‘We don’t know where we are going’
Sophia (Sophie, Fietje) van Geens, Rotterdam 10 August 1925 — Sobibor 28 May 1943
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“ Because really we will soon return with the whole family to see you again…”
My mother remembered in 2016 how Fietje came to say goodbye in April 1943 in the Zoomstraat, in the Oude Noorden area of Rotterdam. My mother was just under eight years old, but she would never forget that moment. Fietje was her 17-year-old niece. “She didn’t have to go …” she added. I was afraid to ask what she meant and a few months later asking was no longer possible.
Fietje’s mother, Paulina van Geens-Silberstein, got married in 1918 to the Amsterdam merchant Hartog van Geens. Like her brothers, she married within the Dutch Jewish community. Her parents, Abraham Silberstein and Sophia Levie (also: Levin, Lewin) were immigrants from Kaunas, Lithuania and Paulina was their second daughter, born in Rotterdam. Their first daughter, Gusta, was the only one who would marry outside the Jewish community, which was so decisive for survival from 1942 on. Only those that were “mixed married” in time could stay. The nazi’s never settled their judicial dispute on the ‘question of mixed marriages’ before war’s end. Gusta managed to have herself officially “de-starred” at the authorities in The Hague in the autumn of 1943, which was recorded by the Municipality of Rotterdam with zeal and precision. The metadata of life and death.
Hartog and Paulina settled in the Lijnbaanstraat in Rotterdam, where more people of Jewish descent lived at the time. In 1918, three months after their marriage, they had a first daughter, Margaretha. Abraham followed in 1920 and Jonas (1922), Sophia / Fietje (1925) and Levie (1929). Margaretha was killed in a car accident at the age of nine. She wanted to go to the Schiekade with a girlfriend and crossed the road under the viaduct of the train to Hofplein Station and was scooped in the process.
The area around Lijnbaanstraat was severely hit during the bombing of Rotterdam, May 1940. The Van Geens family had to flee, found shelter in Rotterdam Spangen, later at Duindigt (Wassenaar, near The Hague) and finally on the Van Ravesteinstraat in the Schilderswijk in The Hague. Fietje went to live with a friend on Jan Blankenstraat opposite…
