During the war, father Cohen (from Amsterdam) brought his six children to Limburg. Three to North Limburg, three with the help of Pauline Delahaye [1] to Ĳzeren [2]. They all survived the war.

The Cohen children in Ĳzeren

Dutch original text at sibbe-ijzeren.nl: Newsletter July 2019

Yad Vashem honors the Reijnders-Nijsten family as Righteous Among the Nations.

What was initiated during the war by the catholic parish in Sibbe [3] led to the posthumous presentation of a Yad Vashem [4] award to the H. Reijnders-Nijsten family June 18, 2019 in IJzeren. As the initiative came from the church at the time, the award was presented to the Reijnders family by the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands in the church at the family’s request. Recognition by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations is the highest decoration in Israel for non-Jews who risked their own lives to help Jewish fellow citizens survive during the Holocaust, e.g. by providing shelter, food or false documents. It is about people with qualities that not everyone had. People who worked to save the lives of Jews without any self-interest. During the war years, three children of an Amsterdam Cohen family were placed with several families in Ĳzeren. Two of the three children (Pietje and Bep) were present at the ceremony in the church and explained that they were very lovingly received in IJzeren and were able to report that their entire nuclear family was saved, and not only them, but therefore also their now approximately 200 descendants. In addition, they always felt safe in IJzeren despite the war.

During the ceremony, Mayor J. Schrijen quoted in his speech the story of Jef Crutsen (who lived in Ĳzeren during the war years), which he could still remember from that reception.

In the Easter vacations of 1944, three children arrived in Ĳzeren from Amsterdam, allegedly to recover from the poor living conditions in the capital. They were two brothers and a sister, aged between 9 and 13 from a Cohen family.
The children are divided among three families in Ĳzeren. The oldest boy (Eli) lives with the Delahaije family on Groenstraat, the sister (Bep) with the Reijnders family on Limietstraat and the youngest (Pietje) with the Crutsen family on Kapelstraat. When the Easter vacations are over, all the children in the village go back to school, except the little Amsterdammers. This makes the actual reason for their arrival clear: they must not risk being caught by the German occupiers and ending up in a camp.

But how can such a thing be kept secret in a small village community with only 41 houses? Were the families who gave them shelter aware of the great dangers to which they themselves were exposed?
There were also some German-minded people in the village.
Imagine if these people had talked! And what could have happened to the three children and their adoptive families!
Ĳzeren had few problems with the German occupiers. Until six young SS men were billeted with the Crutsen family at the end of August 1944. They parked their armored car on the driveway next to the house and took possession of the living room to bivouac there. The parents sleep downstairs in a back room. Pietje and Jef in the attic room directly above the room where the SS men were sleeping. Mother Crutsen then finds it too much. Fearing that Pietje would be discovered, he was secretly taken to the house of the Wim Nijsten family, a hundred meters up the street.
The three children were only able to return home in May 1945, when the entire Netherlands, including Amsterdam, was liberated. Father Cohen picked them up, already then in his own car. Pietje came to thank mother Crutsen, but Jef never got to say goodbye to Pietje. And, even worse, he never had contact with him again.
The only sign of life from the Cohen family is when the eldest of these three in hiding comes to Ĳzeren to tell that he is going to Israel to join the army. Jef doesn’t remember exactly when that was. Possibly at the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967.

It’s fantastic what these three families have done, and many will ask themselves, what would I have done in these circumstances? We can be proud of these families and express our gratitude for their courage and care, for which they have rightly been recognized.

Pauline Delahaye
OpenStreetMap Ĳzeren
Rector G.A. Wolf
Yad Vashem, Wikipedia
• Nederlands • Deutsch • English • Français • Português