Literature Project #51 Marcel Prins & Peter Henk Steenhuis ‘Hidden’
51 days into my year long daily Literature project. Mary, @mcsiegle challenged me to do "something with cutlery" and I would get "extra points if you can make it part of your year-long literature project".
My quotation today is from Marcel Prins & Peter Henk Steenhuis ‘Hidden’ and is the chapter relating the reminiscences of Rita Degen, born Christmas Day 1936.
I find this book, and this passage, presciently moving with the thousands of displaced people in the world today; how precious are the ordinary things we own like cutlery are when we are forced to do without them!
"My father always liked to know exactly what was going on, so he found a job with the Jewish Council which had been founded in 1941 on the orders of the Germans to represent the Jewish community in the Netherlands. My father was on guard duty when one of the first groups of Jewish people was transported out of Amsterdam. What he saw made him decide to send me into hiding right away. My parents went into hiding that same week. He had already arranged hiding places for all of us, not just for the immediate family but also for his parents and for all of my mother’s brothers and sisters. But they never made use of them. “It won’t be as bad as all that,” they said. Soon after my parents went into hiding, their house was “Pulsed,” or cleared out. The Germans had given Abraham Puls and his company the job of emptying the houses of Jews who had gone into hiding or who had been rounded up during a raid. We were lucky: our neighbours, who were good people, had a key to our house, and they took everything they could carry and hid it for us. After the war, we got back our photographs, a set of cutlery, a figurine and a clock."
thanks for the remembrance