Ode to Annie Kropveld-Plas | In 1942 Annie had said; "They won't get me," now she said, "We're looking forward!"

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"They won't get me!" said Annie, when the summons card fell into the mail at her place at Afrikanerplein also. The calling card, which stated that she, together with her husband and child, had to report for Westerbork. Almost all Jewish Amsterdammers in the Transvaal neighborhood had received such a card by the end of 1942, and almost everyone simply did what was written on it.

On a certain date you had to go to the streetcar stop of line nine early in the morning to be taken to the Hollandse schouwburg and from there to Westerbork in Drenthe. What would happen next was not on that card. Annie didn't trust it. The Jewish Weekly had reported that Jews were going to labor camps in Eastern Europe. But why did people get such a card who could not yet or no longer work. Small children, people over seventy, invalids. Annie didn't trust it one bit. She had seen for herself how an NSB man in WA uniform had picked up an old woman in her eighties with a handcart. That Jewish woman could no longer walk. To a labor camp in the East? Whatever, she thought.

Very early the next morning, Annie, her husband David and their little daughter Lida left the house at 38 Afrikanerplein, two stories up. They took nothing with them, not even a small suitcase or a bag, because they certainly shouldn't stand out. It was a good thing they had many friends. Non-Jewish friends from the Workers' Sports Federation who could help.

Annie had been born in 1914 behind Waterlooplein in a slum called Vlooienburg. The family consisted of the parents and, around 1920, six children. All of them lived in a room with a "toilet" in the hallway, which the neighbors on the other side of the stairs also had to use. Toilet, a "convenience" it was called. Actually more of a closet with a shelf with a hole in it. Underneath was a bucket, which was emptied twice a week by the "cologne cart" of the city sanitation department. The family was dirt poor. Father had peddled oranges but had slowly but surely gone blind. Probably due to trachoma, a common disease among mainly Jewish Amsterdammers, but there was also a hereditary eye disease in the family. A disease now called macular degeneration. Like most Jewish Amsterdammers, the family was not religious so they could not appeal to the charity of the Jewish Congregation.

But father Levie was a member of the S.D.A.P., the Social Democratic Workers Party (predecessor of the Labour Party), although he could not actually pay the membership fee. Thanks to that membership he got a job at the Handwerkers Vrienden Kring. Now we would speak of a Social Workshop organized by the S.D.A.P.

Around 1920, there was also hope for the residents of Amsterdam's countless slum dwellings and cellars. In Oost, construction was taking place. Under the leadership of the S.D.A.P aldermen De Miranda and Wibaut.

"Who builds? Wibaut" was the slogan during the City Council elections. Social housing with low rents because that was all the Amsterdammers from the old ghetto could afford.  The new neighborhood was called the Transvaalbuurt because the streets and squares were named after famous places and persons from the Boer War. The war, which the South African farmers - often of Dutch origin - fought against the English around 1900.

The Levie Plas family got a four-room house on the Tugelaweg on the third floor. Very cramped with six children we would say now, but after Vlooienburg they found it a palace.

Private toilet and not in the kitchen as in the houses before the Housing Act of 1901.

Annie was one of the best of her class in elementary school but after the seventh grade she still wanted to work to supplement the family income. After all, father was an invalid and mother also had poor health. She became a seamstress at Hollandia-Kattenburg.
 

In her spare time, she became a member of the korfball club of the Workers Sports Association, because the A.J.C., the Workers Youth Central of Koos Vorrink, with flags and uniforms, was not for her. In that sports league she met her husband David, also Jewish and also a korfball player. After their marriage in 1937, they lived in Betondorp, but when David was called up for mobilization of the Dutch army, Annie had returned to her old neighborhood and found a home on Afrikanerplein. 
 

After staying a few nights with non-Jewish friends from the korfball club, they received help from Ferry, also a non-Jewish friend from the korfball team. He was now, as it was called, in the resistance. Ferry found them a small house in Wormerveerstraat in the Spaarndammer neighborhood behind the Haarlemmerplein. It was a neighborhood where mainly Communist families lived. So after the German invasion of Russia, it was an excellent neighborhood to go into hiding. Annie blonded her hair and so they went into hiding in the middle of Amsterdam. They did have one big problem. Their four-year-old daughter Lida was handicapped. Now we would say "hard to learn." She couldn't handle the change and cried nights. David and Annie didn't know what to do. It stood out too much. Ferry, the resistance friend, knew a solution; Apeldoorn. There was a Jewish institution for the disabled. Surely the Germans would not interfere, because the patients there were not at all suitable for the labor camps in the East. Lida had just been there a few weeks when Apeldoorn was emptied. All the patients with the doctors and nurses went directly to an extermination camp.

Annie and David came through the war well. In February 1945, just before the liberation, Jetty was born. Two more children joined them at the end of 1945. Judith of eleven, the daughter of a brother of Annie and "Peter," just four, actually Eliezer, the son of a brother of David.
 

The parents had perished but Judith and Peter had been taken in by non-Jewish foster parents who had risked their lives to save Jewish children.
 

This is how they continued after the Great Sorrow. David was severely damaged by the war. So was Annie, of course, but through her resilience they still managed to move on with the new family. In 1942 Annie had said; "They won't get me," now she said, "We are looking forward!"
 

They did not often talk about the war anymore, in which almost their entire family had perished. They tried to build a family life as best they could with all those black memories. They went back to work. Got a nice house in the Rivierenbuurt. The children had a happy childhood with long vacations by the sea, because David worked in education. The children heard little about the Great Sorrow. The murdered daughter was never mentioned at all. Until Annie and I took a long car trip through Belgium and France in 2003. Then she suddenly spoke for hours about her childhood in the old Jewish neighborhood, about the korfball club, the hiding and the difficult recovery in 1945. I promised her to write the story down someday.
 

Peter Kropveld
 

P.S Annie died in 2005 in the Jewish retirement home Beth Sjalom in Buitenveldert. She was 91 years old at the time.