Joop Westerweel was a Dutch primary school teacher and pacifist anarchist who ran the largest single rescue network for Jewish children and young adults in the occupied Netherlands. He was thirty seven years old when the Germans invaded in May 1940. He was the headmaster of the Werkplaats Children’s Community School in Bilthoven, a progressive school founded by Kees Boeke that the children of leading Dutch and European intellectuals attended. He had no Jewish ancestry, no formal religious affiliation, and a long-standing public position of pacifist opposition to military service in any cause. He was the type of person whose principles, on a textbook reading of the period, would have inclined him toward refusal to engage with the war at all. He instead organised the Westerweel Group.
The Westerweel Group emerged out of the Dutch Zionist youth movement Hechalutz, the Pioneer, which had run training farms across the Netherlands in the 1930s to prepare young Dutch and German Jewish refugees for emigration to Palestine. By 1942 the German occupiers had begun deporting Dutch Jews. The Hechalutz farms were under threat. Joachim Simon, a young German Jewish refugee at the Loosdrecht farm who was known to his colleagues as Shushu, approached Westerweel in summer 1942 with a request to help hide the farm’s young people if the deportations came. Westerweel agreed and quickly broadened the operation to include both children and adults beyond the farms. He recruited his wife Wilhelmina, known as Wil, his children, his teaching colleagues at the Werkplaats school, and a network of around fifty Dutch non-Jewish helpers across the central provinces.
The Group’s specialty was placing young Jewish people in hiding addresses and, where possible, smuggling them out of the Netherlands altogether. Around two hundred and fifty Jewish young people were placed in hiding farms, convents and private homes through the network during 1942 and 1943, almost all of whom survived the war. A second arm of the operation, the more difficult and the more dangerous, was the smuggling of young Jewish adults across occupied Belgium and France to neutral Spain and from Spain to Palestine. The route went south by overnight train through Antwerp, Brussels and Lille to the unoccupied zone of Vichy France, then across the Pyrenees on foot with mountain guides, into Spain, and from Barcelona by ship to British Mandate Palestine. The route required forged papers at multiple stages, contacts in Belgium, France and Spain, and the willingness to move young people in groups of two and three through the occupation under cover stories that were transparently thin. The route worked. Around seventy young Jewish adults reached Palestine through the Westerweel Group line between late 1942 and 1944.
The cost was high. Joachim Simon was arrested at the Belgian border in January 1943 on a return journey and committed suicide in Breda prison rather than risk giving the network up under torture. His German Jewish wife Adina survived the war in hiding. Wilhelmina Westerweel was arrested in 1943 and sent to Vught and then to Ravensbrück, where she survived the war. Joop Westerweel himself was arrested at the Belgian border in March 1944 and held at the Vught concentration camp in the Netherlands. He was tortured but did not name his collaborators. He was executed by firing squad at Vught on 11 August 1944. He was forty five years old. The network continued to operate after his arrest under his deputy, the schoolteacher Bouke Koning, until the German collapse.
Yad Vashem named Joop Westerweel Righteous Among the Nations in 1964 and his wife Wilhelmina in the same year. He was honoured by the State of Israel with the dedication of the Westerweel Forest at Y’odfat in Galilee, with a forty hectare planting that includes individual trees in the names of around sixty members of the Group. A Westerweel monument stands at the entrance to the Werkplaats school in Bilthoven, where the school continues to operate today on the same lines as Boeke and Westerweel had set out in the 1930s.
The Westerweel Group is the case in the Dutch wartime record that does most credit to the country. The Dutch overall record is poor: around three quarters of the pre-war Dutch Jewish population was murdered, the highest proportion in western Europe, partly because of the efficiency of the Dutch civil service in carrying out German orders, partly because the small geography of the country made hiding difficult, partly because of the willingness of some sections of the Dutch population to inform on Jews in hiding for the German rewards. The Westerweel Group represents the opposite tendency in the same population. The school in Bilthoven was, throughout the war, an island of the Holland that had not been corrupted. The fifty members of the Group, almost all of them ordinary Dutch teachers, students, farmers and clergymen, were the part of the country that had refused.
See also
Sources
- Hans Schippers, Westerweel Group: Non-Conformist Resistance Against Nazi Germany, Springer, 2018
- Bob Moore, Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Yad Vashem, files on Joop and Wilhelmina Westerweel, Righteous Among the Nations, 1964
- Werkplaats Kindergemeenschap, Bilthoven, school archive
- Marnix Croes and Peter Tammes, Gif laten wij niet voortbestaan, Aksant, 2004, on the Dutch occupation deportation rates
- Bert Jan Flim, Saving the Children: History of the Organized Effort to Rescue Jewish Children in the Netherlands, 1942, 1945, Vallentine Mitchell, 2005