March 22, 2024 - “When I talk to schoolchildren, I tell them to close their eyes and remember what it was like when they left to go to school that morning. What is your house like? Was your room clean? Did anyone kiss you goodbye? Now, open your eyes. What would it be like if you never saw any of that again? Not your house. Not most of your family. They usually get very quiet.” This is how Hans Polk began his account of what happened to him as a six year old Jewish boy in Amsterdam in 1943 for the Timpson Area Genealogical and Heritage Society last Wednesday.
The Netherlands had fallen to the Germans and anti-Jewish pogroms had been instituted. “The Nazis had begun arresting Jews and sending them to concentration camps. Our neighbors, who were not Jewish, had agreed to take me, my parents' only child, if the Nazis came for them. Late in the day on June 20, 1943 my father handed me over to our neighbors and he and my mother were taken away shortly thereafter. They arrived at the Sobibor concentration camp on July 2 where then were later executed,” Polk recalled.
“Our neighbor took me to an orphanage which was run by Jews dressed as Catholic priests and nuns who were trying to hide Jewish children. Polk was adopted by a Christian family later and raised as their own. “Two weeks after I was adopted from the orphanage, the Nazis were told about the Jews in the orphanage and forty of them were taken away to the camps.” On May 5, 1945 the liberating American and Canadian forces rolled into Amsterdam. “They were throwing slices of bread to the people lining the streets. This was something we had not seen for a long time. Previously, we had had to eat soup made from the leaves of trees.”
Polk immigrated to the United States in 1956, later becoming a naturalized citizen and marrying an American Catholic. Their children were reared as Catholics and Polk eventually converted to Catholicism himself. He has visited the Netherlands a few times since he came to the U.S., even seeing his parents' names on a memorial at Sobibor. “Do I hate the Germans? No. They are good people but they allowed themselves to be misled by an evil person,” Polk concluded.
TAGHS meets at 2PM on the third Wednesday of each month in the meeting room of the Timpson Public Library, located on the corner of Austin and Bremond Streets in downtown Timpson. The public is always welcome. The TAGHS Library is located within the Timpson Public Library and is open and staffed from 9AM until 5PM weekdays. Telephone 936-254-2966 and ask for the Genealogical Library.
