My wife and I have very good friends, Carol and Hank, who live in Tennessee. In May of last year, we flew to see them to attend their daughter’s graduation from the university. Since graduation was on a Friday morning, we arranged ahead of time to stay the weekend and have Shabbos dinner at their house. Although our friends are not Jewish, they have strong positive feelings for Judaism and Israel, and have enjoyed many Shabbos dinners at our house over the years. There is a Chabad house near where they live, so we were all set.
As we were making arrangements for that weekend, Carol asked if it would be OK to invite a Dutch woman to Shabbos dinner. Carol, like my wife, is from Holland, and had met Sonja at a meeting of women who had moved to the U.S. from other countries. Carol explained that Sonja is in her 70’s, is a practicing Christian, but knows she is Jewish and is trying to connect with her Jewish roots. When Sonja heard we were coming, she asked Carol if she could join us for a “traditional Shabbos dinner.” Of course we agreed!
We met Sonja and her non-Jewish, husband, and after exchanging pleasantries, began our Shabbos routine explaining everything and offering to answer any questions they had. We were pleasantly surprised, just after my wife lit the Shabbos candles, when Sonja’s face lit up and she exclaimed, “I remember my mother doing that!” We continued with Shalom Aleichem, Aishes Chayil, washing and hamotzi, explaining what we were doing, and why, and answering questions from Sonja. She was clearly interested and happy to be re-connecting with her heritage. In fact, during the meal, she said she remembered being a little girl and seeing her father standing in front of the congregation holding his hands up. She mimicked him standing there with his hands together, fingers spread apart with the ring and middle fingers in a “V” shape. I almost cried when I told her how special she was because she was the daughter of a kohen.
At dinner we asked Sonja to tell us her story. She was born in Rotterdam in 1940 just after the war started. When Sonja was 2 years old, her parents, knowing what the Nazis had in store for the Jews, arranged for a non-Jewish artist friend in Rotterdam to hide Sonja. Sonja mentioned the artist’s name in passing (Dolf Henkes; he was somewhat well known in Holland), and went on to explain that it would have raised questions why the artist, a bachelor, suddenly had a child. So, the artist first found a farmer to take care of little Sonja, but took her back after he was appalled to find out the farmer hid Sonja in a chicken coop. The artist then found and placed Sonja with a childless non-Jewish family involved in the Resistance who could be trusted. So, Sonja was given a new name, false papers, and survived the war safely hidden as a “Christian” with her “adopted family.” After the war, her adopted family waited for news of her biological parents. Unfortunately, the news was not good. They were able to confirm when her father was deported and where he perished, and even without documentation, knew that her mother would never return.
Sonja continued to live with her adopted parents. They never told her of her Jewish roots nor of her parents’ fate – it was too dangerous to tell a child during the war, and afterward, they later explained, what was the point? The past was the past, they had grown to love Sonja as their own, and for the young Sonja, her adopted parents were the only parents she really knew. Only later did Sonja find out that another reason why her past was kept secret was because her adopted parents were also afraid of losing her – the Jewish Agency was looking for hidden Jewish orphans and moving them to the newly-found state of Israel.
At the age of 12, Sonja’s adopted parents decided to move to the U.S. As they were preparing to move, Sonja happened to turn over some official looking papers and saw that her birth name was really “Clara.” Confused, she asked her adopted parents about it. They told her all that had transpired in her past, including the fact that she was born Jewish, and ordered her never to speak of it again.
So Sonja moved to the U.S., grew up and married a Christian man, had two children, was active in her church (though she mentioned that she was always more interested in the “Old Testament” part of Christianity – clearly her soul yearned for its true roots). As she and her children grew older, she one day told them about her past. One daughter took an interest in Judaism and even connected Sonja to a relative living in Israel. Sonja gives talks about the Holocaust to schools in her area. She admitted, though, that she feels like her life is a puzzle, with large pieces of her Jewish past missing. One of the reasons for wanting a traditional Shabbos dinner was to connect with her past.
Back to the present. On Shabbos morning, I went to Chabad to daven and was invited for lunch with the rabbi and his wife. I told them I originally thought my wife and I came to Tennessee for the graduation of a friend’s daughter, but in reality, the purpose of our being there was to introduce Sonja to the rebbitzen to help Sonja connect with her Jewish roots. I envisioned that the rebbitzen would contact Sonja and the two might learn together. Little did we know that an even better outcome was to occur.
About nine months later, I came home from work and my wife said “Carol called from Tennessee. I have an amazing story to tell you.” My wife reminded me that Carol’s cousin from Rotterdam had been visiting the night of the Shabbos dinner and had heard Sonja’s story. It is worth mentioning that this cousin had never traveled to the U.S. before and wasn’t even that close with Carol, but as we were to find out, her presence was more than a mere coincidence. Nine months after returning to Holland, the cousin saw a two-line article in the local newspaper that there was going to be an exhibit of the work of the artist who had hidden Sonja! Curious, the cousin went to the exhibit to learn more about this artist. The curator of the exhibit noticed Carol’s cousin and asked why she was so interested in this artist. The cousin told the curator how she had been visiting her cousin in America and heard from a Jewish woman who was saved by this artist. The curator looked shocked, and said “Oh my G-d. You found Clara. We’ve been looking for her!” Because Clara/Sonja’s name had changed and she moved to America and took her husband’s name when they married, the curator had no idea how to find her until now.
After some excited calls to Tennessee, the curator hopped on a plane and flew to Tennessee to meet Sonja/Clara. The curator told Sonja that when the artist passed away several years before, he left everything to the Dutch government and she (the curator) was responsible for sorting through his things. Among his many boxes of things, the curator found an accounting ledger. Tucked inside this ledger was a hand-written letter written in 1942 from Sonja’s father asking the artist to hide his precious little daughter Sonja from the Nazis! The curator went on to tell Sonja that her parents were fairly wealthy and had given the artist a large sum of money to help offset the cost of caring for her. The ledger was the artist’s accounting of the money he spent (and later passed to Sonja’s adopted parents) for her care.
Sonja has since been flown by the curator back to Rotterdam where she (Sonja) told her life story as part of the artist’s exhibit and part of the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the end of the war. During that visit, Sonja met a Jewish woman who was 10 years old when she was also hidden in Rotterdam. In all likelihood, Sonja’s artist savior and adopted family knew about this girl as well, as they were all part of the Resistance. This other hidden child and the letter from Sonja’s father helped Sonja answer a question that had plagued her for years. While intellectually she understood why her parents did what they did, she still could not grasp how her parents could “abandon her when she was two years old?”
Clearly the hand of G-d was at work, because there are too many coincidences to have happened by mere chance. My wife and I are pleased, honored, and humbled that we were chosen by G-d to be the catalyst to help Sonja fill in these missing pieces of her life and re-connect her in some small way to her Jewish heritage.