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Partisans and Underground

Mirjam Waterman Fanny Solomian      
Mirjam and Menachem, 1943.

Mirjam and Menachem, 1943.


Mirjam and Henry (Zvi) Hamerslag at an institution in Hilversum, 1944

Mirjam and Henry (Zvi) Hamerslag at an institution in Hilversum, 1944


Hetty Voute, 1940s.

Hetty Voute, 1940s.


Baby’s eating utensils

Baby’s eating utensils that arrived together with Henry Hamerslag when he was transferred by Mirjam Waterman to Hetty Voute at the train station and thence to Katy Mulder.


Strip of cloth left over from a Nazi flag

Strip of cloth left over from a Nazi flag, signed by women prisoners in Ravensbrück, including Hetty. Yehudit Taube embroidered their signatures.


 

Mirjam Waterman

Even baby carriages became rescue vehicles during the Holocaust.

Mirjam Waterman, born in 1916, and her spouse, Menachem Pinkhof, were active in the Dutch resistance for the rescue of children. Mirjam’s assignment was to gather infants whose parents were marked for deportation, or who had already been deported to Westerbork, and to deliver them to the train station in Amsterdam.
Mirjam arrived at the station with a baby carriage and waited for the liaison who delivered the children to families and institutions for hiding. Mirjam did not know the babies’ destination and the identity of the woman who claimed them. The woman’s name was Hetty Voute; she was caught and sent to Ravensbrück. Mirjam was also caught and deported to Bergen-Belsen. After the liberation, she was active in having the children returned to Jewish authorities.
Mirjam moved to Palestine in 1946. Hetty Voute was named Righteous among the Nations for her feats. She died in 1999.
 


Many children were hidden in the children’s institution that Katy Mulder ran. One of them was Kitty Frank, a Zionist pioneer who had been under my care. On one of my visits to this institution, Kitty led me to a closed room and said, “I have another job here—to take care of two babies who’ve just arrived.” When she showed them to me, I realized that they were the brother and sister whom I had passed on at the train station just a few days earlier. The girl, Mirjam Hamerslag, was a year and a half old, and the boy was only two weeks old.

Mirjam (Waterman) Pinkhof

Copyright © 2007 Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority