Betty Straus, "Our Cabin"

This poem was written by a young Dutch Jewish woman named Betty Straus (later Betty Cohen) while living underground with her brother and sister under German occupation in the Netherlands. Approximately 25,000 to 30,000 Dutch Jews responded to Nazi persecution by going into hiding, and approximately two-thirds of them survived the Holocaust.¹ While the story of Anne Frank and her family has become well known, the Straus siblings had a much different experience. Unlike the Franks, Betty and her family became separated from one another and had to use multiple hiding places.²

In spring 1940, German forces occupied the Netherlands and began targeting Jews. The anti-Jewish actions of the German occupation authorities and their Dutch collaborators escalated quickly from registration and public identification to segregation and forced labor. In summer 1942, German authorities ordered the deportation of Jews from the Netherlands to killing centers in German-occupied Poland. These deportations continued for over two years, mostly through the transit camp of Westerbork to Auschwitz and Sobibor. By the time these deportations stopped in fall 1944, over 100,000 Jews had been deported to their deaths from the German-occupied Netherlands.³

Betty was barely twenty years old when German forces invaded the Netherlands. The van Gessel family sheltered Betty and her sister for nearly a year, but the arrest of several friends hiding nearby forced them to relocate. The young women were smuggled from one safehouse to another on a long and dangerous overnight bicycle journey as pouring rain helped keep them from being seen. Betty wrote this poem describing her second hiding place—the "cabin"—while she and her older brother and sister were living there. The three siblings spent fifteen months hiding in the small attic of the farmhouse belonging to the Garben family. Despite these close quarters, however, the poem describes a relatively normal life in which "we almost forget there is a war going on." As active members of the Dutch underground, the Garbens also briefly shared their hiding space with American pilots whose planes had been shot down and were evading capture by German forces.

Although Betty's poem reveals the difficult conditions of their life underground, it also reflects the optimistic perspective of a young woman who expects to survive. Indeed, the Straus siblings were liberated in April 1945. Betty's parents, however, did not survive the war. They had been deported to their deaths at Auschwitz in 1943. Fewer than a quarter of Dutch Jews survived the Holocaust.

For a detailed breakdown of these numbers and the high mortality rate of Dutch Jews more generally, see Marnix Croes, "The Holocaust in the Netherlands and the Rate of Jewish Survival," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 20.3 (2006): 474–99.

To learn more about hiding and survival in the Netherlands, see Marnix Croes, "The Netherlands 1942-1945: Survival in hiding and the hunt for hidden Jews," The Netherlands Journal of Social Sciences 40.2 (2004): 157–75.

To learn more about hiding and its impact on children and young people, see Diane Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

Josep Garben, one of the Straus's rescuers.

Betty's older brother.

Our cabin two meters by one ten

To see it is special

There is room for three persons

You can sleep in it and if you have to you can live in it

The roof and three walls are made of straw

Very ingenious they have hidden the potty

An opening with cover in one of the walls

We can look through it

Through the opening, we also get air and light

Sometimes a moonbeam on our face

In the evening when the sun is down

We will get a ladder

One climbs up and prepares

And then we disappear before you know it

A voice from down below

Joep¹ calls, "are you up?" "Yes," we answer all together

The last connection with below has been broken

And we are hidden upstairs

Like three toddlers good and correct

We lie next to each other in "bed"

If one wants to turn

The others have to turn with

The turning hurts sometimes

Sometimes you get hit or pushed

You understand

The innocent person gets hit

Sometimes rats disturb us

They come running

But Harry² pokes the straw with an iron stick

The rats frightened, run away

Even with all our worries

We sleep from evening till morning

When Joep comes to open the door

Our daily life continues

We spin wool and knit and eat well

We almost forget there is a war going on

We have to deal with the situation and keep our courage

We trust in God, one time all will be all right

To finish: our sincere prayer:

That a long lasting peace will come soon.

All 17 Items in the Artistic Responses to Persecution Collection

Archival Information for This Item

Source (Credit)

US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Accession Number

1995.A.0514.1

Date Created

April 9, 1944

Author / Creator

Betty Straus

Language(s)

Dutch

Location

Azewijn, Netherlands

Document Type

Poem

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