Esther Posner - March 11, 1986
Contacting the Dutch Underground
We had been approached several times by a Dutch policeman who had been instrument...who had gotten a place for my aunt to hide. My aunt lived in Enschede, which is uh, an industrialized town with a lot of railroads. It was--they had a textile industry in Holland. She lived there and uh, met this Dutch policeman when he came to uh, you know, the police were also working under the Germans, they had to do whatever they were told. Anyway, this policeman, Dirk Mos, had gotten an order to check on dog licenses and went from door to door and he got to my--came to my aunt's house and when he got there, she told him, "I don't have enough food for myself, much less a dog." At which point he said to her, you know, "What do you--I don't understand. What do you mean?" And she said, "Well, I'm Jewish and you know how things are for us Jews." And he said to her, "Well, you shouldn't be living out in the open, you should be hiding." And she said, "I don't have a place." And he said--they didn't really trust each other, so they, they couched their language and he said to her, "Hiding places can be found. I'll be back next week." He came back a week later; she went into hiding with her, taking her mother-in-law with her. Her husband had died of a heart attack. She and her husband had both been couriers for the uh, for German Jews basically, taking--getting things over the border--money, whatever needed to be taken across. And her husband had died of a heart attack, so she was a young widow. She took her mother-in-law with her. And then she asked Dirk Mos, this policeman, if he would please go to Amsterdam to get the rest of her family to go into hiding. Her three other sisters, two of them were single, one of them was married and her brother, who was my father, with his wife and daughter, lived in Amsterdam and uh, slowly but surely they all came and they all survived. And I remember seeing this, this policeman Dirk Mos coming to visit us and I was frightened of him too because he was wearing a police uniform. But, you know, he was just talking to my father and my father uh, wouldn't hear of it. You know, hiding was like running, and he, he didn't want to hear of it. And uh, after we came back from, from this incident uh, getting off the truck uh, he decided that we really were no longer safe and uh, we decided--we went into hiding.
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