was in Holland. 

When it was time for him to be demobilized from the Air Force — he had been in five years by then — he asked me to marry him right there and then. Didn’t want to wait any longer. I went back to England in May, 1947, and we got married in June. In the meantime, my sister stayed in Holland. I felt very bad about leaving her in Holland because we had been together so much that I almost considered should I get married or should I stay with her? It was a very hard decision. She stayed in Holland and worked, and I went to England. A year and a half later I gave birth to my first child. We lived with that aunt and uncle that I had first met when I first came to England. 

Tanzer: This is the aunt and uncle of your husband?
MEEKCOMS: Yes. 

Tanzer: And the sister of your stepmother? 
MEEKCOMS: Correct. We lived in their house. After the war it was impossible to get housing for the young people. It was a great shortage of the housing. When the boys came back from the war they lived with their parents. I lived with them, and they were very loving and became like a mother and father to me. My two sons were born in their house. 

In the meantime, when my oldest son was born, my sister came from Holland to visit me for the birth of my child. She came a few days before Leon was born, and she said to me, “Chella, I have a chance to go to America.” Good friends of my father who lived in Holland and had a little kind of cafeteria in Holland, just didn’t want to stay in Holland any longer. It was too much pain and aches there. They had lost all their family too. He was a third cousin removed from my father, and he had been a good friend of my father. He said to my sister, “Why don’t you come with us to America and start a new life there?” She said, “But I can’t go because if I go to America I will never see you. At least now I am close by. I can go back and forth to see you. But I can’t go to America because I’ll never see you again.” 

I said, “Look Flora, I can make you this promise. If you go to America, and I promise you this with all my heart with every fiber in my body, you get married and settle down and I’m coming with my son and my husband.” She said, “Will you promise me that, Chella?” I said, “I promise you that.” I was nursing the child, and I said, “I promise you that by this baby.” She said, “Only will I go then, if you promise me you will come too.” And I said, “Okay.”

She left a week later to go to America, to New York. The aunt and uncle, we call them, had gone several months before. They let her come. She had a visa for six months, a visitor’s visa. It was extended for another six months. In the meantime, she had met her husband-to-be, who had lived in Portland, Oregon and who had gone to New York for a visit. 

Tanzer: Chella, you told us that your sister had come to the United States and you had promised to join her. When did you and your family decide to leave Europe?
MEEKCOMS: I lived in England with my husband and aunt and uncle, who became grandma and grandpa to the children, who took the place of my mother and father and also the place of the mother and father of my husband. I didn’t want to go back to Holland anymore. I went back to Holland after the war, and there was much pain when I went back there. I really was glad to leave it. A little sad because it could never be the same anymore, but also no regrets. I wanted to leave it all behind me. This was the same case with the people who took my sister. When they left Holland to go to America, they were in their early 50s.They wanted to leave because there was too much pain and hurt there. Not enough left of their family. They were also, as I said, the only survivors of their family. So that I left behind me. It was like a closed book. 
 
A new era had begun. A new life. I lived in England in the suburbs. I did not have any Jewish identification when I lived in England. I lived quite out in the suburbs. The synagogue in London was too far away to go by bus. It was hours to go there. In a way I did not seek it. Now that I look back onto those years of my life, I realize that I was not quite sure what I wanted to make of my life concerning my Jewishness. I was a Jewish girl, that I knew. But did I want to identify myself with it? I realize now that I isolated myself. I had my husband, my two little boys. Grandma and grandpa were there.  I lived an insulated life, just worries about raising the children, just doing with my children. Just hovering over them, just completely concentrating on the babies and the house. 

I didn’t want to get involved in anything, and I did not get involved in anything. I did not associate with synagogues, Jewishness, anything at all. My husband, of course, in that way was not an influence in my life because he had not been really raised as a Jewish boy very much. He lost his parents at an early age. He was the only Jewish boy in the school where he lived. He always spoke up being a Jew. If there was any derogatory remark made — and there was, kids will do those things in England —he spoke up, “I’m a Jew.” And he got many a bloody nose for it. He used to tell me many times he was in fights over it. But that was where it ended, so we had not really any ties with the Jewish community in England. 

All this time, I had started a new life. I had not really gone back and talked about anything that had happened. It was like a new life had opened up. I wanted to kind of wipe it out of my mind. But I must tell you I had many, many nightmares. Many, many nights Dan woke me up that I was crying or screaming in my sleep. Although I maybe didn’t talk about it in those days, it was always in the back of my mind. It was too fresh, too new. 

Tanzer: How did Dan help you forget?
MEEKCOMS: Dan helped me very much. In the beginning in the middle of the night I would wake up crying. I would be perspiring. I would cry in my sleep. He would wake me up and say, “Tell me about your dream.” He would take me in his arms, and he gave me such comfort and love that that helped me through those hard times. Then when the children came, I was so involved with the babies there was no time to think about it. Two little boys, two babies was plenty to do. It really took my mind off the past. 

Then my sister called from America that now she had met this man and she had gotten married. This was a Dutchman who had gone to America just before the war broke out. He was in business in Portland, Oregon. She said, “Chella, you promised me that you would come to America once I was settled here. Are you ready to leave England?” I said, “Of course, I’m ready to leave England. I told you, when you get married and settle down, and I don’t break my promise. I want to come to my sister.” My husband didn’t know anything about this. I never told him about it. He said, “Where are you going?” I said, “We are going to America. I want to start a new life in America where my sister is. I am not that delighted with England.” I really didn’t care for my life in England that much.

Tanzer: Had you ever considered any other country?
MEEKCOMS: No, not at all. At one time when we first got married and the State of Israel had been established, funny enough it was my husband who said — they were asking for the boys to fly for Israel. There was lots of trouble and they asked for the boys. There was lot of antisemitism in England at that time. There were bombs sent through the mail. At that time they blew up the hotels in Israel and British people were killed. My husband said, “I will go and fly for the Israelis. I will fly for the State of Israel. I will help them.” I said, “No.” I didn’t want him to go. I didn’t want to go. I was not ready after all that I had gone through, to maybe lose my husband. I had just given birth. My baby was about six weeks old, the first child, and I was definitely not ready to go through any more pain or agony. In that way I insulated myself. I wanted just my children and my husband and nothing else. And I did not identify with anything. I realize that was part of it.

My sister called me then and said she wanted us to come. I said to my husband, “Please, I want to go to America. Please let us go there. I think it is going to be a good country to go to. I think new horizons will open up for us there.” I felt very good about the prospect of America. He said, “Okay, we’ll go.” We applied for our visas, and several years went by before we finally went. We left after about three years. When I came to America, my oldest son was three and a half and my baby was one and a half.

Tanzer: What did you have to do to get here?
MEEKCOMS: First of all, my sister was our sponsor. We had to fill out I don’t know how many forms to come, but the English quota was not quite ever filled, so we didn’t have any trouble to come because my husband is British and I was British by marriage. I did not ask for help of any of the organizations. It was my sister who sponsored me, and my brother-in-law. We arrived in America, New Jersey, the 7th of June, 1952.

Tanzer:   Did you come by ship?
MEEKCOMS: We came by ship.

Tanzer: What was the trip like?
MEEKCOMS: We went through Holland. Grandma and grandpa had sold all their household and everything. They said, “If you go, we go. We are not going to be left behind.” It was hard. They were already in their 60s. I said to them, “I don’t know if it is going to be easy for you to start a new life at your age.” But she had never had any children of her own and we were her family. She said, “If you go, I don’t care what I have to do, I go with you.” We had some problems getting this visa, and it took a little longer. Our visa was going to run out in May, so we left before they did. They sold their home with everything in it, and they stayed in Brussels. He was a Belgian by birth. And so we left. We went through Holland and took a Dutch ship to New Amsterdam. It was fantastic. I’m sure it could have been a fun journey, but I was very apprehensive and I was very nervous. Two little boys. I was very apprehensive of what was ahead of us and very excited to see my sister again and my brother-in-law I had never met. It was a tremendous, happy experience to see them again. We arrived in New York and ….

Tanzer: Who met you at the ship?
MEEKCOMS: When we came off the ship we were met by the people who let my sister come, aunt and uncle who had taken my sister into their house. They put us in an old hotel somewhere in New York, and I got in touch by telephone with my sister and brother-in-law. By the time we had paid for our fare and we had stayed in Brussels for a while — because we were trying to get altogether with the old folks coming to America, and we stayed there for a couple of months — we went through a lot of money. By the time we arrived in New York we had $100 in our pockets. It was only enough for the fare to bring us to Portland, so my brother-in-law said, “I paid for your ticket. The ticket is all ready to come, for you to fly to Portland.” I’d never met my brother-in-law. 

A friend of the folks of my sister brought us to the airport, and we flew into Portland. It was a good omen. When we arrived into Portland it was a beautiful clear sunny day, and I said to my husband, “It’s a new life. Here is where we belong. I feel very good about it. The sun is shining and it looks beautiful here. I feel happy. I feel very elated.” So they found us a motel and we stayed there. They found us an apartment close to where they lived.

Tanzer: What was the date when you arrived?
MEEKCOMS: We arrived in Portland the 7th of June, 1952.We arrived in New York, New Jersey the 4th of June. It took us three days to come from New York finally before we got settled and flew into Portland. I can’t tell you the reunion with my sister. I found finally we were together forever. This was it. I said we were never going to move anymore. It looked so beautiful here. I felt this was going to be the place. My husband had to look for work. He was an Englishman. He spoke the language very well. We found a little apartment, and I settled down with my little babies.

Tanzer: Where was your apartment?
MEEKCOMS: We settled down in North Portland, close to where my sister lived. Even then, for years I did not identify with the Jewish community. Anybody who met me, I would always come out with it, that I was Jewish. But I still did not identify with the Jewish community.

Tanzer: Why was that?
MEEKCOMS: I don’t know. I know that my husband did not seek it. I really wanted it, but he never really thought it was important. He did not seek it and I did. Eventually we got to know some Jewish people in town through my sister. I got to know more and more people, and I wanted the identification.

Tanzer: Had your sister identified with the Jewish groups?
MEEKCOMS: Not much. Also very limited. Limited pace, very few people she knew.

Tanzer: What about your brother-in-law? He had lived here for some time?
MEEKCOMS: Yes, he had some identification with it. He had never really delved into it. I can’t really explain it. I know that for my part I wanted it. By that time I was really looking for something, but I hadn’t really gone all out for it. I realize now that it was all part of not being quite sure if I wanted to identify with the Jewish community. I’ve always come out to say that I am Jewish, and people would see the number on my arm. I could have had that taken out of my arm like some people had done. I did not. I don’t know if I wanted it to be a reminder never to forget to myself, or  — and I always would come out for what I am and what had happened. But I did stay away from the Jewish community for many years.

Tanzer: Did you have any special problems in terms of getting yourself organized into American life?
MEEKCOMS: Yes, it was different. It took me a while to get used to it. I wanted to be accepted. I noticed there were lots of people with different backgrounds in the United States. We had a hard time establishing ourselves in a financial way. Making a living was hard. We didn’t have a penny to our name, and it was hard. I wanted my husband home. I did not want him to go on the road. He had a chance to go as a salesman on the road. I did not want that. I wanted him to be home with the children. I wanted a family, an identification as a unit, and I wanted to keep that as a unit.

I did go to California for a while. Two years we left for California. We thought it was a better prospect for making a living. My husband had gotten interested in cabinet making. He’d always liked to work with his hands when he was younger, and so he thought he would go into the cabinet-making business. And he did try that in California. We had heard that it was booming there, in the building industry, and so we thought we would try it. We did not like it there. I missed my sister very much.

Tanzer: Where did you go in California?
MEEKCOMS: We went to Los Angeles, and we went to Santa Barbara for a while. It was a very pretty place to live, but it was not very good for business. I went back to see my sister for vacation, and we decided that Portland was the place for us after all. We had tried, and I said to my husband, “I just don’t ever want to move again. This is it. I’ve done enough of this schlepping around. Let us stay here and make a go of it, whatever it will be.”

Tanzer: Meanwhile, where had grandma and grandpa gone?
MEEKCOMS: After we were here for a year, they finally got their visa and they came. They lived with us for many years. We had a houseful of people, grandma and grandpa, the two boys, my husband and I. I was always taking care of a big family. I was home taking care of that family. I was in charge, while before when I had lived in England, she was in charge. This time I was in charge. 

I had changed. I had become more sure of myself, and when we came back to Portland, I said to my husband, “I want to identify with what I am. I have tried to find out, do we want to identify or do we not. I know in my heart I do. I thought for many years, and I know you leave it up to me, in that respect. You are not the strong Jewish influence in our lives. But I feel that I cannot deny any longer what I am. I’ve tried to fight it maybe in a way, to be sure. Be liberal. Be nothing. I can’t be a nothing. My father lost his life because he was a Jew. I can never forget that. I am a Jew and I don’t care who knows it. I want to identify, and I want my children to know that they are Jews. I want this feeling of continuity in my family. I want them to know what they are all their life, and whatever they will identify with later on in life, maybe it’s going to be a part of what I get them into now.” I became a member of the temple when I got back from California and became a member of the Jewish community. I identified with the Jewish community. It took me all those years, really, until just before the oldest child became bar mitzvahed.

Tanzer: What year was that?
MEEKCOMS: That was in 1959, 1960. By then, the children knew what they were. I had already tried to tell them a little bit of my background. Very often my husband would shush me. He said, “Don’t start about that again, Chella. You went through so much and so many nightmares.” I said, “It is in my head and in my soul, and the children should know about it. They have to know about it.” I realized that it was important for them to know what I am as a human being, their mother, that it should rub off on them.

Tanzer: How did they react to it?
MEECKOMS:  I sometimes think I made a mistake in telling them at a too early age, about my experiences.

Tanzer: Why?
MEEKCOMS: Because sometimes I felt they were turning away from it, they were turning away from being maybe — but I had gone through so much pain and lost so much. I felt almost that they were maybe in the heart a little bit afraid — maybe I sent them to bed at night thinking about it — that they were afraid could these terrible things happen to them. Could their mother and father be taken away from them? Could this hurt and pain be? Could the stigma of being — at that time, being Jewish, it was such a terrible pain. It was a burden to bear, to be Jewish during the war, what I went through. That is why so many people who were Jews after the war turned away from being Jewish. I have one cousin in Holland, one daughter from that aunt, who turned completely away from it because she didn’t want to identify with it at all. It played maybe through my mind at one time after the war, but I couldn’t as much turn away from being Jewish as I can turn away from being a woman. I can’t. I’m so sure of what I am and I’m secure in what I am. I wanted my children to have that feeling of not being afraid, of being secure in what they are.

Tanzer: Why do you think that they did react in this way?
MEEKCOMS: I think that, as they were young, they reacted differently than the way that I had hoped they would react to it. I think that I had made a mistake in telling them about my experiences at a too early age. They weren’t able to grasp it. I felt it was too much for them. Many times when I would say something about it they would walk off or they would turn away, change the conversation, maybe because they thought it was pain for me. They would hear about it more often from me as they grew older. I would bring it up at certain times especially. I realize I would talk more about it when I was alone with them than in front of my husband. I did get things across to them about it. 

My husband knew the whole story, and he was very aware of what I had gone through, very protective of me as his wife. He didn’t want me to get hurt anymore or dream about it anymore. The children eventually knew about it as they grew older. They went through Hebrew school and everything, and I was happy that I got them into everything. We observed the holidays. We became, not very religious Jews, but we still observed everything and they learned a lot from me, and they learned a lot, of course, from their school and their Hebrew school and their bar mitzvah and their association with the Jewish community. They are secure that they are Jews. They know that they are Jews. 

They are now grown up into young men. They are liberal Jews like the typical young — when they went to college, they said, “What difference does that make, Mama?” I raised them and I’ve always told them that my people were saved by non-Jews. My life was saved by non-Jews. People who risked their lives for me and for many people before me. I appreciate people at face value as human beings, what they are. I raised them that way, very liberal, so they’ve done that. They have got friends in all walks of life, from all different backgrounds, because that’s the way their parents are. Both of us are like that. I love people. I’ve had beautiful experiences from people out of my religion completely. As a matter of fact, the people I stayed with during the war once said to me, “Wouldn’t it be better if the Jewish people ceased, just to integrate with everybody else so that there would not be a Jew and a Christian, but just people, human beings? There wouldn’t be this problem in the world.”

Tanzer: How would you react, Chella, to your children marrying non-Jews?
MEEKCOMS: I don’t want that. I have tried to get that across to them. I have told them I would like Jewish continuity, and I think it is very important for Judaism to survive. I’m a strong supporter of Israel. At one time when my children had non-Jewish friends, girlfriends, they would say, “You accept everybody as a non-Jew in your home and some of my very best friends are non-Jews, and yet when there is talk about getting married you become very upset when you think that maybe one of your boys will marry a non-Jewish girl.” I said, “I love people, but I think for our Judaism to survive, it’s terribly important you marry a Jew. Would you have liked if Hitler had succeeded? Because that is really what would happen. There was such a tremendous Jewish community in Europe. If we don’t continue our Jewishness and marry into the Jewish faith and raise our children as Jews, then actually he did succeed.” And I said, “This is what I am trying to get across to you.” 

And so one day when one of my children was very serious about a non-Jewish girl, I brought that up. I got hold of him by the shirt and I said to him, “Don’t ever forget what you are because I am a survivor of all those millions of people, and if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be here. You may never forget you are a Jew because if you forget you are a Jew, you forget your mother.” I made him cry. We both cried after that because it came so from my heart, because I feel it so deeply. I have become very much aware more of being Jewish with all the last trouble with Israel. The fight for the survival of Israel. I feel it is so terribly important, that we have to identify with Judaism all over the world so that Israel will exist and never cease to exist, so that we all can live. I feel it very deeply.

Tanzer:  Have you been to Israel?
MEEKCOMS: No.

Tanzer: Would you like to go?
MEEKCOMS: I would like very much to go. I hope one day to do it and I’m sure I will.

Tanzer: Have your children been to Israel?
MEEKCOMS: No.

Tanzer: How strongly do they feel about Israel?
MEEKCOMS: They feel very strongly about Israel too. They feel very strongly about Israel to survive. They feel deeply about it. They are typical, young American Jews. They are very liberal in their views. They are a little more liberal than the average liberal I think. I would like them to be stronger identified with their Jewishness. I would like it stronger. I said to my son the other night, “How strong a Jew are you?” And he said, “Strong enough.” I said, “Yes, but for continuity?” He said, “I think so.” And this is what I hope.

Tanzer: Chella, do you think that your children had any special difficulties in adjusting to life here as a result of your being a survivor? 
MEEKCOMS: I think that at one time in school, their young school years, maybe they did. I don’t know if you were to interview them what their answer would be on that. I sometimes think that I drummed into them a lot of me, and that is why maybe at one time, during the growing up years and even during the teenage years, that they maybe not identified strongly enough with Jewishness, because of my story. I thought that if I tell them all that and get it over to them, they would be very much stronger than I was even in their Jewishness. Actually, I don’t think this is what happened. 

Tanzer: You think it worked in reverse?
MEEKCOMS: Yes. It worked in reverse. When they were in college I could see a great change in them. I could see in them an identification with the other guy, to be just like the other guy, and not to be specifically different, maybe because of my experience. I don’t know why, within their character, within their heart, if I frightened them, if I did something to them. I’m not quite sure even to this day.

Tanzer: Do you suppose that the fear of your experience you could have projected onto them by your fear for their safety?
MEEKCOMS: Yes. I think that I have influenced them in that way. I think that I have succeeded maybe better with my daughter in that respect. I took my daughter to Holland. After I took her to Holland, I found a great change in that child.

Tanzer: What type of a change?
MEEKCOMS: Before that she was a typical American girl. Typical American child. When I had gone there and she had met the people that I stayed with during the war, and she heard some of the stories and I showed her the places I had lived, and I showed her the monument that had been built to the Jews who had lost their lives in the Holocaust, and I showed her all these things, she was 15 at the time. It made a very big impression on her. When she came back I think she identified more with her Jewishness than the boys did, because she felt it more personally. Something better came out of it. I felt that she became more proud of me through that experience than with all my talking to the boys. When I talked to the boys it made an effect on them. They always come out with it. Even now I make remarks to them and they say, “Don’t worry Mom. I’m a Jew. I speak up for it that I am a Jew. I never forget that I’m a Jew.” And then they look down on me and they say, “How could I with you?” So I think they are at least secure in that. They are not afraid of it. But I thought that they would maybe stronger identify with what they are.

Tanzer: Sometimes that comes with settling in, having a family.
MEEKCOMS: Yes.

Tanzer: The commitment comes. 
MEEKCOMS: It came later in my life, maybe because of my husband. He had been raised also in a different way. He identified that he was a Jew, and he would speak up for that, but also, as I said, I kind of isolated myself and insulated myself. That was part of not wanting to be hurt ever again, realizing as I became more sure of myself, became a woman in my own right, in my own thinking. Finally that my children have grown up, I’m very secure in what I am. I speak up and I have no doubts about it.

Tanzer: In the early years living in this country did you experience any discrimination or any hatred?
MEEKCOMS: No, absolutely not. I never had. I asked my children that, too, did they ever find any antisemitism or any hurt or being different. No, they said, they really hadn’t. And I really can’t say that I have. I’ve got lots of friends who are non-Jewish who seem to be very proud of the fact that I am their friend. They have learned something from me, from my experiences. I have told many of them my experiences because I think people should know. I have been very much aware, although many years I haven’t talked about it. As I became older I realized it is very important that people should know about it because I think that the plight of the Jews and the pain and the hardship which people did to them — I think I brought out once when my children asked me, “How can you believe in God? How can you believe in anything after what you went through? How can you have any faith?” I said to them, “It wasn’t God who did it. It was people that did it. And I would like people to know that regular people like them let it happen.” I lost so much that was dear to me, and I’ve experienced so much pain, that I feel the stories should be told. I think that it is important that people should know, and all my non-Jewish friends know it. I made them aware of it.

Tanzer: Do you think they understand?
MEEKCOMS: They did not quite understand. No, they could never quite grasp it. I tried to make them understand that I was a Jewish girl growing up in Holland just like the little neighbor girl next door. I was just a Dutch girl. It made no difference what your religion was. It was a very democratic country like America. We were free as a bird. There was no such thing as being different. 

The Germans came in and destroyed a people. A hatred. And everybody continued destroying because of what one man’s will wanted. A whole nation set out to destroy. My whole family was destroyed. I told them that I am one member of a 15, 16 member family, and my sister and I and aunt in Holland are a survivor of that. They stop to think. They can’t believe it.

Tanzer: Do you tell them about your camp experiences?
MEEKCOMS: Yes, definitely. I made it a point to bring that up at times. There are times that I can talk about it. The times that I have brought it up, I make them fully aware of what went on. Tell them about the gas chambers. I said people did that willingly, opened those ovens doors for people. Just regular people with families who had children of their own who did that. They don’t like to think about it. But I wanted them to know because I think, and I told the children one of my reasons for telling them. When I talked to a Sunday school group of children, I told them, “Your mothers and fathers say why should this woman sit in front of the class and tell my kids about it? They get so upset when they come home.” This is really what happened. I said, “I want you to be upset about it because I want you to think about what I am telling you. That you should work and be alert to what goes on in government, in your state, in your country, and see to it that things like that never can happen again. Be aware what goes on.”

Tanzer: Do you think that American Jews understand what you went through?
MEEKCOMS: Yes, I do. I think that it has been enough brought forward that they do understand and realize what went on. There is a whole group of people who say, “Why should we listen to you with so many things going on today, other things in the world? What goes on in Israel today is terrible. Why should this still be brought up?” But remember that 6,000,000 people were wiped out. And I think, if it could happen in Germany, in a civilized country where terrific intellectual people lived, that it could happen anywhere if you are not aware of it, to have a people destroyed. Millions of people destroyed. I want people to be aware of it. This is one of the reasons that when it comes up and something is asked about it, I bring it up and I do want to talk about it. Although I can still get upset about it and it hurts me, I feel that it is important, and I thought it very important to bring it up to kids that age — 15, 16, 14, that age group. It makes a big impression on them.

Tanzer: Yes. They see so much romance about war.
MEEKCOMS: Yes.

Tanzer: They should really have a depth of understanding. Do you have friends and acquaintances who are also survivors?
MEEKCOMS: In Holland. Nobody here. I associated in Holland, and I still correspond with those girls in Holland I was in camp with. We keep in touch. I don’t know anybody here. I met some people once when we gave a talk, and I know some of them, but I don’t have any personal contact with them.

Tanzer: So you don’t belong to any organization of survivors?
MEEKCOMS: No.

Tanzer: Do you live in a Jewish neighborhood?
MEEKCOMS: Yes. We have Jewish people in our neighborhood.

Tanzer: Are there any particular reasons that you chose that neighborhood?
MEEKCOMS: No. When we went in we were the only Jewish people in there. But we are close at hand to the Jewish community. We can go there within a 10- to 15-minute ride so it’s not that important. We can get to it. It is not like living way out in the sticks, that you can’t get to a Jewish community. We are in a city where there is a Jewish community that you can identify with, and this is important. 

Tanzer: What organizations do you belong to, Chella?
MEEKCOMS: I belong to the National Council of Jewish Women, and I’m very active in that.

Tanzer: What do you do particularly in the National Council of Jewish Women?
MEEKCOMS: I am chairman of the council of the senior citizens at the Jewish Community Center. I identify with the Jewish Community Center. I am around there all the time. I work with a hundred people every week, Jewish people. I am quite happy about it. The people I have met in in the council are high caliber Jewish people. I love being part of that organization very much. It is very important to me. I feel very gratified in what they do for the community, and I feel it is terribly important. Another thing, it is very important what they do because they work with the community. It is important that the community knows what the Jewish people do for their community, and that’s why I am very proud to be part of it.

Tanzer: What is your particular job with the senior citizens?
MEEKCOMS: I work with them on a weekly basis, with their meetings, with their luncheons, with their programs, with their conventions. They have a lot of people in different cities. I’m a member of Temple Beth Israel. My children went to Sunday school through Temple Beth Israel. I feel happy belonging to those organizations.

Tanzer: Do you belong to any of the Zionist organizations?
MEEKCOMS: No, I don’t. I don’t belong to any other group. I’ve been asked to join several other things, but other than paying dues here and there and donations, that’s what I belong to and am actively involved in.

Tanzer: Do you think that your children have had a good Jewish education?
MEEKCOMS: Well, not enough. No, not enough.

Tanzer: Did they attend Hebrew school?
MEEKCOMS: They attended Hebrew school and Sunday school. I tried to get them into some Jewish organizations, but they dropped out. The AZAs, the B’nai Brith, and stuff like that. They didn’t enjoy it. They didn’t like it, and I don’t know why. Now they have Jewish friends and they associate, and my son is a member of the Jewish Community Center. They identify, but they are not overly zealous. 

Tanzer: Or educated. I’m curious about the extent of their Jewish education. What was available to you?
MEEKCOMS: They may join some youth group now, young people’s group. I gave them the names, and they said they might be interested. They date Jewish girls.

Tanzer: What do you like to read?
MEEKCOMS: I like to read anything that is topical very much, the latest that comes out. I like to keep up with things.

Tanzer: You mentioned that you had done so much reading when you were in hiding, and I wondered whether you had continued this interest?
MEEKCOMS: Yes. For years when the children were smaller I did not. As the kids grew older, I went back into reading. I read the latest that is available. I delve into that.

Tanzer: Do you read any books about the Holocaust?
MEEKCOMS: No. I did read topical books that were written about Exodus, all that type of thing. The Promise, The Chosen, books by Jewish authors. I do like to read that. I get into these articles about the Holocaust. I’ve had some books in the house that this is brought up in. I get terribly upset when I read about it. I still tend to get nervous about it. My husband has kind of put his foot down there. He didn’t want me to read it.  I have got it in my mind to read it, though, to go through it again. I said the next book I am going to read is going to be the Holocaust. I do want to go through it. 

I have gone over it in my mind many times from beginning to end like now going through this, putting it on tape. We have to put it in perspective, step by step, to kind of clear your mind out. The whys and what-fors and why the survival. You never, ever live without it. I always thought that I can never be a completely happy person again, but then who is completely happy? In the world that we live in today there is so much pain and anxiety. I live with it. I put it out of my mind, but there is a little spot in my brain and it is there. I can think of my father with deep affection but with pain, too, because of the way he went. I know where he went and the way he went, and I can never forgive the world for that.

Tanzer: Chella, are you satisfied with the way your children have grown up in the United States? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes. They are normal, healthy, thinking individuals. They’re quite happy with themselves. They are secure in themselves. It has not scarred them, my experience. And my husband has a very healthy attitude towards life. He was in the Royal Air Force for five years. He had to fend for himself at an early age, but he is a man with a healthy sense of humor. The children have a sense of humor. I like to think that I have a sense of humor and that all of us have a healthy attitude towards life. I think that they are normal human beings. 

Tanzer: How would you contrast your life with the life of your daughter? 
MEEKCOMS: I emphasized to Yvonne [name?] as she was growing up and became a teenager, I said, “I would really like you to be a teenager and enjoy your life of a few years with enjoyment and fun because at that age, those were the darkest years of my life. I was never a teenager. I really went from a child into a woman, and then right away a married woman. I was never carefree or had any fun that I can remember.” 

Tanzer: You were 12 when …? 
MEEKCOMS: I was 12 on the day the Germans walked in, in 1940 in Holland. I was 14 when I went into hiding, my 15th birthday in hiding. I was 16 in the camp. I was 17 a week after I arrived in Sweden. I was convalescing in Sweden, sick most of the time, I was 18 in England, and three weeks after my 19th birthday I was married. And so I saw to it that my child did have the teenage years, and that she could look back onto them later on, as she becomes older, as years of enjoyment and enrichment. 

Tanzer: How do you feel about living in America? 
MEEKCOMS: I was never sorry that we came to America. When my husband and I came here we were very young. I was 24 when I came here, and Dan was 27. At that time Dion [name?] was three and a half and the little guy was one and a half. We had some hard years struggling to establish ourselves. Those were very hard years. We worked very hard. We didn’t have means to have any luxury, but nevertheless we didn’t go anything short and my children didn’t go anything short. There was security, love, and a nice comfortable home. Life was good here. I found America was a fair country to expand yourself and make a living and to be able to spread your wings and make something of yourself, which was not so true in England after the war. The country economically was in terrible shape, and my husband just coming out of the Air Force could hardly get a job. It was very hard for him to establish himself in England. I was never sorry to have left England or Holland. 

Tanzer: Do you like the American system of government? 
MEEKCOMS: I think that with all our faults, what we have gone through, Watergate and everything else that happens in this country, the wonderful thing about living in America is that you can speak out. There is the Civil Liberties Union. You can bring everything up to the government. I watched Watergate intensely. I was very interested in it, and I thought it was wonderful how it all did come out that the Senators were there interrogating the other Senators and high officials in government. The highest official, who could evidently be thrown out. That is not possible in a lot of countries. I think we are very fortunate that we have this. There are a lot of things we are about in this country, and you can speak out about it. I do think, though, that we still have to never give up impressing our will onto our congress and our senators. Whatever goes on we should be aware, make the people who run the government aware of what goes on and that we are aware of it. 

Tanzer: Then you do think that the American system of government works? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes. I do think it works. 

Tanzer: How would you compare it to the Dutch system of government? 
MEEKCOMS: Similar in a way. I was a young child, of course, when I lived in Holland and when I went back and I looked. Holland was a very democratic country. England is a very democratic country. They are very outspoken in England. As a matter of fact, I found when I first came from England to America, that actually the people in England got away with more than in America. 

The communists, for instance, were not persecuted. There were communist people running in London. They weren’t persecuted and thrown in jail. They left them alone. You could even go on Hyde Park corner, get on your box and speak your mind. They’d laugh at you or let you speak or applaud you or boo you, but you got away with it. It was a very democratic background England, and Holland the same thing. Holland is terribly liberal. They are terribly outspoken. But there was a time here in America —when I arrived here it was the McCarthy era in the ’50s. I was a little puzzled by it all. But that has cleared up now, and there is a tremendous freedom of the press. They say there isn’t, and there have been things in the past — there have been dangers and I think we have to watch out for it. We have to speak out and it can work. 

Tanzer: What do you think are the important national issues that are facing the United States today? 
MEEKCOMS: I’m no expert at that. I do believe that national issues are the state of the economy; it has hit many of us, especially in our business. My husband is in the building business. We have been hit severely by it, and the government has not done enough to help us out of it. 

Tanzer: What do you think the government could do? 
MEEKCOMS: First of all, with more jobs. Many people are without work the last year. And the person who was able to afford a home, the low-income man, cannot afford to buy a house anymore. We were building for the middle class, low-income maybe. We’ve been hit through that tremendously, our business. We have taken tremendous losses and we are feeling the pangs of it after the drop of the economy in this country. But I still think that there is hope that we come out of it eventually. We are living in a very tough time right now financially, but I think that we will pull out of it. 

Tanzer: What do you think are the overall international issues that are affecting this country? 
MEEKCOMS: Personally I am worried about the influence of the Arab countries, the money from the oil, these issues that can influence the people, and the government being afraid of not getting all these things done. The United Nations is very unfair. It is not an honest organization anymore. I don’t think it is even worthwhile working [with it]. I don’t know if it is any influence anymore, and I’m very concerned for Israel, that the United States should give support to Israel. The American people have been fair in the support of Israel, but we hope that it will last because they don’t want to get involved in any wars, in any complications after Vietnam. Will they leave them hanging in the lurch? It’s a little delicate situation, and I do worry about it personally. 

Tanzer: How do you feel about Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State? 
MEEKCOMS: I’ve mixed feelings sometimes about him. I think that he is trying to keep peace as best as he can. It is a very delicate situation. I really don’t know of anybody else who could have done better, let me put it this way. This is the thing. I don’t know if anybody else could have really helped a little more than what he has done. I have my doubts about that.

Tanzer: Do you think that his position as a Jew is detrimental to his position as Secretary of State? 
MEEKCOMS: He has really divorced himself from being a Jew. I don’t think people identify him as a Jew because he really has shown no personal involvement, favoritism one way or the other. In his heart, I don’t know how he would — if he can’t feel that he is himself a German Jew who as a child came here at a young age. So I hope that in the back of his mind there is something, that he will identify with Israel and the state is in the world today. 

Tanzer: Do you think that there is a danger of antisemitism in the United States? 
MEEKCOMS: I do. I do worry about that. It is on the front lines all the time. In this country we have had the Ku Klux Klan, and I have just have come from Texas not long ago — I know there is antisemitism there. 

Tanzer: What type of antisemitism did you find in Texas? 
MEEKCOMS: I did not personally feel it, but my friend told me about it. She lives in an area in Houston that is very rich in oil. A lot of people come there from the Arab countries. She said they wine and dine them. Of course it has to do with the oil, she said. And the people favor them. A lot of them go to Saudi Arabia and a lot of people work there. The American people feel absolutely no qualm about going there. “I have heard remarks about the Jews,” she said. “I have spoken up about it, and I said that my very best friend is a Jewish girl. And then they made remarks about some of the Jews that they had met and this and that and the other.” She lived in San Francisco before, and she had never run into that. But she said, “In the South they think differently.” I think there is a lot of prejudice in America. We have so many people on the opposite side, who are intellectually enriched and who are in good positions in this country, but it is here. Being that Israel is all the time in the headlines, and if they run into trouble — like Yitzhak Rabin asked for so many more million dollars and — you get remarks. “Why should we give any more money to them? We already are suffering from the recession years.” There is definitely going to be — I think there is a danger of it, yes. You have to educate the people to have the answers when they mention it. You have to have the answers to come back with, why and what for. 

Tanzer: What do you think the reasons are for the prejudice in this country? 
MEEKCOMS: It’s strange. I don’t know what to say about it. Really, I found more prejudice maybe here than I did as a child growing up in Holland. You’ve got the South that is divorced from the northern people. They are a different type of people there. There are more uneducated people there, I think, in the South. But even people up here. You get people up here even in their own environment who — I don’t know what the reason is, but it’s here. It is here. 

Tanzer: Do you think that there is anything we can do about the United Nations? By we, I mean the United States? 
MEEKCOMS: The United Nations is such a farce right now that — there are so many countries in the United Nations who are from the pro-African nations and the pro-Arab nations. Russia and all the [countries] behind the Iron curtain, the Balkan states. There are so many of them, and that is never going to change. I think we have to accept the fact that it is never going to change. They are here to stay, those countries, with their views on the world and against Israel, and that is never going to change. The United States has to take a very firm decision on their policies and the European countries will be behind the United Nations, who are now our allies. And they should take a firmer stand. I think they can’t be firm enough. 

Tanzer: How firm a stand should they take? 
MEEKCOMS: They are attempting [?]. They are afraid to break that. So I really don’t know. I do think that we shouldn’t be afraid. We should show that we are not afraid of anybody. We were always the strongest power in the world. We’ve had problems, but I think that we have to show the world not to cry wolf, to stick with their beliefs, and I think the American people do want that. I really believe that the American people don’t want to take a step backward. They don’t like that at all. The more they speak up at the United Nations the better they would really like it, because they like to think of themselves as the power nation in the world. 

Tanzer: What are your feelings on supplying military arms to Angola? 
MEEKCOMS: It’s difficult to say. I’m for a hundred percent of giving everything we can to Israel. I had a discussion the other night with my husband about that. When it comes to Angola we say, “No, hands off. Me, personally. Let’s not get involved in another country. Let them fight their own battles.” But people say that to me, “What about Israel? Let them fight their own battles.” Where do you draw the line? I don’t know what the answer is. 

Tanzer: Well, Israel really has been fighting their own battles. 
MEEKCOMS: They have been fighting, but don’t forget Israel has been fighting their own battles with their own blood. The only thing — without American money and American aid they would not be here today, and we have to face that. Without the money from the Jews of America. We have been very generous. 

Tanzer: Chella, what political party do you belong to? 
MEEKCOMS: I’m a Democrat. And I have voted from the day that I became a citizen. I make sure that I do. 

Tanzer: How soon were you naturalized after you came to this country? 
MEEKCOMS: In the early ’60s. 

Tanzer: Do you keep yourself politically aware of candidates? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes, I do. I try to keep up with it. I think it is a privilege of every American to vote, and I think it is terrible if people neglect to do so.

Tanzer: Have you made contributions to political parties? 
MEEKCOMS: I have made some to the Democratic Party, yes. 

Tanzer: To particular candidates? 
MEEKCOMS: No.

Tanzer: Do you support candidates who are preferential to certain issues?
MEEKCOMS: Yes, I do. As a Jew I’m very partial to candidates who support Israel, and I don’t know if that always — you have to look into his background, if he is good for America too. It is not quite fair, but I do think that Israel plays uppermost in our minds in the Jews of America. The survival of Israel and how we support Israel. 

Tanzer: What do you think the survival of Israel does mean to the Jews in America? 
Meekcoms: I’m terribly afraid if Israel wouldn’t survive. I think that the destiny of the Jews is at stake if Israel doesn’t survive. Israel is a place for all Jews of the world to go to if they want to go there. There have been many places that have been a haven for them. I don’t have to point out where. The whole survival that they are there fighting for their own country, worked so hard to make it what it is today. It is so terribly important, I think to the whole world, the part of the world that believes in Israel, that here is a country who built themselves up into a nation that they can be proud of, and it’s a haven for any Jew who wants to go there. But it was so necessary, really, after the war. 

Tanzer: Do you receive any restitution payments from Germany?
MEEKCOMS: No. I did receive some quite a few years ago. I had several, an amount of money that was given to me for the time I had worked, labor in the camps. The factories paid us a certain amount of money, and then we had a few years before that also a small amount of money from the German government that had paid money. 

I am in the process at the moment with the Dutch government. They have put out some papers where it is possible for us to claim some money. We are not quite sure we are going to get any, if we come in that category, but we were able to fill in some forms and see if there is any money. The Dutch government — all people who had a family, if they had a mother or father who perished during the war, who had been victimized during the war, and they were a survivor, could fill in forms. They had money, like a pension fund. They are like Social Security. They had a certain amount of money they would pay out, and they had preference who they would pay first. I don’t know exactly how it works. We filled in the forms and mailed it in. This just came to my attention about six months ago. I know a woman who lives in Holland who is a survivor of the camp. She is in her 70s and she has crippled feet. She suffered during the war in camp with her feet. She gets free medical care. In Holland it is socialized medicine. She gets help in her home. They give her so much a month for the rest of her life so that life is a little easier, on top of her old age pension that she gets. America is a far away, golden country with milk and honey, and I don’t know if we are going to get anything, but I heard from the Dutch consulate and I filled in those forms. 

Tanzer: Did you ever receive any restitution for the property that was confiscated, was never returned to your family? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes, they did pay out. At that time, my stepmother got the money. 

Tanzer: Did you have any doubts about accepting the restitution payments from Germany? 
MEEKCOMS: No. I know people have refused money. I know a couple who have refused money. They said, “I don’t want a penny of their blood money.” I said, “What blood money? They took every penny from us. They confiscated our businesses, our homes, our families, our factories, everything. They owe us in blood and in money. I feel they should pay.” There was some people who got injured for life. Those people have pensions for life. They did pay for me and everything while I was in the hospital when I was sick. The government paid, and Germany had to restitute that money to the Dutch government. They got their money back from them because we were ill and somebody had to pay for that. I got better on my own, but there were some people who never did get better, who are cripples for the rest of their lives. They are getting pensions. I know one girl my age who gets a pension, a very good pension. She has a quarter of a lung in her body and hardly any ribs, and she gets a very good pension, for the rest of her life. 

Tanzer: Does she live in Holland? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes.

Tanzer: What are you feelings about Germany and present-day Germans? 
MEEKCOMS: I like to think that they’ve learned something. I read an article not long ago that the young people wanted to pay back to Israel. A whole group of young people went to Israel and put in time on a kibbutz and worked without pay. They wanted to repay for what their parents had done to them. So you get that one part of government, what changed the children and maybe teaches them. Then I also hear that there is another part that is still pro-Nazi, that still kind of lives there a bit. At one time they had a good leader. I don’t know at the moment if this has changed. Konrad Adenauer was quite a pro-Israel man and tried to teach the people of Germany what they had done. I don’t know. I’m not too familiar with it. 

Tanzer: Would you ever go to Germany? 
MEEKCOMS: Not in a million years. I couldn’t put a foot in that country. 

Tanzer: Do you buy any German products? 
MEEKCOMS: I don’t, which is silly in a way I guess because I hear there are more Volkswagens in Israel than anywhere else. I heard that at one time they sent lots of German products to Israel. They want to do trade with Israel. They tried to make up, and I guess if they are trying and the government is giving them money to do business with Israel and to make the economy flourish — maybe this is a new generation that’s coming up. These are the children of the murderers, and maybe they should be given a chance. I can understand that. I can fathom that and I can accept that. It is just that personally when I see a German name on something I can’t buy it. I put it back because I personally don’t want it in my house. 

Tanzer: Chella, I would like to talk about personal attitudes that you have about life in this country. How do you feel about blacks and the Civil Rights Movement and most particularly, now, the effort toward busing? 
MEEKOMS: You go in the South — for persecution, and you’ve been isolated, and the pain of it. I’m very much for equality for all men. I do think that it is a very highly recommended procedure. I think half of America has come a long ways since I’ve been in this country. I think the Americans have changed their attitude towards minority groups. I think as Jewish people we owe it to the minority groups to support it. 

Tanzer: You went to a parochial school where the same type of children are being educated together. Do you think that it is detrimental to have the same type of children in a neighborhood going to school together? 
MEEKCOMS: You mean that now they have to mix the colored children with the white children? 

Tanzer: In terms of bussing? 
MEEKCOMS: Of bussing. 

Tanzer: Of bringing children in by bus to a school. 
MEEKCOMS: The only thing I have against it is this. I move into a certain neighborhood and I want my child to go to that school, that’s why I want to move in that neighborhood. And I don’t like anybody telling me that my child now has to go downtown to a school because he has to be bused out so other kids can be brought in. I would really like to say if it happened to me, if I lived in an area, the Boston area, where I lived and that was happening to my children at school, or the Beaverton area here, that I had to bus my child out, I don’t approve of that.

I moved into that area because I wanted my child to go to that school. I don’t mind them bringing colored children into that school; that is fine with me. I lived at one time in an area in Portland, and colored children were moving into the area, and my child shared the car with a colored child to go to school. They went to a birthday party, that was fine with me. My children when they went to college, the first friend he brought home, he thought he was going to shock me. He was a seven-foot high jumper, a black boy. He said, “Well, Mom?” I said, “Well, what?” I said, “What’s the difference? He’s a friend of yours.” I tried to raise the children with equality. I said, “Me of all people.” 

Tanzer: But if your children were to be bused out of the neighborhood, how would you react? 
MEEKCOMS: I wouldn’t like it. 

Tanzer: Would you do it? 
MEEKCOMS: I don’t know. I’d probably try to fight for my beliefs that I want my child to go to that school where I live. That’s why I went there. I think I would fight for it, yes. I have to be really honest about this. This is really what I feel. I don’t like the idea. I don’t mind them being exposed to the so-called minority group, and that they are bringing black children, Chicanos, whatever; I think it would be good to be exposed to them, to be accepting of other people with other values and other backgrounds. After all, we are a country of mixed international groups of people, and I think it is important for all children to accept other people for what they are. But I don’t like the idea of going somewhere and then having a kid go for an hour and a half bus ride or whatever. That is the thing that I understand those people are upset about. 

Tanzer: What are your feelings about minority hiring practices? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes. That has to be [inaudible] for us. The only thing is that as long as the people qualify for the job. What is being done is often people are being forced to go into a job. Maybe there is another guy who is better for the job and he is white. But because he is an underprivileged minority, he gets the job while the other guy’s better equipped for it. It doesn’t always work out for the best. But in many instances I don’t think that they would have the opportunity to apply for a job if the issue wasn’t forced. 

Tanzer: Would there be a better way of handling this than enforced legislation? 
MEEKCOMS: Possibly not because it probably wouldn’t happen. If it wasn’t forced, they probably wouldn’t have a chance, and I think that they have been given a chance for education more now than they ever have had. 

Tanzer: Has your husband had experience in these areas in terms of hiring men? 
MEEKCOMS: No, it did not come — he hired people — when they applied for the job if they seemed right he hired them. We did not have letters in the mail, would you hire a black man? That didn’t come up. He didn’t have a place for it. But he would have. If the man had been available and the man had been qualified for the job, he would have taken him. There were absolutely no qualms about him hiring at all. 

Tanzer: How do you feel the minorities play a role in life in the Pacific Northwest? 
MEEKCOMS: I think that we don’t have quite that problem here that they have in other parts of the country. And I think they can get a job if they qualify for it. The labor force on the farms, I think that has been where the biggest problem has been. Underpaid, which isn’t fair. They have been hungry for the job, and they have been taking the wages, but there is still a long way to go. 

Tanzer: Do you feel an ethnic quality about this part of the country? 
MEEKCOMS: No, not really. I think the Northwest probably is one of the most well-rounded areas, rather than the South. 

Tanzer: And how would you contrast it with the East? 
MEEKCOMS: Of course, I don’t know the East very well. I spent a few days. What I know about it, there are more problems in the East because there is more of everything in the East. While here, we have not that much of an integrated — we don’t have the problems they have in the East. They have so many minority groups. We really don’t have that much of it here. Now if you interviewed a black man here, in this part of the country here, maybe he would feel different about it. But I think that we don’t have the problems here in the Pacific Northwest that they have in the East or the South. 

Tanzer: Chella, how have your wartime experiences affected you as a person? 
MEEKCOMS: Well, thank God I’ve never lost my sense of humor. I even remember periods of having my sense of humor still together with me among all the tragic experiences we had in camp. I even remember putting on a show at one time. 

Tanzer: What kind of a show? 
MEEKCOMS: We were at one time in one camp where we worked in the factories. It was a Saturday night, and we were all together in one barrack, a mixture of a lot of Dutch girls and a mixture of some Hungarians, Jewish kids. Of course, among the Jewish everybody is an artist, everybody wants to put on a show, and I was the master of ceremonies. We put on a little show. And wouldn’t you know, I looked in the back and the aufseherin was sitting in the back laughing her head off. She’d slipped in and I never noticed her coming in. And rather than giving us a punishment for laughing and joking and telling stories and putting on mimicry, a little mime group, and doing a little tap dance and all crazy things — we were doing crazy things. 

I remember doing an impersonation of somebody and making jokes appropriate to the part we were playing in the camp, jokes of what was topical at that time, for us. In other words, laugh at ourselves, which was important. With all the agony and the pain to be able to laugh at yourself, which we never lost. We would go without it for days and weeks, but every so often, every once in a while somebody would say something funny and we would break up. And we did put on a little show. She was laughing her head off I remember, and I couldn’t believe it. One day she would hit you black and blue, and there she was sitting laughing with us. 

And then, I remember that we would sit in the factory and work very hard. We would have the night shift. It was quiet; it wasn’t as busy as the daytime shift. There was one girl who had a beautiful voice. She would sing all these English songs, and they loved listening to the singing, the Germans who were in charge of us. When she stopped singing they said, “More, more!” and they applauded. So that was always with us. We never really gave up on the humor and the opportunity to laugh at ourselves, to make jokes out of a tragic situation. For the whole being of survival, I think, so that we would survive, to be able to laugh at ourselves. I never lost my sense of humor, and I look at my children — they have a terrific sense of humor. I’ve not impaired them in any way. 

Tanzer: So you have gone beyond the fear and anxiety that you had at the end of your camp experience. 
MEEKCOMS: Yes, definitely, and I attribute that a lot to my husband who is a very level-headed man. A level-headed young man when I met him, now a level-headed old man. He brought me out of it. I would get in deep depressions at times and deep nightmares, and he was there to bring me out of it. If I had not had him, I suppose I would have survived and come out of it just the same because I had already noted after I was out for a while that I was able to joke and tell stories and be myself. I came back. But he in raising our children had a great sense of humor himself, which became part of our children. With all my tears and my depressions at times and my anxiety, I got over it, and I did not let it impair my children at all. 

Tanzer: Do you feel more or less Jewish today than you did before the war? 
MEEKCOMS: I feel more Jewish today than I did when the war broke out. I was very influenced by my years in the Orthodox orphanage. The one sad thing, going by that orphanage with my sister one day, and these beautiful people who had taught us so much about Jewish religion and love, and looking at each other, my sister and I, to think that we were the only survivors of that whole orphanage. One night the wagons had stopped by the orphanage and had taken every one of them out, including the director and his wife, who were hired to take care of all the children. The ladies in charge and the men. Every one of them. They ranged in age from five to 18. A lot of them were German refugee children who had been in flight from Germany and had run away. Their parents had put them on a train in the middle of the night to go to Holland. They had gone through a couple of years of the war and perished during the war. Flora and I looked at each other and said, “We are the only survivors of that home.” 

All those children we loved, those kids and the people in it. We loved them so much. We were terribly hurt and upset about it. I went back after the war. Many years after the war, when I went to Holland several years ago, I walked by the street and looked at that place. The pain is still there when I think about it. We are the only survivors of that whole orphanage. I said to Flora, “Surely we are not better than them. We were not at all better than them. They were better than us. They were good religious Jews. Orthodox Jews. They lived their Judaism more than we did. We were not good Jews.” Where was God? I asked myself that question. 

Tanzer: When? 
MEEKCOMS: My children ask me that even today, about believing in God. They have their doubts. They’re Jews, but they have their doubts. It is very hard for them to accept that, and they really ask me many times, “How can you go to temple and pray to God? With what happened to you?” And I tell them again, “We have to believe in something. We have to have a feeling. I believe that there is something up there, and I believe that what happened was the doing of a nation, of a people, people all over the world who knew about it and didn’t do anything about it.” 

Tanzer: Do you feel that the general American public is interested in the Holocaust, or in your own experiences? 
MEEKCOMS: The people I had personal contact with who would ask me questions, and would say to me, “How can you be Jewish and Dutch?” That first of all is one thing that they couldn’t understand. It is amazing how many people don’t understand that, where you are half Jewish and half Dutch. They just can’t put the two together. Once I told them my story, they were very moved by it. Everyone I touched and told my story to said that they had learned something about it. They were very touched by it. If they’re interested as a nation now, all these years after the war, young people, or to let it be part of their curriculum — I think it should be taught in the schools that there was the war in Europe and what happened, that a nation of people [inaudible] civilization only a few years ago. And then they look at the atrocities that went on in Vietnam and I think they do understand. Maybe they do understand that there is such a thing as viciousness, that people can kill and do these things. 

Tanzer: How did you feel about Vietnam? 
MEEKCOMS: Vietnam was in full swing when my children were at the age of college, Kent State. They were right involved in it. I had one son who was very actively involved. He was just sick about the Vietnam War and he was marching, peace march. He came to give a talk to Beaverton High School and at Portland State. His life was in danger. I mean, the people in the school who were vigilantes where he went to school in Eugene. “Straighten out the [inaudible], you bunch of commies.” That type of thing. 

Somebody once threatened him with his life. I was very worried about him, and I said that nothing had to be done in a violent way, that I was with him. I understood the problem. I was very much aware of it and I was on his side, but I feared for his life, and I thought that he should become involved, but up to a point, because I was really worried about him. He got so emotionally upset by what went on in the school. He talked so much about the government and the Hitler government and that type of thing. I was really concerned about him. 

Tanzer: Do you think he related what was going on in Vietnam with your experiences in Europe? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes, he was definitely afraid. They were afraid, that whole age group was worried and very concerned. It was uppermost in their minds what went on that time in Vietnam. They were very much aware of it, and they were worried about the action of our government in it. They said there were atrocities that went on there, and they were concerned about everything. He was very much involved in it. After a while he came home. He was so upset. He dropped out of school the next year. His number was up to go into the Army, and he volunteered for the Navy, which he really — he was working, and he volunteered for the Navy. 

He went into the Navy because he figured he could stick it out for a year maybe, for a couple of years Next thing they flew him to Thailand. He was on a ship in the China Seas within six weeks. 

Tanzer: For how long? 
MEEKCOMS: He was six months off the coast of Vietnam on a ship. He was active for about a year, there in Thailand, stationed there. Philippines.

Tanzer: Chella, you told me that your son had enlisted in the Navy and then went to serve off the coast of Vietnam? 
MEEKCOMS: Yes.

Tanzer: After your experiences how did you feel about your son being in the service? 
MEEKCOMS:  I didn’t feel that badly about it. I was worried about the time when he was in college. I felt that it was a good thing to be involved and that he could see the issues, but there was a whole group of them growing very radical, and I was very afraid that he was going to get involved with a radical group. I was terribly worried about that. And then he said to me he’d joined the Navy, that he had to have time to think it over. His number was up, and he was going to be conscripted into the Army. That was the last thing he wanted to do. And he had to get out of school. He was very confused. He joined the Navy, and I thought it wasn’t so bad, it would teach him something. I really wasn’t that set against it. I wasn’t too happy when I heard he was sent to the China Seas right off the coast of Vietnam. I was very concerned. It was a hectic six months on the ocean there, but then he was stationed in San Diego, and he did his time and he was out in two years. He learned something from that. The Navy wasn’t bad for him. He learned a lot from it.

Tanzer: What did he learn? 
MEEKCOMS: You would have to ask him that. But came out of the Navy quite a level-headed young man. He was very level headed. I found a good influence it had been for him. It put things in perspective, that the government wasn’t all bad, that it wasn’t all a Hitler society. I thought that he was going too radical at one time. He found that there was a midway in between, that you could speak your mind and that things were brought up out into the open. I had pointed this out to him, that things can be brought out into the open. I said, “See what has happened to the government right now?” Watergate was happening at that time, and things were being brought into the open. He realized that, and he said he learned a lot being in the Navy. He became a real man in those few years. He really became his own man.

Tanzer: Do you think, Chella, that your experiences gave him this obsession about a Hitler-type of government? 
MEEKCOMS: Possibly. It definitely had an effect on him. As he saw these things happening like the Kent State killing, he said this was people doing it to their own people. It frightened him to death. He was very upset about it, and I think it might have had an effect on my way of thinking at the time, what had happened to me. On the other hand, there were thousands of youths who felt that way who had not any mothers who had gone through the thing that I had gone through. He was being very influenced by his peer group. I think that had a great deal to do with it.

Tanzer: Chella, we’ve talked now for a number of hours about your experiences and about your life in the United States. How can you see what you have told me as being used? 
MEEKCOMS: First of all, I’m not the first one to tell you about the stories of the camp. Many books have been written about it. For me to tell my story, to come to a solution of a question, I had to go through the whole bit, the whole story to come to it. I have to go and put it in perspective in my mind. 

I have to go one step before I take the next step. I think that it is of value to people, and I said that before when I’ve talked to the younger kids about this, that they know about these atrocities that went on in a civilized nation, in a civilized world, with civilized people knowing about it. So that they as young people have a duty to not sit back and be bystanders, but be active in government and realize what goes on, because it happened in a civilized country, to intellectuals. People were involved in doing away with six million people. 

Then the effect on my Judaism is that — some of them never came back to it, some became very devout, but I came back to be outspoken as a Jew. Everybody knows it, whoever I touch, that I am a Jew and a survivor. And I have many non-Jewish friends who know that. Everybody who comes to the house, if they don’t know it will know it very shortly. Like my sons always say, my mother says if she has something on her mind she speaks it out. I tell it as I see it.

Tanzer: Where did you learn this outspoken quality? 
MEEKCOMS: I really don’t know. My father, he used to say to me, “If you stand in front of the mirror and you look into the mirror, do you like what you see? Ask yourself that question. You have to live with that. Do you like what you see? Do you give of yourself what you really are?” I got a lot from what I am today from my father. He taught me a lot. Of the time we spent together, all those weeks and months in hiding. The nights were long and the days were long. We did an awful lot talking. And I got a lot, a lot I learned from him.

Tanzer: Tell me, Chella, when you stand in front of the mirror do you like what you see? 
MEEKCOMS: Most of the time I do.