Diezestraat 12

The speech at the unveiling:
Abraham de Vries was born in 1860 as the fifth in a family of 7 children. At his examination for military service he was a butcher's assistant, and he was 1.63 tall. He was already 30 years old when he married Sara Kalf in Kampen, where she was born and raised. Abraham had made a major career switch in the meantime because he was a commission agent in diamonds. (That is someone who buys or sells as a middleman.)
Abraham and Sara lived in Amsterdam, in the Kerkstraat, on the Nieuwe Keizersgracht, at various addresses in the Pijp and came to live via the Talmastraat in the Amsterdamse School neighborhood in the Zuid Pijp in 1935 at Diezestraat 12-1. The street had been inhabited since 1929. Abraham came to live here with Sara and their two daughters, Leentje or Lena who was born in 1898 and was a 'frock cutter' by profession and Julie from 1907 who was a craftswoman in the confectionery. Both women had first worked as office clerks, perhaps the later professions were born out of necessity.

Their son Nathan, who was called Nico, had already left home and married. Little Abraham was born in 1925, the only grandchild of Abraham and Sarah. Unfortunately, he lived with his parents in Eindhoven, so they may not have seen him much.
Sara died in early 1940, then 70 years old. She was buried at Muiderberg. So on the Jewish cemetery, but the family does not seem to have been very religious.

Abraham and his daughters have not gone into hiding. They were arrested one by one and deported.

Julie, the youngest, was first called up or picked up in February 1943. After a month in Camp Vught she ended up in Westerbork and a week later she was sent on to Sobibor where she was immediately killed.
Lena went through the same route two months later: one month in Vught, but then with the so-called Kindertransport of 6 June 1943 from Vught past Westerbork directly to Sobibor.

And the father, Abraham, who must have spent his 83rd birthday on June 30, 1943 alone in this house, was imprisoned in Westerbork on August 14, 1943 and sent on to Auschwitz ten days later.

Nico, Sophie and their son Abraham did go into hiding. The 17-year-old Abraham was the first to be arrested, in 1943, his parents half a year later in 1944. The entire family of Abraham and Sara was wiped out.

Fortunately, there were a few children of his brother Samuel de Vries who survived the war, so that today David de Vries, a grandson of Samuel and therefore a second cousin of Abraham, can be with us today.

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