A few days after interviewing Kurt’s sister Helga, we drove to Redlands (California), where we were received with a very warm welcome in Dutch. Kurt never forgot his Dutch, still remarkably present after the year he and his sister spent in the Burgerweeshuis (orphanage) in Amsterdam, Holland and the few years they lived in the south of Holland after the war. But that had been a lifetime ago, and in the last decades he had been living in de United States, always quite close to his sister and paying visits between them till only recently. The fragile health of his wife had made it too difficult to travel.

During the interview, in which it became clear how much information about his family he had, we asked about the tapes his sister Ellen had mentioned. And before we knew it, Kurt was willing to play the cassettes and we could listen to the whole interview with his mother of when he sat her down somewhere in the Eighties to ask about their youth, the flight to Holland, war time and so much more. He trusted us with the tapes, we were allowed to copy them once we got to our hotel, promising to bring them back the next day. And that is how we can now share part of that interview in the Truus Wijsmuller Archives. It becomes clear how their mother found a way to both make sure their two children would be at the safest place thinkable under the circumstances of a looming occupation/war, while also being there for her husband who was already sent to the pre-concentration camp Westerbork in the East of Holland.

While listening to the tapes, we couldn’t but see Mother Gottschalk as someone who had the best intentions of saving her children. As filmmakers, it was so hard to think back to the pain we had seen while interviewing Helga, who had felt so abandoned by their mother – a feeling that had never left her.

In 2014, four Stolpersteine were placed at Konrad Adenauerstraße 175, Geilenkirchen, stones for father Fritz, mother Regina, Helga, and Kurt.

The special story of Helga and Kurt is also extensively described in the book "Machseh Lajesoumim" by Jaap Focke.