Esther Posner - March 11, 1986
Relationships with Rescuers
Did your family resent the Kleinjan's?
Yes, very much so. Um, I've been thinking about it a lot lately, the relationship between the rescuer and the ones who rescued them. I, I think that after the war was over we didn't have very much to do with them at all. And I look back now and I say, "How terrible, how ungrateful. How could we possibly have been like that?" And uh, most of these people we never saw again. Uh, when I--but the reason I, you know at that time I think we felt so dependent that we just wanted to be, just--I think when the war was over we just wanted to be as independent as we possibly could and by having anything to do with them it, it just reminded us of the dependency relationship and reminded them of the dependency relationship. And I think that, that was uh, very difficult. Now it's much easier to uh, by the way, Dirk Mos uh, was picked up. He and about fifty Dutch policeman. There had been an attempt in Enschede on the life of someone--some German Nazi. And uh, I don't know if it was successful or not, I think it was successful. And what they did in reprisal is take, whatever, fifty Dutch policemen and sent them to labor camp. So one day Maria Mos got a message, "Your husband is being sent to Germany." And uh, she was pregnant at the time and she ran down and said goodbye to him and that was it. And she didn't see him 'til the war was over and he came back weighing less than a hundred pounds.
So he was at camp.
He was at the camps the whole time. And she continued, as much as she could, the work that he had started.
Now this relationship--the lack of relationship at the end of the, end of the war with the Kleinjan's...
Yes.
...was it also the same with...
Mos?
...with Mos?
No, no, they're different people. But then again, we hadn't lived with them and we hadn't uh, they hadn't had as much responsibility for us as the Kleinjan's had had. Um, but at the point the Kleinjan's threw us out, we were very upset with them and, of course, they were very upset with us. Nobody was doing much counseling in those days, you know, on how to get along.
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