Ceremony for a Survivor

For half a century, Jannie Magoulas Zeeman kept her childhood secret from most of those in Culver City who know her.

She didn’t talk about how the Nazis first dragged off her father, then her mother and her two younger brothers--merely because they were Jewish.

She rarely mentioned how a kindly Protestant family saved her life at the age of 5 by sneaking her into their home and hiding her in a closet.

She never revealed any of the close calls she experienced as she hid during the next four years. Such as the time she escaped German troops by burrowing into a farmer’s haystack--and stayed alive because an older child clamped his hand over her mouth to stifle her scream when a soldier poked through the straw and grazed her back with his bayonet.

So there were gasps from the crowd at a Sepulveda Boulevard temple as Zeeman, 62, hesitatingly revealed her harrowing childhood during a belated bat mitzvah ceremony arranged by her son.

She decided to study for the religious ceremony after her last surviving relative, an aunt surgically mutilated by Nazi medical experimenters, died two years ago.

While her aunt was alive and haunted by her own concentration camp experience, Zeeman says, she could not bring herself to talk about her personal girlhood terror in Amsterdam.

Watching from the Temple Akiba audience was 68-year-old Thousand Oaks resident Dick Wulff, the son of the Dutchman who saved Zeeman’s life and one of those who helped hide her during those dangerous years.

“I never had a chance to really talk about it. After the war I lived with my aunt and she had her own misery,” Zeeman says of her wartime memories.

“I lived with them every day, of course. All my life I’ve tried to be happy-go-lucky. I’ve tried to hide my pain.”

Zeeman was 4 when Nazis apprehended her father, an Amsterdam coffee shop owner who was active in the Dutch underground. The Germans suspected he was involved in the death of a Dutch SS member. She never saw him again.

“My father was one of the first Jews they picked up. It was 1940 and I was just a little kid, but I remember like it was yesterday,” she said. “That’s one of my problems.”

When Germans began rounding up Jews alphabetically, Zeeman’s mother sent her to live with her uncle. According to Zeeman, Nazis took away her mother, her brothers and her mother’s family in 1941. They later died in concentration camp gas chambers.

“They separated my brothers from my mother, and that was the end,” she said.

When Nazis closed in on her uncle and his family, he asked a friend, William Wulff, to take his young niece. Wulff did.

The Wulff family was creative in hiding the little girl.

“Everybody knew I came from another family, so Mr. Wulff would say I belonged to his divorced sister,” Zeeman said.

When Germans would come around looking for Jews, William and Andje Wulff would send young Jannie running to their next-door neighbors’ house to hide under their bed.

Other times they would spirit her across the street to a Catholic church, where Zeeman and Wulff’s young daughter, Meip, would kneel in the sanctuary until the Nazis left.

Zeeman rarely dared to go to school. Instead, Wulff tutored her at home using his own children’s books. He even assigned “homework” that his children helped her do, she said.

“They would put sheets over their heads like ghosts and sneak in at night when I was supposed to be asleep and finish my schoolwork for me,” Zeeman said of Dick, Meip and Wim Wulff. “I always knew it was them, though. It was so funny.”

At the Wulff house, where the meager electric power came from a bicycle-pedal generator, the family observed Christmas and tried to live as normally as wartime would allow.

Toward the end of the fighting, when food supplies ran low in Amsterdam, the family sent Jannie and Meip to the country to live with a farmer who had food. That’s where Zeeman hid in the haystack from German soldiers.

“There were many close calls. Once I was playing in a park and Germans came in,” she said. Non-Jews reacted quickly to protect their young Jewish playmates: “All the kids ran so we could get away. I fell when I was running and broke a tooth,” she said.

One day when she and Meip were ice skating, young Jannie spotted a girl resembling a distant cousin and started yelling out her name. Meip gave her a whack to shut her up. “She said, ‘What are you doing? You’re giving yourself away!’ ”

By the war’s end, Zeeman was calling Wulff her stepfather. She had come to consider his children as her sister and brothers.

“That family did everything to help me. No matter how bad we had it, those years were the best of my life. I have so much love for them,” she said.

She was nearly 10 when she went to live with her lone surviving relative, her aunt, Gretha Himel. Zeeman was 20 when she accompanied Himel and her husband, Max, as they immigrated to the United States. The three settled in Culver City.

Zeeman, for the most part unschooled and uncertain about her own abilities, worked as a seamstress and, later, as a secretary. She eventually found herself in two unsuccessful marriages.

She acknowledges that for decades her life lacked direction.

“After the war everything was gone,” she explained. “I didn’t care that much for the Almighty. We’d had a family of 40. And only my aunt and me survived.”

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After Gretha Himel’s death, Zeeman says she was “finally able to talk to my children” about her lingering anxieties.

She decided to start the two-year study of Hebrew and Jewish custom that leads to the bat mitzvah after a friend went through the ceremony. The ritual usually marks a Jewish girl’s arrival into religious adulthood.

Son John Magoulas, a student at the University of Judaism who teaches at three area synagogues and at the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, volunteered to tutor her as part of a class of six at Temple Akiba.

A standing-room crowd of more than 400 was there last Friday night when Zeeman joined Sylvia Adeff, Dorothy Frankel, Michael Howald, Shelly Kreger Shapiro and Sharon Stone for ceremonies marking the end of their class.

Zeeman dedicated her efforts to the memory of her little brothers, Nazi victims Simon Daniel Zeeman, 2, and Phillip Zeeman, 3. And she publicly praised the Wulff family “for risking their lives to save mine.”

The moment brought a lump to Dick Wulff’s throat.

“I was thrilled to see the ceremony,” said Wulff, a semi-retired automobile technician. “I said a little prayer of thanks for my parents, that they had the guts to do what they did.

“This lady could have been dead a long time ago.”

Before the ceremony, Zeeman received a letter from Meip Wulff in Amsterdam.

In it, Wulff told of how her own life changed when she was confirmed in her church at age 32.

“She said was proud of me. She said she hopes I finally find peace with myself,” Zeeman said.

“When I read that, I cried.”