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ANITA LEESER-GASSAN: "YOU SHOULD NOT ACT AS A VICTIM, BUT AS A SURVIVOR"

She witnessed how her father laid the foundation stone for today's empire after World War II. But if Anita Leeser-Gassan (Amsterdam, Sept. 17, 1935) had not survived Bergen-Belsen, starvation, deadly diseases and a two-week hell ride on the "train of the lost," there would have been no family business. "I am the only Gassan left."

Text: Bart-Jan Brouwer | Online Editor: Natasha Hendriks
Image: John van Helvert

What was your early childhood like?

"I was the only daughter of Samuel Gassan (Amsterdam, November 5, 1910) and Carolina Biet (Amsterdam, July 20, 1913). We lived in Nicolaas Maesstraat, above Paul Huf. And then in Johannes Vermeerstraat and again later Pieter de Hoochstraat. My father worked as a diamond cutter at steam diamond-cutting firm Gebroeders Boas on Uilenburgerstraat. Until the crisis broke out and there was no more work. Then he started selling advertisements for the ANWB magazine De Kampioen. From the beginning of the war I clearly remember the air raid and the bombing. With copper pans on our heads we tried to protect ourselves. A policeman took us with his car to IJmuiden to let us escape by boat to England. But we could no longer go with him and went back to Amsterdam. I was forced to go to Jewish school, in my blue vest with Star of David on it. First to the Montessori school on Corelli Square, then to School 13 on Jan van Eijckstraat. There I think I also had thirteen teachers in two months, they were always taken away by the Germans."

Your father and mother divorced in 1942, upon which your father fled to Switzerland that same year. What was that like for you?

"My father had an affair with the wife of a friendly couple. In 1942, the ground became too hot for him. He had saved some diamonds, hid them in the heel of his shoes and fled to Switzerland with his girlfriend. Then the husband of that friendly couple, Jacques Smit, took care of my mother. A cross-pollination. From Switzerland, my father sent Paraguayan passports for my mother, myself and Jacques - that might have saved us. My second father was very kind to me. I have good memories of him. In order to provide a reprieve from employment in Germany for as long as possible, he and my mother worked at the Sterilization Office at the Central Israelite Hospital, which is now the Jellinek Clinic. The German doctor in charge of the compulsory sterilization of Jews didn't know what hit him when he was stationed here. He helped a lot of Jews, for example by describing pregnant women as "infertile. And he provided us with shelter in the hospital. Until he could no longer vouch for our safety: 'It's time to go into hiding.'"

What was that like for you as a child?

"Hiding made life very limited. We first went into hiding in a storage room above a shoe store on Van Baerlestraat, a building owned by my grandfather. Until we were betrayed. We were just about to move to another location. While we were entrenched in the storage room at the top of the stairs, the Germans came looking for us. They didn't find us. We heard that they got a phone call and they were told what our next address would be. So we knew not to go there. Then we went to other people in the neighborhood in the middle of the night - who were not happy about that. My second father then called a friend of his, who was hiding with his wife and mother-in-law with a family on Loman Street. These people - Dicky and Henk Claassen and their five children - were willing to take us in as well. It was already so crowded and yet they took us in! After six weeks we went to a boarding house, where the Claassen family did continue to take care of us. During a raid on resistance people, letters were found mentioning the hiding place. That led to our arrest in mid-1944. During the search, the six of us stood in a closet and were discovered by a German soldier. I still tried to persuade him not to take us: 'Wouldn't you rather have my doll for your children?' We were first taken to the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst on Euterpestraat, today's Gerrit van der Veenstraat, and from there to the House of Detention on Weteringschans. From there, on July 20, my mother's birthday, we were transported to Westerbork. And on August 1, my second father's birthday, we were transported to Bergen-Belsen. In that camp, people of dual nationality were held for exchange and not sent directly to Poland for gassing. So with the Paraguan passports, my father prevented us from being taken immediately to Auschwitz."

You were only eight ... Did you realize then that this might be your end point?

"I had no idea what could happen. The camp had existed much longer, of course. The people who had been there for a while were plagued that we were still fairly well-fed. And all the jobs there were already taken."

Was there no togetherness?

"Yes and no. What I learned in the camp: it doesn't say anything whether you are chic or not chic, what rank you are from, what you look like. The notary picked someone else's bread, and that was actually manslaughter there, while the market trader next to us in the barracks shared her last crumbs of bread with ours. And the Jewish boxer Ben Bril, who was in charge of cleaning the latrines, was also someone who took food for other people."

At Bergen-Belsen, 70,000 people died. During your stay there, did you have any idea that such numbers were involved?

"It was a very large camp, where there were all kinds of nationalities: Hungarians, Albanians... From the end of 1944, tens of thousands of prisoners from the concentration camps from the front lines were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. It became a growing hell there: there were deadly and contagious diseases and no food. You saw carts with piled corpses driving by. It was really very scary."

What is it like to be hungry?

"Well, that hurts. When I hear someone say they're 'hungry,' I still get an outburst sometimes. 'What hunger? You don't know what hunger is!' Shortly before Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British on April 15, 1945, we and about 2,500 others were transported to Theresienstadt to be gassed. Already on the first or second day, we had to get off the train at the station in Magdeburg to take shelter from Allied artillery with the camp guards under the train. The station was bombed flat and Theresienstadt was no longer accessible. What followed was a two-week wandering by train through parts of Germany not yet occupied by the Allies. No one knew where we had gone. The Lost Transport it was called. All that time on the train I didn't eat and we were crammed together. Along the way, people were dying by the bushes from malnutrition and disease. We were between the front of the Allies and the Russians. In constant danger of being bombed again. Everyone on the train who wore something white put it on the roof to show that this was not a war train. As an alternative to Theresienstadt, the Germans wanted to dump our train into the Elbe. But they could no longer get there either - everything was blocked off. The transport finally came to a halt in Tröbitz, some sixty kilometers north of Dresden. On April 23 we were liberated there by three Russians on horseback. 'See that you find a place somewhere,' the Russians said. We trudged into Tröbitz, a village then of about seven hundred souls, which suddenly found itself confronted with over two thousand starving and deathly ill people in acute need of help. Not all the villagers were equally helpful. But they had a bad one with the Russians: anyone who did not open the door was shot off the balcony by the Russians. With about nine men, we ended up on a farm. The first day I played with the occupants' child, but then that stopped because his parents didn't allow him to play with Jews. Those people had no idea what was happening to them either. In the weeks that followed, another 320 people died as a result of the death transport. Among other things, because of the typhoid epidemic that had broken out. Many villagers who had been infected by us also died. Eventually, the French Red Cross repatriated us."

Meanwhile, your father, whose parents were killed in Auschwitz on October 5, 1942, was looking for you.

"Toward the end of the war, he enlisted in the British Army. He became head of the repatriation service and then started looking for us. When he got to Bergen-Belsen, we were no longer there. He did encounter the children of his former colleagues there. They were in a separate barracks. The war had just ended. He personally chartered a plane and put these "diamond children" on a plane to Holland on June 23, 1945 - for which he was reprimanded. He then traveled down the stations our train had called at. At Magdeburg he lost track, because with the bombing of the station the registration was also lost."

You saw him for the first time in Eindhoven. What emotion did that trigger?

"My father had been told that a transport had entered a school in Eindhoven. He didn't recognize me, but I recognized him. 'Daddy, daddy,' I called out. I still can't tell you with dry eyes... That was a very special moment. He put us in his army car and took us to Amsterdam."

What was it like returning to Amsterdam?

"I had to go to the hospital first, the same CIZ again. I weighed only 23 kilograms and had no buttocks left to sit on. Then I could go home - our old house on Johannes Vermeerstraat, where NSB members had been held during the war. All around you heard 'is he still alive?' Soon I was able to go back to school, the Aeneas Mackay School on Titiaanstraat, where the children of the Claassen family had also attended. During the hiding period they had given me books to keep me up to date. At that school I could continue in the fifth grade, so I was never in the third or fourth grade. I picked up the thread fairly quickly. The wait was for my second father, but he never returned from the war. That sadness was somewhat alleviated by the fact that my parents got back together."

Your father went right back into the diamond business.

"Back in October 1945, the first diamonds were cut, then in the Diamond Exchange on Weesperplein. First trade, buying and selling, international. He traveled with a portfolio of diamonds, a lot to Sweden and India. We had a very good life. My father didn't know how to spoil us! I got ice hockey skates, a very nice red Swedish bicycle, things like that. In 1950 he was able to start a diamond-cutting shop on Zwanenburgerstraat and in 1955 the company moved to Nieuwe Achtergracht. That location was more geared to tourists. From the Lepelstraat you could enter the building. My father called himself the "Landlord of the Spoonstreet. The building got the logo SG on the wall."

How was your father with his staff?

"Very good. In the evenings, no one went out the door without greeting him: 'Hello, Mr. Gassan.' Like Benno, Samuel was always the first on the job and the last to leave. Managing by walking around. He knew exactly what was going on at every level. What did happen in those days: there were people who wanted to persuade the cutters to swap a batch of inferior quality diamonds with a batch of good quality - in the organization, that kind of fraud was called 'flower pots.' When my father wanted to surprise his staff for St. Nicholas, he had told the staff, "At five o'clock the door closes and no one is allowed to go home. Those frauds were scared to death, afraid the police would come and tried to flee out the window. Whereas my father wanted to surprise them with a St. Nicholas party!"

How would you describe your father?

"He was a very charming man, very well-groomed, very fond of his clothes, and he didn't hate women. That still complicated things at times. Later he and my mother also broke up."

Have you never considered entering the diamond business yourself?

"No, I wanted to study Law. I've had that sense of justice since the war. During my studies, however, I did work as a guide at the diamond factory. With the hair back, and my father made me wear high heels. And at Asscher's I learned diamond drawing. If the diamond had to be cleaved, it was important to do it at its most advantageous. In my drawings I indicated the lines exactly where the diamond had to be cut."

In your work as a lawyer, judge and later vice president of the court in Amsterdam, what did you take away from your war time?

"The common thread has always been that I believe you should not act as a victim, but as a survivor. In my time as a lawyer, I would come to people in the same House of Detention where I had been. When clients were complaining terribly, I'd say, "I've been here too, but I didn't know then if I'd ever get out, and you did."

Have you no anger, do you not look back with resentment?

"I still don't go on vacation to Germany and I don't buy from stores that I know were wrong in the war. That doesn't go out anymore. I did go back to Bergen-Belsen twice. That did me good. The confrontation, the processing."

Your sons Benno and Guy have followed in your father's footsteps. How do you feel about GASSAN becoming a family business?

"That's kind of special. The company is run by a Leeser, Bijlsma and Huisman. In the end, I'm the only Gassan left!"

Masters #44

MASTERS #44