Herefordshire | Archive | 2003 | October | 2
From the archive, first published Thursday 2nd Oct 2003.
ALL smiles for a summer snapshot. Two sisters and a special friend. The picture could have cost them their lives.
Some 60 years on, friends the same age as those three were then will know why, wonder how, ask whom. Just as the Anne Frank exhibition wants them to do.
Time doesn't make the three teens from the photo any different. They shared clothes, swapped gossip, talked about the boys. But in their girls' world one word, a single gesture, out of place meant discovery and certain death.
Look at Rachel van der Hoeden on the left. She is 14, about the same age as Anne Frank when she, too, had to hide from the Nazis. To the Rutgers sisters of Vriezenveen - Nies (centre) and Reit - Rachel was 'Cousin Francine' from the city. They risked everything for her.
Had they not done so, Cousin Francine would almost certainly have been the doleful girl that a young Nies Rutgers - now Cartwright - knew who had to wear a yellow star to school. Until the day her name wasn't on the register - and was never called out again.
Maybe that girl was among the hundreds of 'yellow stars' Nies saw cowered at Utrecht railway station, herded into cattle trucks headed east for Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka...
Now living in Leominster, Nies can at least still see Cousin Francine. She is Rachel Melzer, living in Tel Aviv and on video telling a Dutch news show of the family that saved her.
For that, the report says, the Rutgers received one of Israel's highest honours.
A Yad Vashem to salute those non-Jews who hid Jewish families throughout the Second World War.
The van der Hoedens were friends of the Rutgers. In 1942 the Nazi deportation of already displaced Dutch Jews began in earnest. Rachel had to 'disappear' along with her parents, two sisters and brother.
Unlike Anne Frank, Rachel was able to hide in plain sight.
Her origins were 'not obvious' says Nies - still sad that she should have ever had to think that way. But betrayal was always just a whisper away.
Many city 'cousins' came to stay with brave families in the Dutch countryside.
Other children would arrive in the dead of night - fear spread across their faces - to be spirited away again by morning knowing only the security of grief.
When Nies had children of her own she realised the risk of what went on.
Back then, she says, that risk was accepted, even expected.
It's because of this that she would not be photographed. She wanted the story told by that 16-year-old self she sees in the picture.
More than 8,000 Yad Vashem awards have been given out across Europe, 4,200 of them to Dutch families like the Rutgers.
"Nobody set out to be heroic," says Nies. "Courage comes upon you, an obligation. These were my father's friends."
l Next week - a story of invaders' cruelty, Emma Lievanveld.
© Newsquest Media Group 2008