Rapenburg 38

The Netherlands is at war, Wim participates in the resistance. We know little about his activities because Bouby has indicated from the start that he does not want to know anything, for fear that they would be arrested together and the children would be left alone. What we do know is that Wim taught people how to breathe as if they had asthma, so that they could escape the 'Arbeidseinsatz'.

Wim has important contacts within the resistance, including a Leiden police commissioner. If there is a danger of arrest, Wim is warned, he takes off and can watch the enemy ring the doorbell at Apotheker Kok, also a member of the resistance, here on the corner of the Rapenburg.

Until May 15, 1944. Wim has been betrayed and cannot be warned because the police commissioner is the only one who knows about his imminent arrest. A warning could point in his direction. The occupier is at the door, Wim opens the door himself and is arrested.

He is imprisoned in the 'Orange Hotel' in Scheveningen. He is then taken to Camp Vught. After a stay there he goes to Camp Neuengamme, near Hamburg.

The hunger winter is just around the corner, but Leiden's small and medium-sized businesses are not abandoning the young family and are helping where they can. While Bouby spends the hunger winter with the two little ones and regularly goes on hunger trips, on a bicycle with wooden tires with her good friend Sjoeke Schaper, we now know that Wim was in a concentration camp. Tradition tells us that he wore a beard, had become somewhat religious and that he continued his work as a doctor as best he could. When someone asked what he needed, the answer was, “It's like going to war with a gun out of ammunition. I can't be a doctor like that." It must have been desperate.

The war is coming to an end, the Nazis are clearing the concentration camps and putting the prisoners on death marches. Wim ends up in northern Germany, where he and hundreds of other prisoners are put on the ship Cap Arcona. This ship sails under the German flag and - tragically enough - was bombed by the Allies on May 3, 1945. Wim dies together with hundreds of prisoners, his body is buried in a 'sammelgrab' in a cemetery in Lübeck.

זוכרים כאן

האם אבן כאן פגומה או חסרה? ספרו לנו בדוא"ל