Dorpsstraat 6

She has stayed with her 5-year-old son Daniël since 11 June 1944 in Hulshorst with the Gerretsen family on Brandsweg (nowadays under the forest). Annie was a widow. Her non-Jewish man, Daniel Johannes Otten was a general practitioner in Dalfsen and died in an accident on a railway crossing at Zwollerkerspel. Son Daniel was not born then. After the death, Annie went to live with her parents in Rotterdam. Her father would also perish in Auschwitz.

After the arrest, Annie came to Camp Westerbork and went to Auschwitz with the last transport on 3 September 1944. From there she came to Bergen-Belsen. The death is officially in Auschwitz on January 21, 1945, but it is more likely at the end of February in Bergen-Belsen.

Son Daniel Otten (Violinist by profession) wrote a gripping book in 2012 about his mother: "Annie, a Jewish widow and her son in the grip of occupation and persecution." He will be present on July 18 when laying the stumbling stone.

Lecture by Daniel Otten about his mother on 18-07-2022:

In the year 2005 I saw a three -line text of Simon Peereboom on the wall of the Dutch Pavilion in Auschwitz, the only survivor of his family. The text reads:

"We had radio, you read something in newspapers, but oh Germany.
Such things do not happen here in the Netherlands. And even when the war broke out in 1940, we still thought it would go wild. "

But it was very different.

In 2006 on behalf of the Dutch government in Bergen-Belsen, where my mother Annie Otten-Wolff was killed, a nice plaque with the following text was placed by the then State Secretary Clémence Ross-Van Dorp:
"As a reminder of all Jewish and non-Jewish Dutch people whose axis here was blown up between January 1944 and April 1945, and to those who subsequently found a resting place in one of the burial mounds."

Yes, a resting place in the burial mounds, I think that is a great euphemism. The thousands of unnamed corpses were thrown into large pits at the liberation of the camp, often with the help of bulldozers, after which the camp was burned down.
The first time that Annie Otten-Wolff was again officially given a name was on 29 May 1952 in a declaration of death by the Ministry of Justice stating:
"On January 21, 1945, Annie Emilie Wolff" died in the Oswiecim (Auschwitz), most recently married to Otten, Daniël Johannes.
Later I found at the Red Cross that this was not correct, because with a transport of large groups of women, Annie was transported from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen at the end of October 1944, and that turned out to be her end station.
In 2005 we also found Annie’s Name on the names wall in the Dutch Pavilion in Auschwitz, the final station from Westerbork where the deportees from the train were hunted by screaming guards with dogs. In the meantime her name is on the impressive names monument in Amsterdam, and on a panel of the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Florida where we have her name engraved.
And then there is now this beautiful stumbling stone on the spot where Annie was arrested on July 18, 1944. Many thanks to the employees of the municipality of Nunspeet and others, who have achieved this with so much dedication and feeling. Tribute, I think it's beautiful.

De Steen was made by Alexander Stukenberg in his studio in the garden of the Goethe Institute in Amsterdam. Visual artist Gunter Demnig, of whom the stumbling stone phenomenon originated, transferred the work for the Benelux to Alexander Stukenberg in 2019. That is also very symbolic, Demnig and Stukenberg and the Goethe Institute. I was able to watch how Alexander did it, per letter with a hard steel grind and then one blow with the hammer on it. An empty plate brass turned into a dramatic historiography into telegram style, as we now see in the sidewalk.
In Dagblad Het Parool, Alexander (I quote) told: "Feelings of guilt about what the victims were affected still exists among Germans, also with me. I have no sense of perpetrator, but I am in the group of the perpetrators. While making the stones I put my feelings away, because it makes me too bad. " When Annie and I left the nerve -racking Rotterdam on 11 June 1944 to travel to Hulshorst, Annie thought he could wait for the end of the war in relative peace with Henk and Ans Gerretsen there, who had invited us to stay with them; They were good acquaintances before the war.
Annie had forged papers and trusted on it, we had five fairly quiet-summer weeks with the Gerretsen family on Brandsweg.
The family had several children and children often came to play in the yard, for example there was a daughter of the Verrijn Stuart family, whose father was in the resistance, who sometimes came by, and from the Felplaan family, who also on one Stone throw away, the mother sometimes came to visit her son Boudewijn whom she called Boei, a two -year -old boy. This Boudewijn became a very good friend of ours years later, and the girl Verrijn Stuart turned out to be a colleague that I had already met in my study time at the conservatory, still without knowing anything about the persecution history. Long -term friendship has also been created with her.

But everything went very differently.
The quiet weeks suddenly came to an end on July 18, 1944 when the local watchmaster F.J. Jansen came to check everyone in the Gerretsen house very early in the morning.
This watchmaster was affiliated with both the SS and the NSB and it was precisely in 1944 that he was able to go relatively unhindered to Jewish hunting, because in Nunspeet/Ermelo an NSB mayor were appointed in February of that year, a certain Marius Gerhard de Kruijff. De Kruijff was a mayor in Franeker, where he joined the NSB on 10 May 1941. Among the population of Franeker, a verse of having disapproval quickly circulated on this:
"O dirty NSB-er, o nauseous piece of cattle, treacherous submarine, with your reverb Houzee." De Kruijff was suspended in January 1945.

In the Gerretsen house, Jansen Annies put a identity card in his pocket, said nothing else and left again.
Where we are now, hairdresser Van Koot was located at the time and in the course of the morning Annie cycled unsuspectingly here to have something done about her hairstyle, but everything went differently. Jansen had figured out that Annie's papers had been forged, he entered the barber shop and arrested Annie on the spot, after which he took her to be locked up in the Marechaussee barracks, where the NSB-er and anti-Semite Karst Doeven was in charge. Later in the day I was picked up at Gerretsen by Doeven and Jansen and the same evening they brought us to the police station Woudoord in Velp, where we were immediately locked up. When we ended up at the SD the next day, Annies Lot was sealed.

On August 20, 1945, the commander of the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee Region Arnhem wrote a letter to the director of Police in Nijmegen:
"I have the honor to tell you that the watchmaster F.J. Jansen was a member of the NSB and the SS. He was known as a traitor, who thought it was an honor to add colleagues and citizens to the SD and NSB superiors.
His wife, under the guise of a good Fatherlander, heard people and transferred the information obtained to her husband. "
On October 6, 1945, a resident of Brandsweg 54 wrote a map at the head of the P.O.D. On the Molijnlaan in Nunspeet:
"As a result of the call in the magazines, I will experience you politely
That also a Jewish woman with a boy of +/- 5 years removed from the Gerretsen family, Brandsweg in Hulshorst. "
The aforementioned daughter Verrijn Stuart, now Mrs. Van Helden-Verrijn Stuart, recently wrote to me the following:
"As children from the neighborhood, my brother and I sometimes played at the Gerretsen family. There were 2 mothers, a few girls and a boy with whom I made sand and twigs of structures. On the next time the boy and mother were no longer there. After that I never wanted to go over again. "

De Wachtmeester F.J. Jansen was found dead at Terlet in February 1945, riddled with bullets, and Karst Doeven The anti -Semite has been sentenced to 15 years in prison.

I said, thank you.

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