From Shatters, Slivers of Hope

Flory Van Beek has carried the glass shard in her purse for nearly 60 years.

It’s about a quarter-inch thick, 2 inches long and three-fourths of an inch wide, the remnant of a shattered porthole on the Dutch ship SS Simon Bolivar. When it hit a German mine and exploded in November 1939, the Bolivar became the first neutral ship sunk in the North Sea during World War II.

The 16-year-old Flory and her 26-year-old future husband, Felix, had joined on the ship numerous Jews fleeing the Netherlands for South America because of the advancing German army. Both were severely injured in the explosion but were among 274 of the ship’s 400 passengers and crew pulled from icy waters by British sailors after a second explosion sank the ship.

It was only after doctors in England removed the shard of glass from the back of Van Beek’s neck that she learned how lucky she had been: The glass had lodged a millimeter from her carotid artery. Ever since, she has carried the near-lethal piece of glass with her.

“I can’t explain why, but I want it with me somehow,” said Van Beek, in the living room of her Newport Beach home. “Sometimes I look at it, and I think it was a miracle that I survived. The doctors couldn’t believe it themselves.”

It wouldn’t be the last, she said.

Van Beek chronicles the “miracles” in “Flory: Survival in the Valley of Death” (Seven Locks Press; $22.95), the story of how she and Felix survived the Holocaust. They did it with the help of three Dutch Christian families that hid the couple in their homes for three years.

“They were very courageous, risking their own lives and that of their children,” Flory Van Beek said. “They were real patriots, but they didn’t consider themselves heroes, really. They thought it was the human thing to do.”

Van Beek will discuss her book at a meet-the-author program at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Jewish Community Center of Orange County in Costa Mesa.

Among those in the audience will be Hank Hornsveld of Costa Mesa, one of the two sons of the second family that took in the Van Beeks after a late-night visit by the Gestapo forced the couple to flee their first hiding place.

“We’re in the world to help each other,” Hornsveld, 77, said of his family’s decision to hide the Van Beeks from the Nazis. “People in need need help, and that’s the way it was. We don’t worry about what nationality or what religion they are.”

Hornsveld, a retired electrical contractor who came to the United States in 1957, six years after the Van Beeks sponsored his brother, the late Bertus Hornsveld of Fallbrook, said Flory Van Beek has done a “fantastic job” in telling her story.

The book paints a vivid portrait of life for the Jews in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation. As a German nationalist, Felix could not remain in England after they recovered from their injuries. And after their ordeal at sea, Flory Van Beek said, “I wanted to go back to Holland.”

The German army attacked the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, eight days after she and Felix returned to Rotterdam.

“We were in the middle of the bombardment,” she recalled. “That was another miracle--that we survived that--because [1,000 people died], and all of Rotterdam was flattened.”

Once the Germans occupied the Netherlands, she said, every Jew was required to report to a local district government building to sign papers to indicate whether they were Jewish, half Jewish or one-quarter Jewish. They even had to indicate how far back their ancestry could be traced. They were photographed, and their new ID cards were stamped with a “J” for Jew.

Failure to comply with this “summons” meant being sent to the concentration camp in Mauthausen, Austria.

That was the first in a long series of ordinances directed at the Jews. Parks, theaters, hotels, restaurants, libraries, museums and other public areas became off limits. Jews had to turn in their radios and bicycles, and they weren’t allowed to have telephones. They were required to turn in all their gold and silver. They were forbidden to enter the homes of non-Jewish people.

Professionals and intellectuals had to quit their jobs, and business owners had to turn over their businesses. Yet if you were unemployed, Van Beek said, you would be deported.

Chance Meeting Offers a Chance

In June 1942, she received summons to report for work in Germany. She became nearly hysterical, she said, envisioning it as a trip to her death.

That afternoon, she went to the grocery store for food--”against my mother’s wishes, but we needed something to eat.” Her mother’s fears were well-founded. By then, Jews were being picked up on the street, tortured and shot at the whim of the Nazis.

Wearing her yellow cloth Star of David, as all Jews were required to, Flory stood next to a canal contemplating suicide. Then what she calls another “miracle” occurred: A Dutch man on a bicycle approached her and asked, “What the hell are you doing here with that damned star on your blouse? Take that damned thing off and follow me.”

Flory said she had never seen the tall, blunt-spoken man before. For some reason, she felt she was in good hands, so she did as he said and followed him home.

The man was Piet Brandsen, a contractor who was the leader of the area’s resistance movement.

He and his wife, Dina--the parents of four young daughters--offered to take in Flory and her boyfriend Felix, saying it was their duty to help their fellow countrymen. Devout Catholics who felt it was sinful to have an unmarried couple living in one room, the Brandsens required that Flory and Felix be married before taking them in.

Instead of the attic room the Van Beeks thought they would be hiding in, the newlyweds were shocked when the Brandsens gave up their own bedroom for them. And there they lived for the next 18 months.

During the day, Flory would mend the Brandsen girls’ clothes and help them study; Felix shined the family’s shoes. They did anything to fight boredom and to repay the family in any way they could.

They also began doing work for the resistance movement; Flory did typing for the underground newspaper and for a counterfeit food coupon distribution program, which Felix administered. At night, after Dina Brandsen announced “the coast is clear,” they would go downstairs and listen to the BBC on a forbidden crystal radio.

To help ensure the Van Beeks’ safety, Piet Brandsen made a hiding place off their bedroom, a small area only about 3 1/2 feet square with double doors. He also rigged a red light with a button downstairs that could be pushed to warn the Van Beeks if they were in danger.

The Van Beeks used the hiding place only once, on Jan. 21, 1944, when the Gestapo came to the front door. Normally, the couple would have been downstairs, but they were upstairs working on their resistance paperwork when the red light came on. Another miracle, Flory says.

The couple spent two hours in the cramped, airless hiding place. At one point, they heard footsteps coming up the stairs. But at the last moment, they heard a German voice yell out from downstairs, “What are you doing there? There is nothing upstairs.”

Although the Van Beeks were undiscovered, Piet Brandsen was arrested that night and spent eight months in a concentration camp.

Not wanting to put the family in danger by their presence, the Van Beeks sneaked out by way of the balcony, heading for the Van den Hoevens family, which was hiding Felix’s family on the same street. But they didn’t know which house it was.

“We really did say a prayer, and we rang the next house. It happened to be Mr. Van den Hoevens,” Flory Van Beek recalled with a shake of her head. Yet another miracle.

The Van den Hoevens already had five people in hiding, so he took them to the Hornsvelds’ home, a dangerous, 50-minute walk on icy streets through sleet and wind.

By war’s end, the Van Beeks had spent three years in hiding. Of the Netherlands’ 140,000 Jews before the war, only 5,200 survived.

Flory Van Beek’s mother was picked up on street by the Nazis in 1942; she died at age 59 in a German concentration camp in Poland. All her relatives on Van Beek’s father’s side also perished in the camps.

But her sister, who was hidden in a barn by farmers in a neighboring village, survived. So did her eldest brother, who was hidden in an attic in Amersfoort. Another brother escaped the Netherlands on his bicycle when the Germans marched in--”and this was also a miracle”--he made it through Belgium, France and over the Pyrenees mountains bordering Spain, where he told the Dutch Embassy he wanted to fight with the Allies. As a member of the British army’s Princess Irene Brigade, he was one of the Netherlands’ liberators.

In 1948, Felix Van Beeks’ two brothers, who had lived in New York for many years before the war, urged the couple to come to the United States. Fearful that the Cold War with the Soviet Union would turn into another war, the Van Beeks left the Netherlands.

Sifting Through the Memories

After living for 14 years in Los Angeles, where Felix worked for a furniture company, the couple moved to Newport Beach in 1962. Felix ran a furniture and household appliance business in Santa Ana. Ralph, their only child, died of brain cancer in 1970 at age 16.

When they left the Netherlands, Flory Van Beek brought with her a suitcase filled with the diaries Felix had kept during the war, as well as documents and newspaper clippings she had saved.

Van Beek said she can’t explain why she saved newspaper clippings and other documents during the war, it was just something she felt she had to do. It wasn’t until 1984 that she began to sort through the materials, arranging things in chronological order.

In 1991, the Van Beeks donated the collection to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., along with the six bronze medals Piet Brandsen had received for his work in the resistance.

Several times during the years, Flory Van Beek said, she tried to write a book about her wartime experiences. Each time, she said, “I became very emotional” and stopped.

By 1997, however, she felt she owed it to her mother and the rest of her family--and future generations--to put the tale on paper.

“[The Holocaust] is history, and it should never ever happen again,” she said. “War, I don’t know, but persecutions? . . . If you die for your country, it is one thing. But to be persecuted because you have a certain religion is unbelievable.

“What the Germans did, it can never be made good--ever, ever, ever, no matter what they say.”

Flory Van Beek will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Jewish Community Center of Orange County, 250 E. Baker St., Costa Mesa. Admission: $5 for members; $7 for nonmembers. (714) 755-0340.