A VISIT TO YAD VASHEM

by Sien and Nico Overduin-Somsen

In the first two weeks of May Sien [440] and Nico [441] made a roundtrip in Israel and the Palestine territories. For them this trip was the first encounter with a country with which many people with a biblical upbringing have special ties. Ties that have sometimes become very special ones during and after the war because of particular events.

Sien’s parents: Dirk Johan Somsen [361] and Wilhelmina H. Smits [362] made similar trips two times before, the first one on 1965. On those occasions they visited old acquaintances, people who had belonged to the Jewish community in Eibergen, but who had emigrated to Israel after the war.

Avenue of the Righteous

On 11 May 2000 we (Nico and Sien) visited Yad Vashem, just outside Jerusalem, a place of commemoration and prayer for the six million Jews who became victims of the Nazis. In the Holocaust Museum the complete history of what happened to the European Jews in the thirties and forties is shown by means of thousands of pictures and documents.

Outside there is the Avenue of the Righteous, lined with trees like living monuments in memory of those who sacrificed their lives to rescue a fellowman from death.

Roaming in the yard outside we descended the stairs into a garden in the shade of trees. There we discovered the walls with the names of people who had helped Jewish people in hiding during the Nazi regime and who had received the Yad Vashem decoration for this.

Nico Overduin [441] is pointing to the names of his in-laws

On December 16, 1981, Dirk Johan Somsen and his wife Willemina Hendrika Smits received this decoration. In Somsen Omnes Generationes this event is mentioned and there is also a picture in it. (page 102/103).

It is a very special experience to be faced with the names of your parents and parents-in-law, (see photo below) cut in stone, during a holiday. (The names are not spelled correctly though).

Browsing through the Somsen book we realise that in the war many more Somsens helped (Jewish) people in hiding. Relatives who were not specially mentioned or who did not receive a decoration but who showed great courage. In the same pages (100-102) we read about Berend H. Somsen [367] who was a brother of Dirk J. (uncle Bernard). He was not lacking in courage in the years of war.

This one Somsen who received a Yad Vashem decoration in 1981 was allowed to do so – in our view – on behalf of all those Somsens not mentioned. ¦