From Holland With Love : Holocaust: Tiny Steenge, 81, hid a Reseda man from the Nazis. Now she is by his side again as he fights cancer.

Her friends in the little town of Meezenbroek, Holland, were shocked when 81-year-old Tiny Steenge announced she was going to America.

It was a daring and costly feat for an ailing widow, living on a meager pension.

But daring acts are nothing new to Steenge.

In 1943, with Hitler’s army wreaking havoc in Holland, Steenge, a Gentile, took in two Jewish boys whose families had been sent to Nazi concentration camps.

For nearly three years, she stole to feed the two boys along with her own three children. She lied to suspicious neighbors and German officials who patrolled the area. She met secretly with the Dutch Underground, plotting ways to keep the boys safe.

The goal was to survive, and survive they did. In doing so, they forged a bond that has outlasted years and miles of separation.

One of the boys, Jake Scheffer, now 62 and living in Reseda, recently learned that he has cancer. When Steenge found out, the woman who saved his life so many years ago was determined to be with Scheffer as he once again battles for his life.

She arrived last week for a reunion that has been filled with joy and sadness as the two recall that period of time when Steenge’s love and courage saved Scheffer from almost certain death.

“I wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for her,” Scheffer said, referring to the woman he affectionately calls Aunt Tiny. “I can’t repay her for what she did for me.”

Jewish scholars and others term people such as Aunt Tiny--Christians who endangered themselves to save Jews from Hitler’s death camps--righteous Christians. In recent years, more and more of their stories of bravery have surfaced.

Aunt Tiny’s name will be added to that list.

Steenge does not look like a heroine. She is a slight woman, her back is stooped with age and her movements are somewhat tremulous.

But she recalls those years of hunger and fear and simple joys with heartfelt animation.

She laughs deeply when telling of a time she outsmarted German soldiers, then is moved to tears recalling the night she thought Scheffer had smothered in his hiding place.

Alternating between Dutch and broken English, communication seems painful for the elderly woman. She gasps when she talks, a condition her doctors told her resulted from the nervousness and stress she felt during the war.

But it is clear that she is pleased with the outcome of the decision she made 48 years ago to help Scheffer.

“He lives,” she said, gesturing to Scheffer.

In 1943, Scheffer was 14 and living in a boarding home for Jewish boys in Amsterdam. The day Hitler’s troops arrived, rounding up Jewish families and putting them on trucks, Scheffer fled to the home of his nephew, who was married to Steenge’s sister.

He then stayed with Steenge’s parents until they became fearful of Nazi reprisal because a neighbor threatened to turn them in.

Steenge lived many miles away, but when she heard of the boy’s plight “she came all the way from her home to get me,” Scheffer said.

She had three young children of her own and her husband had died before the war, yet she put her own life and theirs in jeopardy on his behalf, Scheffer said.

“We were living in constant fear,” Scheffer said. “For three years, we were scared that somebody was going to turn us in.”

To explain the presence of the boys in her home to curious neighbors, Steenge created a story: The boys were her cousins, the children of an aunt who had died and she had to care for them.

The bond that developed between Scheffer and the Steenge family was as strong as between blood relatives.

“We were like brothers and sisters,” Scheffer said of his relationship with Steenge’s children. “I never felt I was the outsider.”

Still, Scheffer’s life was different from that of the other children. He could not go to school and he missed the activities normally associated with being a teen-ager.

Frequently Germans patrolled their town in the province of Limburg, knocking on doors in search of Jews. When they came, the boys hid in a hole dug beneath the living room and covered with wooden planks and carpet.

“Sometimes it was two days, sometimes it was three days, sometimes it was a week, until it was over” and they could emerge, Scheffer said.

One night Steenge knocked on the planks to check on Scheffer and he did not answer. She was terrified.

“I said ‘Jake! Jake! You die?’ ” Steenge said in English, raising her voice, her eyes watering with tears.

Scheffer was unharmed and simply had not heard the knocking, but the incident underscores the fear and anxiety they felt.

Although it was forbidden, Steenge kept a radio hidden in the wall of her house and secretly listened to broadcasts from the BBC. She also was in contact with the Dutch Underground--her brother was a member--and the group helped her care for Scheffer when he contracted jaundice.

The Nazi army was but one of the demons tormenting the lives of Steenge and the children. Hunger was another.

During the war, food was rationed depending on the size of the household. Because she could only tell authorities about her own three children and not the extra two, there was never enough.

“The Germans took everything, all the nice food,” Steenge said angrily. “We got nothing. The kids get hungry.”

Steenge would walk for hours in wooden clogs to a farm to gather potato peelings left for pigs. Then she would fashion a meal from them for the children. She would awaken at 4 a.m. to steal wheat from another farmer.

“We didn’t have much food so we stole, we begged, but we made it,” Scheffer said. “I never saw her eat first, always the children.”

Scheffer was never discovered by the Germans. And when the town was liberated by U.S. forces in 1945, Scheffer came out of hiding. The other boy, who also survived, died recently.

Scheffer’s mother and five of his siblings had been killed in the camps. Only his oldest sister, Linda Sherman, who had been imprisoned in concentration camps in Holland, Czechoslovakia and Poland, survived.

After liberation, Sherman and Scheffer were reunited and in 1946 emigrated to the United States. Sherman now lives in Culver City.

In all those years, the two never forgot “Aunt Tiny” and kept in contact with her. When she found out recently that Scheffer had upper colon cancer, she was determined to come see him.

“I said, ‘Jake sick, I go to America! I go!’ ” Steenge said.

Steenge had saved the money Scheffer sent her during the past 20 years in birthday and Mother’s Day cards and used it to pay for the flight. Recently Steenge also began receiving a pension from the Dutch government in recognition of her unselfish acts during the war. When she told officials there that she wanted to come to America to see Scheffer, the government gave her additional money to help her pay for the trip. She plans to stay a few weeks.

Scheffer, a U.S. Army veteran, now works at the Reseda Convalescent Hospital and is married with one adult child. He has already had one cancer-related operation and is now undergoing chemotherapy. His prospects remain uncertain.

But since Scheffer’s tearful first meeting with Aunt Tiny at Los Angeles International Airport late last month, his spirits have soared, Sherman said.

Normally, “he’s a very, very quiet man,” Sherman said of her brother. “I’ve never seen him talk so much,” she said, laughing.

Sherman and Scheffer took Steenge to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles, which collects oral histories from individuals whose lives were affected by the Holocaust. “They were so happy to see her,” Sherman said. “They hugged her and thanked her.”

And on Saturday, Scheffer and Sherman held a party so that all their friends and relatives could meet the woman they had heard so much about. “More people need to know about people like her,” Sherman said.

Although others may marvel at her courage, to Steenge the explanation for her bravery is simple.

“I loved” the children, she said through an interpreter.