Julie McDonald Commentary: Sharing Dutch Mother’s Auschwitz Survival Story Draws Family Closer

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As a teenager, Ada van Esso survived two years in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a Nazi death camp in Poland, and weighed only 60 pounds when she left Ravensbrück concentration camp for Sweden.

Hans van Dam, eager to repel the invading enemy in Holland and aided by the Resistance, hiked over the Pyrenees range from France into neutral Spain, sheltered briefly in Portugal, then flew to England to fight with the British against Germany.

Yet neither Ada van Esso nor Hans van Dam spoke much about their lives during World War II.

“My parents looked forward rather than backward,” said their eldest daughter, Ine-Marie van Dam, a conference translator from Centralia fluent in English, Dutch, German, Spanish and French. “That was very much the message. They didn’t talk of their experiences.”

But in 2020, she persuaded her reluctant mother to share her concentration camp experiences in a recorded interview for Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity, where Ine speaks about her parents’ lives as part of its speakers’ bureau, including at Centralia College and Centralia Christian School. She told her mother to share the stories for her four grandchildren, who would someday want to know. Her mother spent sleepless nights, tense and nervous, both before and after the interview.

“I didn’t know my mom’s story. None of us did,” Ine van Dam said. “We knew she’d been in the Holocaust. We knew she’d been in the camps. We knew that we were Jewish. All of that was out in the open. But we didn’t know the story. I think in large part, many people handled it this way. They didn’t want to burden their children with the horrors of what they had lived through.”

Ada van Esso enjoyed a normal middle class life in a rural Netherlands community — until Adolf Hitler’s election as Germany’s chancellor in 1933 and the rise of his National Socialist German Workers Party. The Nazis blamed the Jews for the nation’s economic ills after Germany’s defeat in the First World War.

“My mom’s best friend stops talking to her,” van Dam said. “She lived across the street and wouldn’t talk to her. The family had turned Nazi.”

With fewer than 300 Jewish people living in Meppel, only 40 miles from the German border, Ada’s parents, Meijer and Marie van Esso, moved in 1937 with their three children 85 miles westward to Amsterdam, a city with 80,000 Jews. Ada’s father owned a jewelry business and traveled a lot. For Ada, assimilating into city life meant losing her rural Dutch accent, but she started making friends.

Then, on May 10, 1940, Hitler invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. The Netherlands surrendered five days later, the day after the Nazis bombed Rotterdam to smithereens. The government capitulated and the queen fled to England. 

Persecution of Jewish business owners and residents soon followed in occupied Holland. The Nazis implemented a curfew and confiscated their radios, bicycles, telephones and businesses. Hitler’s propaganda about the Aryan master race spread as he described Jews as “a threat to the purity of the Aryan race” and “subhuman,” van Dam said.

“Well, life changed,” Ada van Esso recalled in her video interview. “We still could go to school, but after a year, we had to wear a star.”

Then Jewish children could go only to special schools. Although they didn’t know each other, Ada attended the same school at the same time as teenager Anne Frank, whose published diary after her death detailed her life for two years hiding in a secret attic.

“People came that disappeared, and we never knew — did they get picked up by the Nazis or did they go in hiding?” Ada van Esso said in her soft voice.

The van Essos had few options. They found places that they thought were safe to hide their mothers, Ada’s grandmothers, and a doctor agreed to care for their youngest son, Maukie, who was physically and mentally impaired. Then her parents paid someone to aid their escape to Switzerland with Ada and her older brother, Leo.

“We were told that we could go to the train station. We could take the train to go to Switzerland so that will be taken care of. And it was totally crooked,” Ada van Esso said. “It was somebody who took all the money and saw to it that we were all put in prison.”

Captured at the German border, the family was sent first to a prison camp in Cologne and then a former old people’s retirement home in Berlin.

“From there, they put us on the train to Auschwitz,” she said. “We were put in cattle cars. This one was covered.”

They traveled four or five days without food, she said, “till the train stopped and that was in Auschwitz.” 

As they left the train in April 1943, men were sent to one line, women to another, she said. 

“A doctor was looking at you and he went like that —” Ada waved a thumb in the air — “one went to the camp, and the other went to the gas chambers, but we didn’t know that.”

Women with young children wound up in the gas camps, van Dam said.

“She was 15 years old; her mom was 40 years old,” she said of her mother. “They were both deemed fit to go ahead and work for the Nazis for a while until they didn’t live anymore.”

The Nazis shaved all their body hair, issued them striped uniforms, and tattooed a number on their left forearm. Everyone spoke German, not Dutch. It was noisy, with dogs barking and people screaming and shouting orders. An overwhelming stench permeated the air as the prisoners stood in the cold for roll call.

“It stinks to high heaven,” van Dam said. “They’re burning bodies. Of course it stinks.”



Ada was told that Dutch Jews don’t last in the camps; that she’d be dead in two weeks.

Within a few weeks, while her mother lay dying, Ada was offered the chance to work in the laundry. She washed primarily Nazi uniforms, while others dried, ironed and sewed them. At times, they tore the uniforms to create work for others so they would live another day. 

“Because everything you can do to them to damage anything that belonged to the Germans, you do,” Ada van Esso said.

She credits her job in the laundromat for her survival. 

“It was a building,” she said. “And it was downstairs. Comparatively to Auschwitz and Birkenau, it was luxury.”

As Soviet soldiers threatened from the east, the Nazis in January 1945 sent Auschwitz prisoners 370 miles away to Ravensbrück concentration camp, often in uncovered cattle cars or on a death march through snow during one of the coldest winters in European history. Ada secreted away extra articles of clothes for added protection.

 “One out of three people didn’t make it,” van Dam said. “If they dropped out, they were either shot or just left to freeze.”

Again at Ravensbrück, the Nazis selected some prisoners to work and others to die. Although depleted, Ada persuaded them she could work. They assigned her to pick nettles with bare hands in the dead of winter. 

Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish aristocrat who heard of plans to liquidate all prisoners, negotiated with SS Officer Heinrich Himmler the release of 31,000 prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. They were loaded onto white buses bearing red crosses and driven to Lübeck, Germany, and from there traveled by ship to Malmö, Sweden. 

Ada, weighing only 60 pounds, boarded one of those buses. She stayed in Sweden for four months recuperating in the tiny town of Skatås. 

After the war ended, she flew home to Holland and lived with friends for a short time before finding a place of her own. Authorities told her she couldn’t live alone at only 17 but backed off after she told them she had survived two years in Auschwitz. She returned to schools taught by Jewish teachers and professionals.

“This was basically an AP program on steroids,” van Dam said.

When a new train of survivors arrived, people left school to see if they could find family members.

Unfortunately, Ada lost her grandmothers, her parents, and her brother Leo in the Holocaust. Only one cousin, Annet, survived in hiding as did her disabled younger brother, Maukie. Her brother didn’t recognize her when she met him and died shortly afterward.

Of the 140,000 Dutch Jews in the Netherlands before the war, van Dam said, only 5,200 survived the deportations.

Ada van Esso was one of them.

During the war, Hans van Dam, a trained lawyer, traveled more than seven months from Rotterdam over the mountains to Spain and then to Sintra, Portugal, where he recovered for a few months before flying to England. He fought his way back to the Netherlands in the Royal Netherlands Motorized Infantry Brigade also referred to as the Princess Irene Brigade. He arrived in France in August 1944, two months after D-Day, and fought with other Allied Forces through France and Belgium to the Netherlands, where he was demobilized. He helped survivors find family members after the war. On a list of 52 names, he found only one person alive — Ada van Esso. They dated, married, and started a family with the birth of Ine-Marie in 1947.

When rumblings of the Korean War began, with threats of Soviet expansion in Europe, Hans and Ada van Dam opted to leave the Netherlands rather than risk living through another war. They traveled with Hans’ younger brother and his family to the Dutch territory of Curaçao, a Caribbean Island. His brother emigrated to South America, while Hans and Ada raised their family on the island for six years while awaiting visas to the United States. In 1956, her father traveled to New York and then Seattle, where he sent for his wife, two daughters, and infant son to join him. They arrived on a Friday and the girls started school on Monday, not knowing English.

Rather than practicing law, Hans trained as a certified public accountant. He moved the family south to Beaverton, Oregon, where Ine graduated from high school in 1965, before returning to the Seattle area. Her siblings attended Roosevelt High School, and Ine enrolled at the University of Washington. Her mother, as an empty nester, earned a bachelor’s degree at the same time from the UW. A copy of her term paper, “Planned Deviant Behavior,” is available at the Holocaust Center.

After graduating in 1969 with a degree in French and political science, Ine pursued her dream of becoming a conference translator. She studied three years at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and then worked a dozen years for the European Commission in Brussels.  She moved to Monterey, California, married, and taught interpretation and translation. But as her marriage ended and her mother’s health failed, she sought a return to the Pacific Northwest — and Centralia College had an opening for a language professor. In 2008, she joined the faculty for a few years and bought a home. For years she lived a bicoastal life as a freelance interpreter with a home in Centralia and a rented condo in Washington, D.C. She frequently spends time in Mexico.

“Interestingly enough, and totally unexpectedly, learning, absorbing and sharing my mother’s story is proving to be a healing experience for me,” Ine said. “I’ve always been affected by the knowledge of what she went through as a teenager. … For years I held the barbed wire of the camps in my back.”

She’s been telling her mother’s story for nearly four years, both in person and via Zoom, and reconnected with cousins on three continents. Hans van Dam died in September 1980, and Ada van Dam passed away last year on March 6 at the age of 93. Her story can be viewed at https://www.holocaustcenterseattle.org/ada-van-esso.

“My mother thought people wouldn’t care,” Ine said. “In fact, the response has been heartwarming, the questions thought-provoking, the connections—including with family members—astonishing. And as new information keeps flowing in, I feel ever more love, understanding, and compassion for the person my mom was able to build and the love she was able to provide from such a harrowing past.”

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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.