Olmstraat 4
Almelo
Wijbe Hankel's life was long hidden in a small metal box in an attic in Borne. On Sunday, the Almelo resistance hero Hankel got his own Stolperstein. To reflect on his life for a moment.
The family knew that Wijbe Hankel had been in the resistance. It was also well known that he was arrested in 1941 and finally came to his end in Dachau in 1944, in his early fifties. But not much more. “During and after the war there was little or no talk about it. We knew that they had hidden Jews, but we know little about what else happened to him. ”
Incidentally, the Jews were not under the floor on the Olmstraat, but one street further, in the Lindestraat 38. There lived Wiebe Edelijn, the maternal grandson. “I knew there was a hatch in the floor, but as children we never paid attention to that. It was never talked about either. "
Wiebe Hankel, who lives in Giethoorn, knows that the Hankel family originally comes from Germany. “Sometime around 1850 they came to Zuidwolde to work in the peat areas. It was crisis. When it also decreased there, my grandfather and grandmother moved to Almelo in 1928. There was still work in the textiles there. They have lived there at 4 Olmstraat all this time. ”The customer review has been automatically translated from Dutch.
Now the well-known box comes into the picture. It was in the attic of Frans Edelijn in Borne, Wiebe's brother. The mother of the Bornse retired alderman is van Hankel. Wijbe Hankel was her father.
Edelijn, who was over seventy, was not there on Sunday in Almelo: “The whole family was heavily involved in the resistance. They had more than thirty Jews under the floor. However, the line of war only became clear when we opened that cash box that we had been keeping for many years. It turned out to be a pile of letters that Wijbe had written after he was arrested during the war because he was a communist. This led to great tensions in the family, because they were afraid that the Jewish people in hiding would be rattled off. ” In the end, that did not happen.
The letters do show how Wijbe Hankel made it to its end. Frans Edelijn: “My grandfather was arrested in June 1941 as a political prisoner. First to a prison camp in Schoorl, then to Camp Amersfoort. There was a reign of terror there ”.
He was there for about 2.5 months. Another letter will arrive on December 7th. “In his last letter from Camp Amersfoort, he wished his family happy holidays. The next letter came from Neuengamme, a labor camp near Hamburg, where many people have also died. ”
According to Edelijn it was the most horrible period. He worked there in a brick factory. The very last letter arrives on December 19, 1942. He was taken to Dachau where he died on August 31, 1944. Edelijn: „I still have the Sterbensurkunde, the certificate of death. It was a horrible message to my family. My grandmother never got over the blow. It was a big drama. She passed away in 1948. Of sadness."
Source: https://www.tubantia.nl/almelo/almelose-verzetsheld-wijbe-postuum-geeerd-ik-wist-dat-er-een- Luik-in-de-vloer-zat~a1f831bf/
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