Willem Vleeschhouwer, born in Amsterdam in 1886, was a window dresser and a salesman in shop-window articles. On 20 July 1917 he married Martha Kaufmann, born in Langenschwalbach in Germany in 1889, in Wiesbaden. They lived in Amsterdam and for about ten years in Stuttgart. From December 1939 they lived at Van Zeggelenplein 56 in Haarlem.
In 1942 they were forced to move to Asterdorp in the north of Amsterdam, a neighbourhood where Jews were made to live together. Willem died of a tumour in an Amsterdam hospital on 17 November 1942, aged 56. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery in Diemen. Martha was taken to the Vught camp in February 1943 and to Westerbork on 24 May. The next day she was deported to Sobibor, where she was murdered on 28 May 1943. She was 53. Van Zeggelenplein 56 was the last address where they lived in freedom; that is why the stones for both of them lie here.
