BOISSEVAIN | Frans Polak Family

Engelein de Booij and Frans Polak,
before the Nazi invasion, 1940.

The following powerful letter is posted here by permission of the writer, Maaike Knottenbelt, in Adelaide, Australia:

Hello John,

...from a person you do not know, but one who is overwhelmed by reading your chapter about Hilda Boissevain de Booij and her daughter Engelien, and Engelien's husband Frans Polak, in your 2015 post.

Since I'm not so digitally literate, I didn't think I would succeed in leaving the following comment on your blog, so I am writing direct and hope this reaches you.  

[This is the post that Maaike refers to: https://nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-first-year-of-dutch-occupation.html. There is another one that fills in more details, here: http://warriors-families.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dutch-resistance-goldberg-family.html - JTM]

I have not previously read any of your writing although I probably should have. I am a niece of that young Jewish man Frans Polak, whom Engelien your cousin married in 1940. I have a copy of a photo of them on their wedding day (perhaps you have photos of that occasion too). 

I also have in front of me a letter from Engelien written on 24 July 1999, after Frans had died. It confirms what you already know from a Boissevain source, that although they divorced after the war was over, they remained on good terms with each other until his death. I did not know the reason for their divorce but what Engelien said to you, that the debt he owed to her for his survival [the Nazis seem to have usually spared the lives of Jews married to gentiles in Holland] was too great to bear, seems so plausible to me. 

My mother Meta Polak was Frans’ younger sister. My mother went out to the Dutch East Indies in December 1939. She married my father, Robert Knottenbelt, the following year, in Batavia, 12 November 1940. It is therefore unlikely she was at Frans and Engelien's wedding in 1940 in Holland.

My parents both became Japanese prisoners of war – my father on the Thai-Burma Railway together with one of his older brothers; my mother in Sumatra together with the wife and three young children of one of my father’s cousins.  Elly, the eldest sibling of Frans and Meta was in different camps in Java, together with her two-year-old son.  Her husband Bert van Helbergen was also on the Thai-Burma Railway, but in different camps from my father and his brother (who were not always together in the same camps either).  My maternal grandmother’s brother Piet van der Goot, his wife and child died in camps on Java.  All other family members survived the Japanese camps.

My maternal grandfather James Joseph Polak left Holland with my grandmother Tetta van der Goot for North Carolina in early 1940 before the Nazi invasion of Holland; he worked for the Enka Corporation.  His brother Ernest Polak was a District Court Judge and second wife Renee Polak-Hirsch did not.  Stolpersteine [10x10 cm brass markers for victims of the Holocaust, at their last location seen alive] were laid for them in Rotterdam on 7 April 2010.

There are family war-time letters, including two postcards from Renée to Frans and Engelien written under very straitened circumstances.  

I was so moved to read the letter written by Engelien’s mother to your grandmother in Washington DC, which Engelien translated for you. Do you have more war-time letters from Engelien’s mother or Engelien? Have you finished your book [about the Boissevains in WW2]?  

I grew up on a diet of your mother’s unforgettable books: The Cottage at Bantry Bay, Francie on the Run, Pegeen, The Mitchells (oh Angela and the angel! ), Andries, Kersti and St Nicholas — I know there is another one there whose title currently escapes me. [A list is here: http://www.lib.usm.edu/legacy/degrum/public_html/html/research/findaids/vanstock.htm.]

With a great deal of help I am currently in the processes of collecting, transcribing and translating the family WW2 correspondence, and collecting also those primary source documents that support information about the writers. Unlike you I am not trying to compile a wider family history; just focussing on the wartime correspondents, their correspondence, and any subsequent correspondence that refers directly back to that time. This will always remain an incomplete collection: in the extant correspondence there are references to letters that do not appear to have survived. Perhaps also, more may yet emerge. [The Amsterdam Archief has a lot of Boissevain letters, well indexed.]

My father, mother, older brother and myself migrated to New Zealand in 1951, where the sibling count increased to six. I have lived in Adelaide, South Australia since 1979 with occasional excursions overseas.  I hope very much to hear from you —

Most sincerely,

Maaike Knottenbelt 

Second letter from Adelaide, Australia: 

I include below just briefly two quotations from my English translation of a letter dated 8 October 1945 written by my maternal grandmother Tetta (with a postscript by James) to their son Frans.  They lived in Asheville, NC, and Frans was in London at the time.  It was a momentous day, with the receipt of two family letters: the first letter from Elly in 3 1/2 years confirming that she and young Kees were still alive; the other from my father in Bangkok, confirming the same. No news yet from Meta.

“Aunt Olga writes that they will move soon to Montreal, where her son-in-law Marlin has become liaison-officer with the Inter[national] Civil Aviation Ass[ociation].”

and from the brief postscript written by my grandfather:

We also received recently a short letter from Willem van Marle, at Camp Davis.  He cannot get any leave, so I fear we shall not see him.”