We met Helga Nathan Gottschalk and her husband in their home in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Helga had been quite hesitant on the phone, not sure at first if she would want to go back into her memories to talk about such painful events in her early life. But she eventually agreed, as did her younger brother Kurt, because she was eager to pay tribute to Truus Wijsmuller, the remarkable woman who had made sure both of the siblings made it out of Holland safely in May of 1940.

During the interview, it became clear that Helga found it very difficult to understand still how her mother had left her and Kurt in the Burgerweeshuis (orphanage) in Amsterdam, while she went to be with their father in the Westerbork camps in the East of Holland. She felt very abandoned and alone, and her pain was so visible to us.
Once we met her brother Kurt a week or so later, he handed us some tapes of a long interview he had with his mother long after the war. In it, she painted a very interesting and detailed image of pre-war Geilenkirchen (a city in Germany), Jewish life and some of her memories of wartime in Holland after she was forced out of the family home. She explained how she wasn’t able to find a hiding place where she could be with her two children, and how she had found the Burgerweeshuis the safest place for them to stay. She would visit them very regularly, up until that day in May of 1940, when she came to visit and was told ‘all children have left’! She soon found out that they had all been taken to safety by Truus Wijsmuller, and that they were on their way to the UK.

Helga did share some very valuable letters that the children and their parents were able to send during the first years of war, enabled by the Red Cross, with 25 words allowed, followed by a 25-word answer. Some of these letters can be found in the ‘Documents’ section in this Truus Wijsmuller Archive.

Helga and Kurt’s father was murdered during the war, but their mother managed to survive the camps, as did their grandmother, and they were reunited after the war.
As in many cases, it wasn’t an easy adjustment for any of them, since so much time had passed and independence found that the children were no longer the children that their parents had sent away in an ultimate attempt to be saved.
This part of post-war trauma should be highlighted in new books, stories and documentaries, since we have witnessed during many interviews with Truus’ Children that this is such a big part of the painful aspects that needed to be faced, even after surviving the war.