‘The Gestapo entered our house.’ Survivor of Nazis shares story with students
Six hundred eighth-grade students sat rapt in the auditorium of Turlock Junior High on Tuesday afternoon, needing nearly none of the shushing and scolding so common in school assemblies.
For about 45 minutes, they hung on the words of 86-year-old Irene Perbal of Calaveras County, who shared her horrific experiences as a 7-year-old living in Amsterdam when Germany invaded in May 1940 and began occupying the Netherlands. Her account included the pain of seeing the Nazis take away her father for hiding Jews, and the greater pain of never seeing him return.
Until Hitler’s rise and World War II, young Irene lived a “beautiful” life in Amsterdam with her parents and siblings. It fell to pieces with the occupation, she told the kids, who are studying the Holocaust.
Under an appointed Nazi governor, the Dutch immediately lost all aspects of their own culture. They were stripped of the freedoms of speech, press and assembly, Perbal told the students. Because it now was a Nazi-occupied nation, there were concerns of air raids, so residents blacked out their windows with paper and cardboard at night. When an air raid was expected, they took shelter in basements or wherever else they could, she said. “We were literally living in darkness and fear.”
Radios had to be surrendered to the Gestapo, leading people to hide them so they could listen to Radio London, Perbal said. Her grandfather concealed one in an attic and would take notes to share with people.
The situation was much more dire for the Jews, she told the assembly. They were not allowed to use telephones. They were allowed to shop only during a period of a couple of hours. The children were banned from public schools.
As the Nazis rounded up Jews for what were believed to be labor camps, families went into hiding. She recalled seeing children torn from their parents, husbands being torn from their wives.
“When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes a duty,” Perbal said, quoting Thomas Jefferson. And so her family went beyond hiding a radio to harboring Jews. “In spite of the Nazis having warned that whomever helped a Jew would be treated like one.”
Young children were reminded daily not to talk to anybody about the people hidden in their homes.
Food was rationed, which meant that for families like hers, it was even more scarce. Their household included Jews in hiding, who, of course, had no coupons. Her father worked at the rationing center, which allowed him to secure a bit more food.
“We were scared the whole time that the Germans would come into our houses, because we had the Jews hidden,” Perbal said. And on June 6, 1943, just six days after her 10th birthday, that fear became a reality. “The Gestapo entered our house. Those guys were not even Germans, they were Dutch traitors working for the Nazis,” she said.
Three of them came in, went upstairs, found the Jews in the home at the time and dragged them out. They asked her mother where her husband was, Irene said, and were told he was at work. Her father was located and taken away, supposedly to a labor camp, but “by a miracle,” she, her mother and her siblings were left in the house. “That was probably because we are not Jewish. Because Jewish families, they were all taken.”
The next day, though, the Nazis came with trucks and took all her family’s possessions, and turned the mother and children onto the streets. They survived through the help of the resistance, she said.
Even D-Day, the June 6, 1944, Allied landings on the Normandy beaches that marked the start of a campaign to liberate northwest Europe, didn’t loosen Amsterdam from the suffocating grip of the Nazis, “who became meaner and meaner every single day,” Perbal told the students.
Food coupons became worthless when transportation stopped and store shelves went empty, she said. “The winter of 1944-45 was called the Hungerwinter. It was the coldest on record. We were starving, we had no means to warm our houses.” Only at the public kitchen could residents get a little to eat — a watery substance made of potato peels and cabbage stems that had zero nutritional value.
That winter, 2,500 people died in Amsterdam, and 30,000 more in surrounding areas, Perbal said. Relief came in May with Operation Manna, one of the humanitarian food drops over the Netherlands, undertaken by Allied bomber crews during the final days of the war in Europe.
Perbal kept her composure as she recounted her experience, even when talking about the return of political prisoners taken from Amsterdam. Her family would greet every arriving bus, looking for her father and showing his picture. He never came home, and his wife and children learned that the “labor camp” he was sent to was, in fact, a death camp.
“My father had no intention of being a hero,” Perbal said toward the close of her presentation. “But he left us a legacy of great courage and humanity. ... And told us never to be afraid and always stand up for our principles.”
Perbal said she came to learn that there are no winners in war, and she felt compassion even for the German citizens — the women, children and elderly — who suffered. She said she’s tried to live a life of acceptance and tolerance, but “I admit that I still have a zero tolerance, and that is for swastikas on the streets of America. That scares me to death because I know all the evil that came from that.”
This story was originally published February 12, 2020 at 2:46 PM.
