Righteous Gentile award

Michelle Tedford

Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer

 

Tipp City man, family honored for rescuing Jews during Holocaust

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before he received the Righteous Gentile medal from the state of Israel, Marinus Bosma was unsure if he could handle the emotions behind the award.

As a teenager, he had endured German occupation of his hometown of Arnhem in the Netherlands. Police targeted his family for aiding Jews.

He and his family were separated for almost two years, hiding in attics, and when reunited, survived the great freeze of 1945 by living in a duck shed.

But the part of the story that makes 79-year-old Bosma most emotional is his mother.

In his home near Tipp City — where he immigrated with wife Nelly in 1956 — Bosma pointed toward the mantel at the elegant black-and-white portrait of a young Helena Bosma-van der Pol.

She is the reason why the family stayed strong, he said. She was the one who insisted the family could not take the easy path, could not look away.

“People kept coming to the door and we knew what a dire situation it was, that there was a death threat out,” Bosma said.

Helena was responsible for placing more than 30 Jews seeking safety, and for housing and feeding first a family of four and then another group of eight for more than a year before being caught.

She received little recognition for her sacrifice during her lifetime.

The Righteous Gentile award, received by Bosma on June 29 in front of hundreds at the Dayton Art Institute’s Gothic Cloister, was also for his father, Albert and sister, Berty. But most especially, it was for his mother.

And as he accepted the medal, he cried.

Presented by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial organization, the award honors those who saved the Jews during World War II.

The local ceremony was sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council, coinciding with the opening of the Max May Memorial Holocaust Student Art exhibit at the Dayton Art Institute.

Bosma said that, while he was only a child, he understood the gravity of their predicament.

“You had to be handy, you had to be inventive or you wouldn’t make it,” he said.

The Bosmas shared the family’s 1,200-square-foot row house with an elderly couple and the Speijer family of six for more than a year.

To make room for everyone to sleep, the Bosmas constructed Murphy-style beds throughout the house that folded up to resemble bookcases.

The bottom drawer of the buffet was removed and molding was added to conceal a trap door leading to a hidden crawl space.

One elderly Jewish man had poor eyesight, and Bosma remembers shaving his beard and cutting his hair.

“You couldn’t let your hair grow — you may have to go out the back door at any moment and you couldn’t be looking like a thief,” Bosma said.

The trick to survival was not leaving any evidence of their guests for police to find. That meant no open books, no extra clothing, no unexplained warm chairs.

“The carpet around the dining room table was worn from so many people marching around it,” he said. “I don’t know how we pulled it off.”

Bosma remembers each detail of the beautiful summer day in 1943 when they were discovered.

It was a Wednesday and he and his father had closed the bicycle shop early and headed home. His mother and sister were visiting a relative when the Gestapo knocked on the door.

At the first sign of the police, a well-practiced plan went into effect. Albert pretended to be upstairs changing while young Marinus yelled that he could not find the key to unlock the door.

The Jewish guests opened the buffet’s trap door, dropped to the floor, and rolled into the crawl space. It took only seconds and left no evidence for the police.

“We talked to them,” Bosma said. “‘What are you guys looking for?’ we asked. We were kind of helping them search, lifting carpets, moving furniture.”

The father and son convinced the police they had the wrong house, but the family knew better than to assume they were safe.

The next day, all decided it was best to move the families on to Amsterdam.

Albert and Marinus each took half their guests on different trains and were lucky enough to avoid ID checks.

After a successful hand-off to other members of the resistance, Marinus returned to Arnhem —to find his mother and sister being interrogated by the police.

The Germans had returned, ripping apart the house and uncovering the hiding place, papers and gold stars torn from their guests’ clothing.

This is when his brilliant mother saved her family.

While police questioned Marinus, she asked to take a short walk to accompany her daughter to school.

While she was out, she asked a friend to intercept her husband at the station and prevent his capture by police.

On returning home, she convinced the Germans to leave, stating that her husband would never enter if he knew the police were inside. While police watched the front door, she led the family out the back.

“We walked away,” Bosma said, and none too soon; that night, police returned to Arnhem and arrested more than 60 people.

The family endured nearly two years of separation while living underground.

Bosma assumed the alias “Pieter Posma” and lived in the countryside with a sympathetic family and another refugee.

He stayed active in the resistance, blowing up rail lines supplying the Germans.

In 1945 he joined the Dutch army, helping to liberate the Indonesian colonies from the Japanese. There, he met his wife.

For the Bosma family’s sacrifices, Uriel Palti, consul general of Israel to the Mid-Atlantic Region in the United States, said the family name will forever be remembered on the Boulevard of the Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem.

“That’s the way we honor and respect and love the people who saved the Jews,” Palti said at the ceremony.

Bosma received a standing ovation from his family, members of the Dayton Dutch and Jewish communities and a host of supporters.

The time in which he lived was extraordinary, Bosma said, but he believes the goodness of heart possessed by his mother is shared by people around the world.

“I do firmly believe that if that happened in the United States today, God forbid, that you people would also open the door . . . I’m sure of that.”

 

© 2005 The Dayton Jewish Observer