How a Facebook post got wartime rescuers recognized as Righteous Gentiles

NADINE WOJAKOVSKI

A foster family that hid a Jewish baby during the Holocaust has been reunited with her after 50 years, and the parents posthumously honored by Yad Vashem
Clockwise, from left: The church Renate is believed to have attended during the war; Aad and Fie Versnel with Renate, circa 1945; Renate reunited in 2015 with Cobi and Els after more than 50 years. (Courtesy Nadine Wojakovski)

WORMERVEER, Netherlands — Seventy-five years and four days after my mother was sent into hiding as a baby in wartime Holland, her rescuers Aad and Fie Versnel were finally posthumously recognized by Yad Vashem as members of that select band, the Righteous Among The Nations.

It has been a long time coming, but had it not been for a Facebook post that miraculously traced the family within just four days, this story might never have been told.

Three years ago I published “Two Prayers Before Bedtime,” a memoir about my grandmother Cilla Bitterman, who sent her daughter (my mother) Renate into hiding during the war.

Lacking documentary records, we estimated that she was forced into hiding at just 19 months old, in the middle of September 1942, exactly 75 years earlier.

The bravery of my grandparents in making the heart-wrenching decision to send their son and daughter to an unknown fate was only possible thanks to those people, living in Nazi-occupied Holland, who were willing to face the utmost risk and sacrifice, endangering their own lives to save another.

100,000 Dutch Jewish men, women and children were rounded up or herded off the streets of Holland into cattle trucks and deported to concentration camps — Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor and Theresienstadt, where they were brutally and horrifically slaughtered. Only two-sevenths of the 140,000 Dutch Jewish population survived.

As the great 18th century Whig statesman Edmund Burke famously said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Two Prayers Before Bedtime’ by Nadine Wojakovski.

My grandparents, Cilla and Eugen Bitterman, had the unimaginable good fortune to find a selfless, childless couple in their 30s who were not prepared to stand by and do nothing.

Aad and Fie Versnel, who lived in the village of Wormerveer, just over 10 miles from Amsterdam, saved my mother’s life. My grandmother handed over her baby in 1942. In June 1945 she was reunited with a four-year-old daughter whom she no longer recognized.

For the Versnels, handing back Renate, the only child in their life, was so very painful. On receiving her daughter back, my grandmother Cilla promised that she would pray for them to be blessed with their very own child. Exactly one year later, in June 1946 a baby daughter — Els Renate — was born, followed by Cobi in 1948.

When I wrote the book, I dedicated it to Aad and Fie Versnel and the Dutch Resistance.

One of the last times my mother saw the Versnels was in 1962, at her wedding to my father Arthur in the Kraznapolski Hotel in Amsterdam, which was attended by the couple and their teenage daughters.

A black-and-white vintage picture of Fie, Aad, Els and Cobi greeting the bride Renate, 17 years after the end of the war, testifies to the imperishable bond of love between the Bittermans and the Versnels that time could not dim. Their wedding gift was a silver plate, on the back of which was engraved: “To our foster daughter.”

After my parents married, they left Amsterdam and eventually built a home and life in London. As the years went by, and my grandparents and the Versnels passed away, my mother lost touch with the family. Her attempts to find them were unsuccessful.

After my book was published, we redoubled our efforts to find the descendants of the Versnels.

Versnel and Bitterman families get together in Holland, circa 1961. (Courtesy Nadine Wojakovski)

A righteous use of social media

On December 29, 2014, my sister posted a single photo of the Versnels on Facebook, with the message: “Looking for children and grandchildren of Fie and Aad Versnel from Holland circa 1945. Please please share.”

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