Dutch family gave shelter
Initially the owners thought he might be avoiding the German military draft. "After some time, it was clear that my father was Jewish but he was allowed to stay," Leder said.
FOR Professor Gilah Leder of Melbourne, a child survivor, a visit to the Netherlands in May to honour a family who sheltered her father from the Nazis was an important act of remembrance.
In Zeist, the retired academic and her husband Jack attended a dedication of two plaques – honouring Peter Anne Schat and Johanna Schat-Truschel, outside the house in which they had secured her father Aaron van der Hoek.
On May 5, Netherlands Liberation Day, Leder dedicated the plaque commemorating her father, while the couple’s daughter, Dony Schat-Wijland, dedicated the plaque for her parents. Municipal officials and Dick van der Kamp, son of a Dutch resistance fighter, attended the ceremony for van der Hoek. “It was a real link of generations,” reflected Leder.
From late 1943 until liberation, the family, who ran a bakery, sheltered van der Hoek and gave him work.
Initially the owners thought he might be avoiding the German military draft. “After some time, it was clear that my father was Jewish but he was allowed to stay,” Leder said.
Although he had false papers and could pass for a non-Jew, his bread deliveries were made at some risk.
During one of his deliveries, a woman told van der Hoek she knew he was Jewish, remembering him as a kosher baker in Hilversum. She said she could easily mention him to her husband, a senior member of the Dutch National Socialists, but assured him she would not, as she did not believe in what her husband was doing.
The plaque states in Dutch, “Aaron van der Hoek, born July 3, 1916, died December 30, 2000, was sheltered in this household. He survived the Holocaust.”
The plaque for the Schat family states, “Peter Anne Schat, born January 6, 1903, died March 21, 1991, and Johanna Schat-Truschel, born August 8, 1909, died January 18, 1986, in this household gave shelter to Aaron van der Hoek.”
In 1943, Leder, aged 16 months, was hidden separately, as was her mother, and was reunited with her father after the war, before the family migrated to Australia in the early 1950s.
Some 104,000 Dutch Jews, 75 per cent of the Jewish population, perished in the Holocaust.
Leder, who volunteers for Courage to Care, has addressed audiences as far afield as South Korea, where she shared her Shoah experiences with US military personnel during a Yom Hashoah commemoration in 2018, when the US Army was looking for an Australian survivor to make an address.
She told The AJN her wartime foster family had been “the most wonderful people and I’m still in contact with them”.
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