Bergstraat 8

On Wednesday, November 3, 2021, 2 Stolpersteine were placed for the first time in the municipality of Stein. That happened in Urmond, right in front of the house at Bergstraat 8 where father Nathan and daughter Bertha Claessen lived until 1943. They did not survive their deportation to concentration camps. Heaven is crying. The Pavane by the French composer Gabriel Fauré, performed by trumpeter Jan Toom Fernhout, makes the atmosphere even more moody than it already is. The reason for the meeting in the Bergstraat in Urmond is therefore not a pleasant one. Right in front of the house at number 8, two Stolpersteine are being laid in the sidewalk this afternoon in the pouring rain. They must ensure that the deportation of the former residents Nathan and Bertha Claessen, father and daughter, is never forgotten. Every year Bertha's name is heard during the apple of death, part of the official commemoration around the bust of chaplain Berix in Meers. She was born on September 24, 1896 as the daughter of cattle dealer Nathan Claessen and Emma Spier. Bertha is one of 46 people from the municipality of Stein who died during World War II. She was arrested at home on 9 April 1943 at the age of 46 and transported to Sobibór extermination camp in Poland just under two months later. She was gassed there not much later.

Historian Harry Strijkers, who researched the deportation of father and daughter Claessen at the request of chairman Han Frenken of the Ultraloop Foundation and Groenewald secondary school, will read a poem during the ceremony on Wednesday afternoon that accurately describes the horrors in Sobibór.

A train full of Jews runs through my head. I reverse the past like a bill of exchange and I count the cattle wagons with the bolts: fifty wagons, fifty people in each wagon. One lies clamped between limbs, one is carrier or carried, prisoners of each other. In the darkness of the wagon. In the dark without water. Without air, without hope.

Less is known about father Nathan. He is said to be in a psychiatric institution when he is also transferred to Camp Vught in 1943. The poor treatment there and the already fragile health prove fatal to him.

They are therefore the first Stolpersteine in the municipality to be laid in the Bergstraat. After the Claessen family, multiple football international and Fortuna star Wilbert Suvrijn, among others, camped in the building. Today a pilot lives there. In the Netherlands there are now around 7000 'stumbling stones', devised by the German artist Gunter Demnig, who placed memorial stones on the sidewalk in front of the former homes of people who were expelled, deported or murdered by the Nazis.

Mayor Marion Leurs of the municipality of Stein says the following memorable words during the stolperstein laying: “It remains a guess as to what exactly happened here. But we must never forget it. Even in today's world, people are diametrically opposed to each other. Let's learn from past events.”

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