Holocaust Records Help Reconstruct Lives

They were simple people, living in a blue-collar section of Amsterdam. Gerardus was a street cleaner. Cornelis worked as an assistant in a bicycle repair shop and attended a special school for slow learners. His mother's letters are marked by spelling errors and plain language.

Holland had gone through hard times in the 1930s, and unemployment was high. After the German army rolled in unopposed in May 1940, the occupation created an economic revival and won some sympathizers. About 20,000 Dutch enlisted in the elite German Waffen SS, while thousands more joined "Landstorm," an SS-type Dutch paramilitary unit.

The Aryan-looking Dutch felt relatively safe from Hitler's race discrimination laws, and people mostly looked away when the occupiers committed outrages against other Dutchmen.

"I don't think there was ever a government so successful in creating new jobs," said Johannes Houwink ten Cate, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at the University of Amsterdam. "The first years of occupation were relatively rosy."

Later a resistance movement arose which at its height numbered 50,000 fighters, compared with 150,000 who actively collaborated with the occupation, Houwink ten Cate said.

As the tide of war began to turn in 1943, the occupation grew harsher. Arrests of Jews intensified. Most went without a struggle, unaware they were destined to die in gas chambers or by hard labor.

About 25,000 Jews went into hiding, but 8,000 of them were turned in _ many for cash bounties by their fellow Dutchmen. Among the 6 million killed in the Holocaust were 107,000 of Holland's 140,000 Jews.

Meanwhile, Dutchmen aged 16-24 received call-up notices to work in Germany, filling jobs vacated by German men at the battlefront. Tens of thousands evaded the labor draft, but there was no bounty on their heads, said Houwink ten Cate.

Brouwenstijn may have been one of those who refused to go. He was still in Holland on May 2, 1944, when he was arrested for possessing a radio _ outlawed because it could pick up broadcasts by the Dutch government-in-exile. He was jailed for six weeks, then sent to Camp Amersfoort in the eastern Netherlands where low-level members of the resistance often were taken. On Sept. 8, 1944, he was put on a train for Germany. He had turned 22 the previous month.

His family never heard from him again.

After the war, his mother wrote repeatedly to the Dutch Red Cross for information.

"Dear Sir: Because I haven't heard from you, I am writing this post card to see if you have heard anything about my son, Cornelis Marinus Brouwenstijn, born 23 Aug. 1922, in Amsterdam. I hope that you can soon send me a message. Thank you in advance," wrote his mother in 1948, filling both sides of the tiny postcard that remains today in the Red Cross archive in The Hague.

In May 1949 a form letter came from the Red Cross. "We regret to inform you ...," it began, informing the parents that their son had died between April 19 and May 3, 1945, near Neuengamme, a labor camp in northern Germany.

The circumstances of his death were unconfirmed, but the likely sequence of events seems to be this:

British troops were advancing on Neuengamme. Hitler had committed suicide a few days earlier, and SS chief Heinrich Himmler had given orders not to surrender the camps with their prisoners.

SS guards put some 8,000 inmates onto two ships, the Cap Arcona and the Thielbeck. On May 3, a British air force squadron, knowing nothing about the ships' human cargo, bombed and sank them.

Though his body was never found, the Dutch national War Graves Institute in The Hague lists Brouwenstijn as "buried at sea."