Recalling widespread suffering of the Holocaust

SALISBURY — After reading the May 16 Lakeville Journal story about Holocaust survivor Endre “Andy” Sarkany , who told his story to a group of students at Housatonic Valley Regional High School on May 13,  Mieke Armstrong of Salisbury felt it was time to tell her own story.

Her father, Sybrand Marinus van Haersma Buma, was the mayor of a township of 29 villages in Friesland, the northernmost province of the Netherlands when the Germans invaded the Low Countries in May 1940.

The van Haersma Buma family, as well as her mother’s van Heloma family, were Dutch aristocracy with a long record of holding public office.

They were the kind of people who would attract the attention of the invaders.

Van Haersma Buma knew ahead of time that the Germans were coming. He was alerted in the middle of the night to the presence of German troops on the border in 1940.

“We have to push them back. That’s all my mother remembers him saying.”

He immediately joined the Resistance.

When the Germans arrived, they noticed van Haersma Buma’s tie pin, bearing a likeness of Queen Wilhelmina.

The Germans asked who was represented on the pin. Van Haersma Buma said, “My Queen.”

“Your former queen,” was the reply.

Soon after the invasion, the Germans removed local officials, including her father, the mayor, from office. So the town officials met in secret for a year.

On May 7, 1941, when Armstrong was almost 4 years old, a Nazi official, a Dutch collaborator and two others came to their home and took her father away.

“They took him away and that was it.”

Van Haersma Buma was shuffled around in various forms of detention — first in the Netherlands, and then in Germany.

He wrote home sporadically, sending short notes that had been censored, from May 1941 to September 1942. Then the notes stopped.

While imprisoned, van Haersma Buma, who somehow had managed to retain a Bible, held prayer meetings with his fellow prisoners.

But his physical health deteriorated from the harsh labor camp regimen.

On Dec. 10, 1942, her mother, Marca, wrote to the Swedish attaché in Berlin, looking for any news of her husband.

But it was too late. Van Haersma Buma had died on Dec. 11 at the age of 38.

The family was notified, “probably from the Red Cross,” a week later.

“The Nazis were so organized, it’s amazing,” said Armstrong. They sent her father’s threadbare clothes back to her mother after he left the first German concentration camp in the Netherlands.

She remembered her mother putting the clothes away and being told to leave the room. She remembered that particularly, as “no” was not a word she heard very often.

Armstrong said that the Dutch people were deeply sympathetic to the plight of the Jewish people, and did what they could to help Jews escape the Nazis.

But she thinks it is important that people remember that other people suffered under the Nazis as well.

“I realize now that a whole wave went through the upper echelon,” she said. “We were vulnerable too.”

During the occupation, which lasted until the end of the war in the north, her mother concentrated on her family.

“My mother was strong, deeply religious. Her life from now on was to take care of her four children.”

The Germans used their family’s home as on observation post occasionally, but the family was able to offer shelter to refugees from the cities.

It was difficult but the family stayed together, and her mother’s resolve never broke.

Only in 1946 did Armstrong see her mother cry.

“Her inner strength was amazing.”

And her faith allowed her to forgive the Germans after the war.

After the war, Armstrong studied horticulture and came to the United States in 1961 on a fellowship.

She arrived in Brooklyn in September 1961. “I met my husband three weeks later.”

She and John K. Armstrong bought a house on Bird Peak in Salisbury in 1976.

John Armstrong died in 1997.

She said time is running out to hear about the impact of the Nazis. When she tells someone that her father died in a Nazi labor camp, the response is often “Oh, I didn’t know he was Jewish.”

“I feel I need to set the record straight.”