Norbert Ripp made it so easy for us to like him from the moment he opened the door of the care facility he and his wife had moved to not too long before we met. Here stood a sweet man, a soft voice, formulating his sentences with care. His lovely and open wife Evelyn was present during our visit and interview, and it was only after we spent some extra time once filming was over, that we understood that she had gone through such a difficult period during the war as well. Having fled from the hell of the Lachva Ghetto, she had to survive in the forests surrounding the ghetto. It turned out that she had recently committed that impressive story to paper with great courage in her recently published book.

At the beginning of 1939, Norbert arrived in Holland after his whole family life was turned upside down after Kristallnacht. He grew up in Bochum, where he was born in 1927, and was living quite a happy life. All of a sudden, all of that changed, when he realized that the children in the neighborhood would no longer want to play with him or his brothers because they were Jewish. Once school was banned for them too, his parents found a way to get Norbert out of Germany on a Kindertransport train. After a few stops in the Netherlands, he ended up in the Burgerweeshuis (orphanage) in Amsterdam.

There he became part of a group of boys of about the same age, who got along well. Just like Bernard Goldfarb (see his portrait on this website too) and Arthur Adler (see his portrait elsewhere on this website), he regularly visited Truus and her husband Joop Wijsmuller on Fridays at their home at Nassaukade  in Amsterdam. They spent time there, chatted with the fatherly Joop and often stayed for dinner. The housekeeper Cietje appears in many of the stories, and was a very warm, homely woman who ensured that the Wijsmuller household was very well prepared to receive this special group of boys. They found a kind of 'second home' here, far away from the family from which they had been so brutally separated by the war.

Norbert Ripp survived the war thanks to the rescue efforts of Truus Wijsmuller. His eldest brother was able to escape to the United States shortly after, the middle brother initially stayed behind in Germany, and was arrested during a flight, but was eventually able to get away with his parents. After the war, the entire family was reunited in the United States, a reunion that didn’t happen for many families.

Norbert eventually became a dentist and built a beautiful and valuable life in the United States, with children and grandchildren.

At the end of the interview, he walks to another room to show a school project by one of his grandsons. He recreated a part of the ship SS Bodegraven, the ship on which his grandfather Norbert and the other 73 children from the Burgerweeshuis were able to escape from the Netherlands just in time. The day was May 14, 1940, the excat they that the Netherlands capitulated to the German occupier.

Norbert reads out loud what his grandson wrote in his project:

"The journey of young Norbert. My project discusses my grandfather, Norbert's Ripp journey from Germany to England in his escape from the Holocaust. He escaped through the Kindertransport: an organization thanks to which children younger than 18 years old could leave Germany. I made part of the boat he was on, I used wood sticks and a picture of my grandfather. My grandfather was around my age when his mother sent him to safety through the Kindertransport. He went from Germany to England, where he was in an orphanage for a while before coming to America. It took many of his sacrifices for me to be a proud Jew in America today, many years after the Holocaust, including the opportunity to go to a Jewish day school."