Survivor to speak in home city
Eddy Boas has been back to The Hague since, but he has never told his story to an audience there.
Child Holocaust survivor Eddy Boas will make an emotional trip back to The Hague later this month to tell his story of survival.
Boas was born in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1940 and was just three months old when the Nazis invaded. At the age of three, he and his family – his mother Sara, father Philip, older brother Samuel – were rounded up and deported to Westerbork concentration camp. From there they were sent to Bergen-Belsen, but they miraculously survived as a family unit before migrating to Australia.
Boas has been back to The Hague since, but he has never told his story to an audience there.
“An invitation came from Rabbi Shmuel Katzman, the Chief Rabbi of The Hague,” Boas told The AJN. “He originally invited me back in 2020, I was all booked to go, but because of COVID I had to cancel. The rabbi was still keen to have me speak and reinvited me to present on September 20 at the Jewish community centre.”
Boas has been critical of how the Dutch betrayed their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. In his book, he has written about how more Jews per capita were murdered in Holland than from any other western European country. Out of 107,000 Dutch Jews deported to concentration camps, only 5000 survived.
“I talk about the Dutch quite a bit – how they lacked support for the Jews,” Boas said.
“I’ve had lots of questions here about the Dutch because everyone always the thought the Dutch were very good to the Jews in Holland. I say in my book that unfortunately the impression people get by reading Anne Frank’s diary is that the Dutch were good to the Jews. She didn’t mean to express that, it’s the way people read it.”
Boas said he will speak to the audience in Dutch, though he admits he hasn’t had a conversation in Dutch since his mother passed away in 2001.
But before Boas travels to Holland, he will also be speaking in London at the Wiener Holocaust Library, organised by both the library and the Holocaust Educational Trust.
There is a deeply emotional connection for him to Britain too.
“We were saved by a British soldier when we were trying to make our way back to Holland,” Boas said.
“My brother was out begging for food in Leipzig when he encountered this soldier and brought him to us. I was suffering from typhus and he saved my life by giving me medicine.”
The same soldier then arranged for the Boas family to return to Holland by train, where they arrived 51 days after leaving Bergen-Belsen.
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