Menno Mano Kohen

Name of Interviewee: Manno Cohen

Name of Interviewer: Dina Shefet

Cassette Number: VD – 660

Interviewer: Today is the 13th of December, 1994 - an interview with Mr. Manno Cohen. Mr. Cohen, please tell me about your childhood, about your family.

Manno Cohen: I was born in Amersfoort, Holland on the 7th of May, 1936. My mother and father had just opened a bakery there. They were one of the three kosher bakers in town who served the Jewish community and the army with bread. The army was very important because, well, in those days, a lot of Jewish young men in the Dutch army and in the beginning of the war, or just before the war started actually, they all came to our house to eat because they wanted kosher food and I remember very well them coming to our house and my mother and my grandmother, who was living with us, cooking for about forty or fifty Jewish boys that came to eat with us. Amersfoort was a very small town with a small Jewish community and I don't really remember very much of the town in the first years of my life. I remember being in the bakery - the bakery always played a big part in our lives because the bakery was in the house and it was part of our playground actually and the first memories I really have are of the town and of anything specially happening were actually the first days of the war. Because, probably because they were very exceptional and very special days - it was not like the normal, everyday happening. Also it was the 10th of May which is my sister's birthday and we were ordered on that day to leave the town and be evacuated to another part of Holland because the Dutch authorities were afraid that Amersfoort would be bombed by the Germans, like they did Rotterdam and Amsterdam. We were transported out of town - the whole town was emptied, actually, and one of the things that I can really remember from the trip going up to the north of Holland was that we had to pass through Amsterdam, across a bridge on the river and we saw the oil harbour of Amsterdam burning - this is very vivid - the smoke of the oil harbour, the oil tanks burning - this is a memory that it still very vivid. The other one is that we were brought to school somewhere in Holland - I know where it is now because later on I was told where it was.

Interviewer: Where was it?

Manno Cohen: It was in a little village called Kudeck and we were brought to the school and the roof of the school was painted with a red cross on a white base because in those days they still thought that a red cross would protect people from the Germans. There we stayed for about five or six days and we were brought back to Amersfoort after maybe a week - I don't know exactly. And as we came into the house all the decorations were still up for my sister's birthday - all the paper decorations - and the first thing I see the women still climbing on chairs to get down the decorations because they were in no mood for birthday parties or any celebrations at the time.

Interviewer: What did you speak?

Manno Cohen: Dutch.

Interviewer: Dutch.

Manno Cohen: We're a Dutch family. We have been Hollanders on both sides - my mom and dad's side - we've been Hollanders for many years - from my mother's side, I know definitely that we were there before Napoleon. Where we came from originally I don't know...that's 700 years and when we got there I don't know either, but probably, most probably from Germany somewhere, but that was many, many years ago - a couple of hundred years ago that we came there. Also I think because it was Germany, there was still family in Germany, the very well-known name of our German branch of the family was Rosenthal - the crockery factory - the famous Rosenthal facotry - that was family of my grandmother's. Also the contact between our family - the Hollanders - and the parts that were living in Germany were very close - there was always some part of the family was living in Germany.

Interviewer: And what kind of relation did you have with your neighbours?

Manno Cohen: With our non-Jewish neighbours?

Interviewer: With your non-Jewish neighbours.

Manno Cohen: Non-Jewish neighbours. Actually some of them very good because, as it turned out, they helped save our lives and some of them very bad because we had to go into hiding because of them. We lived in a mixed community and, as a matter of fact, our really next-door neighbour was not kosher. He was sympathising with the Germans. I don't know - say he was a Dutch Nazi, but anyway the family sympathised with the Germans and we had to be very careful because of him and our first address that we went into hiding was actually next door to his parents and because of that we had to really stay indoors for the first six weeks. That's taking the whole thing out of chronological order - I don't know if you want that.

Interviewer: I don't mind.

Manno Cohen: You don't mind. The other neighbours - I don't really know. I remember there was people there who were still living after the war, after we came back and we had contact with them, but how strong the contact was between my family, my parents, and our neighbours, our non-Jewish neighbours, except for the one family that actually saved our lives, that started with saving our lives, I don't know how good the contact. For me, I was four years old when the war started.

Interviewer: Were you a religious family?

Manno Cohen: That's a very, very, very difficult question. My father had a kosher bakery. That meant that he had a hechsher and it meant that the rabbinate approved of him. I know that my grandparents were very religious people, especially my father's family. I also know that my father's generation, my father and mother's generation, already were not that religious anymore. If you talk about religion in the form of all the outward signs of - you know, if someone who lays tefillin every morning and goes...if you talk about in that way, then I'd say: "No." If you say: "Were you traditional Jews?" we definitely were. Definitely were very traditional Jews. We had a kosher home before the war. My dad used to go to shul, to synagogue, especially on Shabbat in the morning, or Friday nights probably. During the week definitely not, he didn't have time. He had to work.

Interviewer: Was it a Zionist family or at least Zion was mentioned?

Manno Cohen: In those days, I don't know. I don't think so.

Interviewer: Was it mentioned ever?

Manno Cohen: How do I know? I was four years old. Those things I really don't know. Afterwards, if you talk fifty years later, from 1960 onwards, yes. Actually it started in 1948 - it accumulated. Very Zionistic family. My parents were besotted with Israel. They were completely...why they never moved here is another story, but they have lived here, they should have gone to live here, not only once, twice or three times. As a matter of fact, in 1949, my dad was ready to move his family to Israel. He had already ordered a prefabricated house that could be transported easily by sea and everything. The only problem was that they didn't want to leave their parents because both my mom and my dad were the only children left in the family. My grandparents' only children. All the others had disappeared during the war. In order to come to Israel they definitely had to take their parents with them. My father had a mother and my mother still had both her parents. Funnily enough, the women, both my grandmothers, were absolutely thrilled and they wanted to come and they wanted to go with and they - I think, thinking back on this now later - I'm also no teenager anymore and when this happened - I think they were actually looking forward to starting life all over again, even at their age because of what had happened because whatever happened in Holland had such a bad memory, it was just a terrible thing in their lives, of course, it was the worst that could have happened to anybody. They lost all their children except one. They were actually looking forward to starting all over again. My grandfather, who was a darling, he really was a terrific man, wanted to come to Israel - had no problem with moving from Holland and coming to live in Israel. His only problem was he would not go by sea or over air - he wanted to go over land. If he could have come here by train in those days, he would have come. But to go onto a boat, uh, uh, that was not for him. He was a very old-fashioned man - he was born in 1870 or something - and we're talking about a seventy-year-old at least - he was at least seventy about the time I'm talking about and he wasn't going to make it, he wasn't going to travel by sea and...so we stayed. We cancelled and we stayed in Holland. Then, we're talking twenty years later, my father retired and they started travelling and they were...the first place they wanted to go to was Israel and they came here the first time in 1960-61 and since then, till the day Dad died, they came here every two years, they were here for three or four months - they often brought their own home, they brought a caravan, and they schlepped right through Israel, parking their caravan wherever they wanted to stay. They stayed in kibbutzim , they stayed all over the place. They were absolutely mad with Israel - they collected a lot of money coming back in Holland - they...my dad owned four thousand or five thousand slides about Israel and they used to give lectures on Israel and they used to collect money and it all came here and they really...they were so bad that we actually didn't want to come! It was overdone, you see? We got too much of it.

Interviewer: So we are going back to the time of the war, back to Amersfoort, after you have been in this village.

Manno Cohen: After we've been evacuated we've come back and we live in the same house still, the same place. Dad carries on doing business.

Interviewer: What was the changes? Did you feel any changes?

Manno Cohen: Yes, there were changes. Absolutely, first...the change that most obvious was the atmosphere. I don't actually remember any physical changes, except for that we had to wear a star, also I wore a star. And that there was no...I couldn't go to school anymore. I couldn't go to kindergarten, I couldn't go to "gan yeledim". I had to go to a Jewish one. There was a...the teachers, the Jewish teachers in Amersfoort were not allowed to teach anymore in the ordinary schools and the Jewish community started a school system for Jewish children only. We spent all day at this school - we didn't go there in the morning, come back for lunch and go in the afternoon again - we spent all day there. We ate there and actually the women we knew all very well because they were all members of the community and the community wasn't that big. They were looking after us and we...they educated actually all the children, I think, up to fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds.

Interviewer: What was the education?

Manno Cohen: I went to kindergarten. I went to kindergarten and...but there was also basic schooling and higher schooling - whatever was necessary for the children that were there. I don't know exactly how many children - maybe there were thirty, forty, fifty children there - not hundreds anyway.

Interviewer: Did you feel the change?

Manno Cohen: Yes. Sure. we had to leave all our friends. You know, you go to school, you get friends, you communicate with the same children most of the time and now you were not allowed to. There were also places we were not allowed in. The signs: "Forbidden for Jews" were all over the town. There were things we were allowed to do and things you were definitely not allowed to do. Maybe certain hours we weren't allowed out of the house anymore - at night we weren't allowed out - we had to stay indoors after dark.

Interviewer: What about food?

Manno Cohen: No problem. Those years there was no problem with food. The hunger in Holland was much later. In 1941-42, there was no problem with food. Anyway we were a bakery - Dad baked so we had food anyway. And the business went on as usual. Then one day he got...we got a call up to come to the station. You see, this period, these first two and half years, say from May 1940 to August 1942 was a...for a child my child, was a very straightforward period of things that weren't that great in changes. Nothing much happened. As I say, the atmosphere changed, there was a lot of tension and as a child you feel tension anyway. We had to go to a different school and we weren't allowed to do certain things. I remember there being a "lunapark" actually "mamash" next to our house. The "lunapark" was...we lived in the centre of the city and there was a little square there and on that square was a "lunapark". And as children we definitely wanted to go into the "lunapark", but we weren't allowed because Jews were not allowed to go in the "lunapark". I mean, these are only...I'm sure the children were older than me, that were teenagers, and the grown-ups had many more constrictions which I as a child didn't have, or at least didn't realize that I had them.

Interviewer: What did you feel when you were forced to wear the yellow star?

Manno Cohen: Didn't mean a thing in my life. Only afterwards, I realized - and I'm talking about after the war - did I realize what we actually were wearing. Yes? At the time it was like a sticker on a cardigan like the kids put on stickers today? It was the same thing. It didn't mean anything.

Interviewer: All in all you saw the difference when the children did not wear the...?

Manno Cohen: It was the difference with the other children, but it didn't have anything to me of a stigma. We were kids, four-, five-, six-year-old children, didn't really matter very much. I didn't wear it all that long anyway - I think I wore it for about six months because I had to be six before you had to wear it. Up to six years old you didn't wear it. My sister never wore a star. But it didn't mean very much - not really. Things started changing when we had to go into hiding. That's when the war really started for me. In the beginning it was war when we were evacuated from the town - that was a war episode. We came back - life carried on for us children as it had been going all the time, or anyway the changes were not such that our life really changed drastically - it didn't. Only when we had to go into hiding did our lives change completely. And from then on the war started meaning something completely different - got an element of threat. Suddenly we were involved - as young as I was - we were involved in observing our lives. Maybe not so consciously as I'm saying it now because time has altered all this, of course, and you look at it at a complete different angle today because you're much older and you went through a lot of things. You know more about it, but definitely, as small as we were, we did, in a way, have to help conserve our lives. Help our parents to stay alive and we were very lucky - we - I'm talking definitely about my sister and myself - that my father was very far-seeing, that he realized that the information that was coming out of Germany, that that information was true. Because why did a lot of Jews in...I can only talk about Holland - I don't know about any other country - why did a lot of Jews in Holland, including our family, got killed. First, one of the reasons was that they did not believe the information that came out of Germany.

Interviewer: What was the information? Do you remember it?

Manno Cohen: Information about concentration camps. What was happening in Germany. What was happening to the Jews in Germany. What could happen to the Jews who were going to be deported because by then deportation started already. We're talking 1942 by now. The Jews of Holland a lot of them - did not believe - it's not so bad. So we have to go there. So we have to go and work in Germany. Nothing bad will happen to us. I can show you letters - nothing bad will happen. The letters from the camps are here. They are quite optimistic. My dad didn't believe it - on the contrary. He had made arrangements that on the day that we had to leave and go the the station to go wherever they were going to take us- he was not going to take any risk. He...first of all, was a chance that he could stay on, that he didn't have to go because he was one of the few Jewish bakers and one baker and one butcher was allowed to stay, because they didn't take the community as a whole. They didn't take them all together. But he did not take that chance - we got notice that on the morning of the 23rd of August, 1942, we had to go to the station, the railway station, in order to be transported. In the evening of August the 22nd he closed normal time - 6 o'clock he closed the shop and as soon as it was dark which was very late because it was summer and in summer in Holland the sun goes down quite late. As soon as it got dark, we crossed the road to our neighbours and from there we were taken to the first place where we went into hiding.

Interviewer: Who actually took you? Who helped you?

Manno Cohen: Like this. My dad had talked this neighbour already beforehand. They had made...they had been talking: "What is going to happen if we have to go to Germany," because in those days it was still "if", they didn't know yet that everybody was going to be taken. And this neighbour had said: "Don't worry, you come to us and I'll organise something." We went across the road and nothing was organised and my...as it happened at that particular moment this man's new son-in-law - they'd just got married about two months before that - he was visiting his father-in-law and this young man - he was twenty-four at the time - he said: "No worry. We'll wait till the real night has fallen, till everything is quiet and I'll take you to my house." This was quite a decision this man made. He couldn't phone his wife because there was no telephone. It's not like today - he couldn't contact her - and he just took two children and two grown-ups in the middle of the night. We walked - it was about eight, nine kilometers and the children got pushed on a bicycle - we were sitting on his bicycle - and the grown-ups walked to that house and that was the first place of shelter that we as the family - the Cohen family - got. These people started a chain of people that saved our lives in the two and a half years to come. Also, this man was a clerk in the city hall of the little village - of Loesten, near Amersfoort and he started, with my dad and a couple of others, an underground movement while we were hidden with them.This underground movement was not a movement that fought against the Germans. This was a movement that looked after people that needed help. People that went in...and nevermind Jews, non-Jews, nevermind who it was. Everybody that needed help was looked after by them and it started off with the documentation - and that's where I got all these papers - and they found a system to give people such real good documentation that I know of a young man at the time - today he's not so young anymore - who actually was in Westernborg, was caught, was in Westernborg and got out because his documents proved that he was not Jewish.

Interviewer: So they just gave these false documents?

Manno Cohen: They were not false - they didn't give false documents - that was the beauty of it. These documents here are not false. This is a real document. The only thing that's not right on this particular one is the name. The name is a fantasy name. Later on they changed this and they found it too dangerous and they actually took real names of people dead or alive to make these papers even more authentic. But these papers are real. They scrutinized them and there was nothing wrong with them. Original paper, original documents, original numbers, registered numbers, original thumbprints. And my father's "teudah" - this is an original photograph of him. And because of these papers we have been able, we were able to stay alive for the next two and a half years and walk around freely. The whole thing was not quite as easy as these few words indicate because, first of all, because my dad was in the underground. He was thought by the Germans - they didn't know he was Jewish and they, the Germans looked for him for a long, long time - never found him, or found him and never took him because they didn't know it was him. And he...

Interviewer: So actually your father joined the underground?

Manno Cohen: No. They started this movement. My dad and this man - Karl Brauer - and a few others actually started this movement in the house where we were hidden - the first house we were hidden in. That's when they started this movement because we needed papers - they got the idea of making these papers. How to do it and it was a underground movement of civil servants, mainly, although Dad wasn't a civil servant, but it was mainly civil servants because the civil servants got the papers. It was, as I said before, it was a movement of men and women that helped people, not fought against the Germans - they left that to others. They were there to look for places where they could go in hiding, they looked after the documentation, they looked after ration cards, they looked after all the things - doctors, if needed. Babies were born, people died - they had to do something with babies who were born - they had to do something with the baby...

Interviewer: So actually your father himself was responsible for these documents?

Manno Cohen: Yes, my father saved hundreds of lives this way. The documents he wasn't responsible - the other people, the civil servants got the documents. He wasn't, he couldn't work in the City Halls - the city halls all over Holland worked with it. But Dad actually did the physical work of looking after people - going from farm to farm and finding places and because of this, we had to move. We had to keep moving all the time so the Germans wouldn't find him. So we moved - in two and half years we moved twenty-two times.

Interviewer: What was issued in these papers?

Manno Cohen: First of all there is the identity card - that's the first one they needed. People needed identity card. Without it you couldn't step out of the house. Secondly, you needed a card that allowed you to go and fetch ration cards in special offices they had where you could get ration cards - you needed a card for that where they marked that you had ration cards. Thirdly, we needed a registry for marriages and births. Every Dutch family has a little booklet. When you get married you get this book from the government and they write in who gets married, who are the parents and who are the children. When the children are born they are also written. That you also need. So all these documents had to be as original as possible in order to save the people - make their life a little easier. So we got here the original documents which were taken out of the City Hall and were filled in and put stamps on and put thumbprints on and everything that the people that were going to receive them.

Interviewer: And what about religion?

Manno Cohen: We were Christians, we weren't Jews. We were very much a Christian family, with all the trimmings. Going to church, reading out the bible.

Interviewer: What was the name?

Manno Cohen: Boss. Our name was Boss. Our first names were changed, but very little. My mom and dad were...had complete different backgrounds than they had before and we were their children, as we were all the time. And we moved as a family through this area of Holland where my dad worked and stayed very much together, except for about four or five months that I wasn't with them. We were as a family - a unit. And sometimes we were living with people and sometimes we had our own part of a house or our own little house. Sometimes my mom could look after the family in her own way and sometimes we just ate with the farmers and lived with the farmers and my dad worked often with the farmers because he needed money also. He didn't have....actually, as a matter of fact, his money got stolen and he was...he had to work. On the day of the battle of Arnheim his money got stolen because there was panic in the family and somebody didn't watch the wallet very well for a minute and it was gone, so then he had to really start working and he worked in farms and he worked in bakeries in order to earn money to keep his family alive.

Interviewer: And nobody was suspicious about...?

Manno Cohen: No.

Interviewer: When you moved from one place to another?

Manno Cohen: No. We never moved from the one place to a place next door. We always moved from village to village.

Interviewer: And you as a child, how did you cope with this?

Manno Cohen: I was told what we were all about. I knew. My sister didn't, but I knew why we were in hiding. I knew we were Jewish. It didn't mean a thing. It didn't mean anything in my life. I didn't even know yet what religion was - let's put it that way. I was too young, but I was told I was Jewish and I was told to never say so. I was told never to get undressed, to drop my pants in front of others. Never to join any games with little boys - who could pee the furthest or anything like that because they had no...they were not allowed to see that I had the circumcision. That was a sure sign that you were Jewish, so because of that they warned me...my parents really drummed it into me that I...all the dos and don'ts. For the rest, we were living...Actually, it was sometimes it was the feeling of a holiday. You musn't forget, we weren't living in town. We were living in the country. They...we were living mainly on farmland, so we were living in farms where there was water - you could go and swim in the summers - beautiful summers when the sun shone, you could go and swim. We had children to play with, we had animals to play with. School was not always open - we didn't go to school everyday because schools were bombed and there was not enough classrooms for all the children, so often we had school twice a week or three times a week. Now the only thing that was different - I always had a private teacher. My mom and dad just wanted me to just have the full education that was possible, so there was always a private teacher, so I was, everyday a couple of hours, I had to go and learn and go to school. And one year, as a matter of fact, I went to school everyday in...everyday to the same school. That was the only time that I stayed..half of the year I stayed by myself with these people and that was the longest I was in one place. One year I was...

Interviewer: Where was it?

Manno Cohen: That was in a little..very little village called Westendorp in.. near Farsefeld in the east of Holland - very near the German border, very near.

Interviewer: So what did you do there as a child and what did you tell the family there?

Manno Cohen: The story was that my dad had to flee from the big cities because the Germans wanted to work, him to work for them and he didn't want to do it, and because food wasn't that plentiful - this was before the hunger winter, before 1944, food wasn't that plentiful. Anyway he wanted his family near him - he had brought his wife and his children with him. And that story was accepted. Most of the families...Sorry.

Interviewer: But to this village you went on your own.

Manno Cohen: No, no. I went with my people. My mom and dad, after about six months, had to move again and they decided to leave me because this family we were staying with had more foster children - I wasn't the only one. They had a few boys in the house - three, I think it was - that came out of asocial families and they were looking after them. They were a bit older than I was, so they easily could account for an extra boy in the house. It was simple for them to have, instead of three, have four boys. It was no problem. They had one son and the others were just staying there, like a foster family. That's what it was. So they decided to leave me there.

Interviewer: Were they paid?

Manno Cohen: I don't know. I know that some people we stayed with didn't want money. I also know that others wanted a lot of money. I know that expenses were often shared. You know that, Mom and Dad just paid their way in sharing expenses of food and whatever had to be done at that particular moment was done, was shared. But also I know that a lot..that there are people that charged a hell of a lot of money for us to stay there. It varied from family to family.

Interviewer: And what...Probably you were with other non-Jewish children, no?

Manno Cohen: Only non-Jewish children. The only Jewish child we were ever together with was my nephew - he...cousin actually, cousin of mine. He came to visit us for a summer - so-called visit, but that was for him....

Interviewer: As a child how did you hide the fact that you are different?

Manno Cohen: I wasn't different. I was completely...I was physically different because I'd had a brit milah, so don't drop your pants, that's all. So I was shy, that's all. And for the rest, I was one of them...I spoke their dialect. It was no problem. I mean, these things children learn very quickly. And I was one of them, I was one of the children. The children had...in the case like ours had least problem. The grown-ups had many more problems. But I spoke their dialect within no time.

Interviewer: Did you have fear?

Manno Cohen: Fears? Yes, but not being Jewish. Being Jewish was not one of my fears. The Germans were not our big fear - that came later. In the beginning, not. Our big fear was the Americans and the English, the Allied troops. The Allied airplanes that came over at night and went on their was to bomb Germany and didn't know exactly where they were and dropped their bombs in the wrong places, you know. The Germans that were shooting at the American or Allied - they weren't only American - Allied planes and hit them and then they were coming down laden with bombs. Where was it coming down? That were our big fears. That were our nightmares. Going to sleep at night, knowing nearly for sure that you were going to be woken up at 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock, maybe 3 o'clock in the morning because you had to get out of bed because you had to go into shelter which they had built - bomb-free. Luckily, we were very lucky that we never had to try out if these shelters were really bomb-free because, I'm sure, we would have all been killed. But very near our houses bombs fell and very...and I've been a few times in very short distance of bombardments. That were our fears. My fear of being...of the Germans, of the Germans catching us, came after I had to leave suddenly this family where I'd been staying for a year and they came to get me two days later.

Interviewer: When you are staying for a year with this family, what did you do when they go, did they go to church?

Manno Cohen: Sure, I went to church. My biggest punishment was when I wasn't allowed to go to church.

Interviewer: What did you feel when you were in the church?

Manno Cohen: I was a child, a Christian child.

Interviewer: Did you have any feeling towards this...?

Manno Cohen: Oh yes. I've been...If you go...you asked me if your family was religious just now. I think I have been more of a religious Christian than I'll ever be a Jew as far as going to church is concerned and all the outward things and all the things that had to be done in order to be Christian.

Interviewer: Did you feel Christian then?

Manno Cohen: I suppose so. I didn't know the difference first of all. My parents never told me what the difference was - that would have been much too dangerous. To tell a child - seven years old by then - what was the difference between Judaism and Christianity, they never said that. They only told me that I was Jewish and never had to mention it, but what was being Jewish I didn't know. So to me it was all the same. It was terrific for a child to be brought up in all the trimmings of religion and being able to help with it and do with it - I know you do the same thing today with your grandchildren, my grandchildren, anyway. You do the same thing - just Chanukah. What doyou do? You put a chanukiah and you give the children the candles and they prepare it and they say the brachot and they light the candle -that's wonderful. But does that mean Judaism to them? I don't think so. It is a religious happening, but you can easily tell these children at that age that it is a Christian thing, or Mohammadan thing - it doesn't need, necessarily, mean to be Jewish. But to them it is a way of showing religion for a child.

Interviewer: But what did Jesus meant to you at that time?

Manno Cohen: What it meant to all the little children that were brought up Christian. Jesus was a saviour, was a god, was part of G-d. What is G-d? I mean, today we don't even know.

Interviewer: Did you trust him?

Manno Cohen: Sure.

Interviewer: Pray to him?

Manno Cohen: Sure. Every night there was a ritual - like Jews have daily rituals the Christians also, especially where I was, they were very, very staunch church-goers, very, very Christian people. If they wouldn't have been that good Christians they would never have saved our lives. But because they were what they were, how they...their philosophy on life - that's why they saved us, especially those that knew that we were Jews. They saved us because they were very good Christians. Am I clear on that? And I was Christian. As I say, Sunday morning, church. During the week not, of course, but there was bible reading after every meal and when we had our own household, which we had occasionally, that my mom could look after us and cook for us, my dad had to read out of the bible after every meal. He couldn't..he didn't want to...

Interviewer: Did you read the New Testament?

Manno Cohen: Old and New. He always read the Old Testament, that I know, but it was Old and New. This was...there was to me, there was not such a thing as the New Testament, Old Testament - that was the bible. All those beautiful stories. I read...I went to school, very Christian school, very religious school where every morning you started off with prayer and singing and bible stories. It's wonderful - these bible stories are beautiful and to a child's imagination they are even more beautiful than Grimm's fairy tales.

Interviewer: What especially? What bible story did you really like at that time?

Manno Cohen: I liked the stories about Jesus - that I liked very much.

Interviewer: More, even, than the other stories? More than the story of Abraham and Itzhak?

Manno Cohen: Yes, because they were emphasised. We were fed on it, we were fed on all the stories of these places that you can go and see in this country now. That makes it to me very interesting. Now, that I live here and I can go to Kfar Nahum. Yes, with my Christian friends from Holland, people that actually gave me this Christian upbringing. They still come and visit us. They come and visit us here. And to go with them to places that...where the stories they told me actually happened and I can tell them exactly...now, give..actually not tell them, give back to them, exactly what they gave me in those years. This happened here, this is the - what do they call it in English? - the speech on the mount - you know that are going to show them the places and this is where the bread was divided and the fishes were divied - I can show them all these places. But I know the stories. They have a different meaning to me today than they had then, but in those days it was like the fairy stories. We brought our children up on Hansel and Gretel and the stories of Grimm and....they were beautiful - these stories were gorgeous stories. Why not? And we were brought that way and for us, my sister and myself, this was a very safe way of bringing us up. It was very much a kind of insurance against...because we were brought up so Christian that we - except for me knowing, not knew that I was Jewish, you understand? We were Christians and it suited my parents beautifully and they did exactly what we had to - pray before meals, as I said. We had to read out of the bible after meals. It had to be done and my dad did. He did all the trimmings of a Christian life and they adhered to it very strictly and we became very, very good Christians. To the outside world, which was the safest way to live. And we...my dad hated to eat pork...we ate it when we had to, other people were watching. In the end we ate it because that's all there was. You know, but in the beginning it was very, very, very difficult to open your mouth to meat that you were not allowed to eat, especially pork. it was very bad, but in that part of the country...

Interviewer: When you say "bad," it was bad because it was a new taste to you?

Manno Cohen: No, no, no. Not to me, to me it didn't mean a thing. To my dad, it was something that was against...

Interviewer: But for you it was nothing. Maybe you loved it?

Manno Cohen: No, I never liked it. No, no, I didn't, I didn't like the taste of it, of meat.

Interviewer: Not because...

Manno Cohen: It had nothing to do with religion, I just didn't like the taste of it. But I loved the taste of the sausages. I mean, these are things that happened. The...

Interviewer: Actaully, what did you eat there as a child? What was the breakfast?

Manno Cohen: Breakfast is bread, proper Dutch. Breakfast is bread with...in the end it was very little on it, of course, but whatever they could manage to give us. Bread we always had - my dad worked in bakeries and he could bake his own bread so that was no problem. Sometimes it was very bad bread if we couldn't get enough white flour, but bread there was. Sugar we made ourselves, out of sugar beets and it was boiled for days and days and days then we'd get left with a little bit of kind of syrup, not real sugar, but syrup. So something sweet was there. Tea and coffee wasn't there, they weren't there. We had milk, plenty of milk because we had cows. We were living in country where there were cows, everwhere you looked there were cows, so there was butter, because you could make your own butter. There were people who knew how to make cheese so there was cheese. Where we were living there was no shortage of food at all. We had gardens so there was vegetables.

Interviewer: Like what? What vegetables?

Manno Cohen: Lettuces, beans, cabbages, everything that is, at home...real Dutch vegetables. Tomatoes, they were there, cucumbers, they were there. We all had it. Fruit was there - there were fruit trees, cherry trees, apples, pears, plums, peaches - they were all there.

Interviewer: And at that time, when you went out, did you hear what happened to the rest of the Jews? Were you aware, you as a child?

Manno Cohen: Yes, we were very much aware of it. We were very aware of it because it was talked about in our home. My grandmother was hidden in Amsterdam and my dad tried to smuggle food out to her all the time - we knew there was no food there. That was known. But we, as a family....our part...we didn't have hunger, never knew it, not one minute. There was porridge every...the farmers eat porridge before they go to sleep so every night before we had to go to bed, they had dinner early and we had porridge before we went to bed - it was a plate of oatmeal porridge. Oats we made ourselves - the harvest was not turned out to the Germans completely. They were taken of it and they took a sack of oats to the mill and, illegally, the oats were plated and we had oats that could be cooked and we had porridge properly.

Interviewer: And at that time, did you hear about death camps or you only had...?

Manno Cohen: No, no, we knew all about it. My dad knew all about it. We knew - that's why we were saved, because he knew. He knew from the beginning and we knew where the family disappeared to. We didn't know what happened to my dad's family until much later. My mother's family was actually caught. They were hidden quite near us - her brother and sister-in-law - were hidden quite near us and we knew they were betrayed. We knew by whom and we knew they got caught and they were transported, deported to Germany - we knew about it, yes. And we knew what would happen to them. And this was not conveyed to the children as so many words as I'm saying, but children hear a lot, you know, they pick up a lot of things. They pick up what they're not supposed to hear, they usually pick up and I knew what was happening. I definitely did.

Interviewer: And after that you are going from this village, you are going where?

Manno Cohen: I'm going back to the first address, to the people I was telling you about where we went the very first..that gave us the very first shelter. Because my mom and dad weren't with me, or I wasn't with them, and for some reason or other, I don't know why, I couldn't go to them. I had been to visit them, but I couldn't stay with them. And Dad didn't know what to do with me.

Interviewer: So they lived in the town, in the city?

Manno Cohen: No, no. We all lived in villages. We never entered another town again. We lived in the east of Holland near the German border in little, tiny little villages. That's why is was easy to move. People don't know...it's not like today when you have cars, when you have television and radio and telephones - there was no communication. The fastest way to get from A to B was with a bicycle, you see?

Interviewer: So you went back to there?

Manno Cohen: And then Dad had to take me somewhere and he put me on the back of his bicycle and he actually rode me to these people - that was about eighty, ninety kilometers away.

Interviewer: After being there for a year, wasn't it difficult for you to adjust, to separate?

Manno Cohen: Of course it was difficult, but I have no...I can't say..no. I think Dad told me why I had to go. I think Dad told me.

Interviewer: Did you get any warmth by the...?

Manno Cohen: Oh yes. Very loving people, very loving people. Up till today.

Interviewer: Are you still in contact with them?

Manno Cohen: Oh yes, very much so, very much so. There are people we have no contact with at all - don't know why exactly. We have people who treated us badly also. And we have people that became family. And the people that became family, they are really like family. They're, actually, they're better than family, you know? Much easier to have contact with them. I've got siblings that are not blood relation, but they are my own age and we were brought up like brothers and sisters and the whole atmosphere today is still, between us, is still very much like brothers and sisters. And it's very nice. This one woman was born when I was actually on the farm. And today we still phone one another - we pick up the phone and speak to one another. She was here last year and I'm now starting - we've just now started to get her grandparents - because I was in her grandparents' house - and her father, recognized as righteous gentiles. But only now after all these years - I don't know why my dad never did it, but it's time now to do it. I think it is. We're starting on it. It's not very difficult to do it because we've already contacted a few people to write their stories and get it done with. And some other family also where we never stayed for any length of time, but every time we needed a bed for one or two or three nights there was a room for us in that house and we...but also these people became like brothers and sisters to my mom and dad. They became very, very close, they became more than friends. They became family and they...the whole life they've been together. There's one woman - she actually took over our family after the war, when my mother had a complete nervous breakdown and she had lost her husband and she actually took her daughter - the girl I just talked about, the one that was born during the war while I was there - and came to live in our house and took charge of the family. While my mother was in sanatoria and being treated and all sorts of things with a complete nervous breakdown. She wasn't home for nearly a year and this woman actually took over the family and we look at her today still as our kind of second mother. And with her the contact is very, very good. I would never go to Holland without visiting her. I pick up the phone and talk to her, she picks up and talks to me. Whenever there is something, we're always in contact. And with her children also, especially with her daughter that was born during the war. You know, the ties that these...that were createdwhile we were there betwen their families and our family were extremely tight, we're extremely close to one another. And this didn't stop in 1945 when the war was over or when we left their houses - it carried on. With other peoples it stopped. That was it, we paid our way there. Some of them up to today don't know that they had Jews in the house. One family we were staying with, this farmer refused to save his brother-in-law who was Jewish. His sister had married a Jew and refused to save his brother-in-law because he was Jewish, but we were living in his house. He didn't know we were Jews. He would not have had Jews in the house and he threw us out after the war the moment he found out we were Jewish. It was after the war when everything was over and finished and done with, we told him that he had harboured Jews and he threw us out. We had to leave the house immediately although we really went through a lot together because we finished the war with them and at that moment we actually physically got bombarded. And a lot of...

Interviewer: When did you actually finish the war? Where were you?

Manno Cohen: On the second of April, 1945.

Interviewer: Yes, but where were you physically?

Manno Cohen: Where? Also in the same area, in the same area. This was in a little village called Longerack. No, no, no. It will come back to me - it was near Doetinchem, it will come back to me just now. It was near Doetinchem, it was a tiny little...kind of moshav, you know, it's not really even a village.

Interviewer: How long did you stay in this village?

Manno Cohen: We must have stayed there about three months. About three months. It was the end - then the war was finished when we...

Interviewer: Do you remember the end of the war?

Manno Cohen: Very clearly, very clearly.

Interviewer: What do you remember?

Manno Cohen: The end of the war was like this - we were living in this farm and about 500 meters from the farm where a battery of German cannons were shooting in the direction of the Allied troops, the Canadians and the Americans were coming our way. And then they moved the batteries further back and after they moved them we got the answering fire from the Allied troops and we were directly in the line of fire and we were hit in...the house was hit by a cannon shell, a bullet actually and we were all sick, we all had flu, all four of us were sick, but because it was Easter my mother had cooked a bit of, more of a festive meal - and she insisted we all get out of bed and eat. Lunchtime, eat this meal. And that saved our lives because the shell hit the wall between our bedroom and the farmer and his wife's bedroom and riddled the blankets with holes this size and if we would have been in bed we really wouldn't - I wouldn't have been sitting here telling you this story. And we left the house because it was too dangerous and we went into the ditches that the Germans had dug. We were living at the edge of a forest. And the Germans had dug ditches through the meadows and the forest as a kind of defence for the Americans and Canadian troops that were coming towards us. In the forest, just at the beginning of the forest, they had dug in concrete rings in order to save ammunition in there, to put it safely in there and this was empty - they didn't have any ammunition to put in so it was empty, so we went in there and we actually sat in those concrete rings waiting for whatever was going to happen. And in the middle of the night the shooting started, but now rifle fire and they were actually shooting into the ditches where we were hidden and in the end my dad took off his jacket - he was wearing a white shirt - so they would see him and he didn't speak a word of English, but my grandmother was...had been living in England - his mother - and had taught him just two or three weeks earlier how to say in English: "Here were women and children." That was all the English he knew: "Here are women and children." And he left the ditches and he started shouting that there were women and children and the...they stopped shooting and they told us to come out. And we were surrounded at that moment by the Canadian army and nobody speaking English, of course. They had got an interpreter - a man who spoke Dutch and he was a Jew. So the first contact with the Allied army was a Jewish contact. And he wouldn't believe my dad that he was Jewish and my dad proved that he was Jewish by starting to recite the "Shma". And he told us that it was Pesach, which we didn't know, it was Pesach and he said in Naemechen, which is a town that was already liberated, they already were...the Jews were already eating matzos. But the very contact, the very first contact with the Allied, with the Canadians was by a Jewish interpreter. And then the war was over. It was about a month before officially, it was officially the war ended May the 5th and this was April 2nd.

Interviewer: What was for you when you met these....When you were with...in those villages sometimes you separated from your family, yes and your parents?

Manno Cohen: Actually, this started right at the beginning already. We were in Loesten with these people that started this underground movement. And there after about six weeks - we stayed there about six weeks. We had to leave, they had to make room for others and it wasn't very safe for us to stay there because the neighbours were the parents of the people that lived next door to us in town where actually, my dad had his business and they were not very kosher - they were not really, maybe not really collaborators, but we didn't trust them so we had to stay indoors during daylight. And we were only allowed out at night. It was actually the only place during the whole period that we were in hiding that we were not allowed out during the day. The rest of the time, all the time that we were in the country we were free to move wherever we wanted without restrictions, except for restrictions put on by the Germans to everybody. But not because we were Jewish - nobody knew we were Jewish. So we had to leave there and some family of these people who were living actually in Amersfoort, in the town where we were living, the same town, offered to give us shelter. And that's where we went and we stayed there only a very short while. And then my parents decided we had to leave Amersfoort altogether and they would go, first of all, to Amsterdam - why to Amsterdam I don't know. And then they...these people agreed to keep my sister and myself until they would get a message where to deliver us. My parents had settled anywhere in Holland they would send a message to bring the children to them.

Interviewer: So you were separated then from them when you went to Amsterdam?

Manno Cohen: No, we stayed in Amersfoort, yes? With these people that we were hidden with - that's my sister and...my parents went to Amsterdam and again, I don't know why. And from there moved to the east of Holland, to the country, past - to give you a landmark - past Arnheim and Naemechen, where the battle of Arnheim was fought - past there to the east, to the German border. Now these people kept us for exactly twenty-four hours. Kept us in bed, doped us - gave us sleeping pills, so we wouldn't move, we wouldn't...my sister and I . When we finally woke up my parents were gone and it was night. They put us on a bicycle and drove us to the house of our nanny, which was living on a farm - she was a farm girl, on the outskirts of Amersfoort in a village called Hoechland and they dropped us on the doorstep and disappeared. Knocked on the door and disappeared. So we luckily, we knew, as children we knew our nanny, of course, but we knew the family also - we'd been staying with them, we knew them and they took us in. There was no doubt about that, that they would take us in - they took us in. And we stayed until the message came where to deliver the children, so our nanny, this girl, she delivered us to our parents and they were staying at that time in a little village called Linteloo in Holland where we were actually part of the family - we were living with the family and we stayed there for awhile - I don't know how long. We had two farms, we stayed at two farms in that area, two different farms. We moved already. Also there came the message from the rabbinate from Holland that was still operating at that time that it was...that we were allowed to eat whatever was put in front of us - "pikuach nefesh". We had to...we were allowed to eat pork and we didn't need to keep the kashrut laws anymore and we were allowed to do anything to hide that we were Jewish. Anything necessary to hide that we were Jews. Then we went to the family called Burser in Westendorp and this family is until today part of our own family - they have become just part of the family. Unfortunately the old people have passed away - the people we went into hiding with, they died a few years ago - they became very old. Their son was killed, was actually not killed. He came..he was taken to concentration camp and came back after the war riddled with all kinds of sicknesses and died actually in Holland and his widow and children are still very close to us today. With that family I stayed a year and I went to school and with this family we actually became Christians. Actually it happened there. They were very good Christians and we became like part of the family, like part of a Christian family and the rest of the war we spent as a proper Christian family. We didn't show anywhere that we were Jewish. When we lived with farmers or we lived on our own, either in farmhouses or had our own little whatever, we behaved, with all the trimmings, like Christian people. That meant prayers and bible reading and going to church and joining in with whatever good Christians do, which was our best defence against the Germans. We were...we disappeared into the countryside, so to say. You know, we disappeared into the population. My mom and dad stayed about six months there, I stayed a full year there. While we were staying there there were also other friends of ours from Amersfoort that needed hiding, that came to stay with us - people I knew very well. Also, a family from Amsterdam - a mother and a son - that came to stay with us there. And they all moved in and out there all the time while we stayed and later on I stayed there because I could go to school there and I didn't need to change, which was very bad, not only for the child bad - to go and change his environment, but also if I had to change schools, I had to have a reason, it had to be registered. This less you registered, the better it was. Suddenly I had to leave because there was a "ratzia" and they left me as one of the foster children that were in the house anyway and they were looking for Jews and they never....there were about five or six Jews in the house, hidden - they never found anybody at that particular moment - I was the only one in plain view. They didn't realize I was Jewish and they left me in bed, moving my bed - it was standing in front of a cupboard - they moved my bed to see if there were any Jews in the cupboard and they pushed my bed back and they left me in bed. My dad took me away because he heard that they would come and fetch me because they realized that they had...they had missed a Jewish child. When they came to fetch me they....I wasn't there. They took the son of the family, who was...had just got married while we were there - that was the guy that came back after the war and died from his..the sicknesses he contracted in Germany, in the camps. Then they didn't know where to take me, what to do with me because I couldn't be with my parents and they took me back to Loesten, to the very first family we had been staying with. And the funny part is that this family didn't remember that I was there twice and last year when I visited them, we were talking about them coming here and unveiling the plaque as righteous gentiles and they were going to stay with me and we started talking about what happened during the war and we didn't do this before because this guy had pushed everything away. When the war was over, this was over - the story was finished. Even his children didn't know what he had done during the war and we started talking about it and suddenly the woman disappeared and came back with a photograph and said: "Now you must tell me who this is in the photograph," and it was me. And she didn't know who it was. Both had forgotten that I'd been there twice. I stayed there for about three months and then my parents had moved again and were in a place where they could also have me and Dad came to fetch me and was brought back to my people. And actually from then on we were together. We moved to about another five or six or seven places and we stayed together all the time until the war was over and we were thrown out by the farmer.

Interviewer: Can we go back to when the Allies came and you had this feeling of eating chocolate. What was...?

Manno Cohen: Not the feeling of it - there was actually chocolate. The Allied army came with food. Not that we were hungry - we weren't. We had everything, but we didn't have the luxuries of life. We didn't have coffee and we didn't have tea and we didn't have sweets, no chocolate and they had chocolate and the first words, the first English that the children, including me, learned was: "Have you please got chocolate for me?" And we used to pester the Canadian soldiers for pieces of chocolate. And other sweets, but mainly chocolate. I remember pitch-black, thick chocolate they had and you asked me: "What was the first impression you had of the Allied forces?" - that was definitely chocolate.

Interviewer: What was the...in the first days after liberation? What was the atmosphere? Do you remember?

Manno Cohen: What I remember most was that my dad suddenly became a soldier. This was very much in our...a shock in our family. There was no...to me...was a feeling of liberation - I don't know. I really don't know. The war was over or was not over - I think I was too young to really grasp immediately what has happened. What was really happening. All the stories - it was too much. All the stories came back from people - how they were liberated - everybody had a story to tell. To everybody it happened in a different way.

Interviewer: But you came to a place that probably was now empty of Jews.

Manno Cohen: No, wait a minue, wait a minute. We are not talking for a long time yet about meeting Jews.

Interviewer: Even after the liberation?

Manno Cohen: We are liberated and the first person we meet is a Jew - I told you the army interpreter was a Jew and then there's a long time - nothing, as far as Jews are concerned.

Interviewer: Where are you staying?

Manno Cohen: We are staying at that moment in Doetinchem and Doetinchen in the best of times had a very, very small Jewish community - I'm talking about maybe, at the top, might have had a hundred people there. So it was very small. So there was nobody there, but nobody was even remotely interested in those days of starting or finding a Jewish community.

Interviewer: But what about your family?

Manno Cohen: I was just going to say - they were interested in finding what happened to the family and virtually the first day my dad started spending all his time in trying to trace the family and Jewish life - being member of a Jewish community again - only came later when we moved from Doetinchem back to Amersfoort. And that is in November, December, 1945. But the first period after the war there was no connection to other Jews, no Jewish community. We were in, as I say, a farm. We were only interested in finding the family immediate. My one grandmother was hidden quite near us - we even visited her during the war. My grandfather was hidden in the same area. And this is a very funny story actually. His one granddaughter - my cousin - was hidden with the family, with the same family. With the brother. And every Sunday she had to go and visit this brother because there was an old man there and she didn't know who he was and she had to sit on this old man's lap and the old man used to cuddle her and talk to her and everything. And she thought that this...she was also a child - she was seven or eight years old at the time - and she thought she...she told that later...this was a terrible day, this Sunday, because she had to go to this dirty old man who kissed her and cuddled her and she didn't know how to handle this at the time. Afterwards, of course, when she told this story many years later, it was actually quite funny that she didn't know her own grandfather. She had hardly met him because he was living with us in a different part of the country and she'd hardly ever met him and she didn't realize that this old man that was staying with her uncle - actually, it was her uncle, you musn't forget - the brother of the people she was staying with was her uncle and there was this man and she didn't know who he was and...but my grandfather was there, but my other grandmother was in Amsterdam and we didn't know exactly where she was. As a matter of fact, we thought she was in Amsterdam, but she was in the Hague. She had visited family of the people she was hidden with in the Hague and got caught by the railway strike and couldn't get back to Amsterdam. And she passed the hunger winter and they brought her back to Amersfoort on a bicycle with a little cart behind it - that's how she got back. And so we knew that that part of the family was safe - the immediate family was saved. We knew that the two children from mother...my mother's niece and my mother's nephew were saved and that's all we knew. What happened to my father's huge family and the children we didn't know. And he started working immediately in finding out what had happened to that part of the family. That took him many years to find out what had happened and where they were killed and when and actually finish off the business of what happened to his brothers and sisters and their families. That was what he started doing and only after six months did we move back to Amersfoort. I wasn't there - my sister wasn't there either - we were in Denmark. We were sent out with the children's transport, recuperation transport to Denmark. And when we got back we didn't get back to Doetinchem, we got back to Amersfoort where the family had started some kind of a...

Interviewer: How long did you stay in Denmark?

Manno Cohen: Three months. Where the family had started some kind of normal life again. We were all very close together, everybody under roof, everybody together, they...parents and grandparents and the one niece and nephew and us, the children, we..you know, the remnants of the family was actually under one roof in one house and we stayed like that for quite a long time. And then...

Interviewer: I would like to ask you actually. What kept you going? You were a small child.

Manno Cohen: Yes. What kept us going in what way?

Interviewer: In a spiritual way, in the strength. Where did you get the strength to move from one place to another?

Manno Cohen: From my father, from my father. The perpetual optimist. He listened everyday to the news from England, you know, in England they broadcasted news in Dutch twice or three times a day. We were not allowed to have radios, but of course we had a radio and he always saw the sunny side. When every....there was no bad news with him - or totally bad news, there was never. There was always something optimistic and that kept us going. All of us. The children, as well as his wife and the people around him everybody in his immediate surroundings - he kept them going by being a tremendous optimisit. The was was always finishing tomorrow.

Interviewer: I understood that actually you yourself after the war moved again from one country to another, yes? Do you think it had to do with your childhood?

Manno Cohen: Absolutely. Yes, it had.

Interviewer: Not settling in one place.

Manno Cohen: It had to do with me not wanting to go into the Dutch army. I definitely didn't want to enter the army.

Interviewer: You never identified yourself as a Dutch?

Manno Cohen: No, I never felt anything as a...Holland was nice...is still a nice country. It's a beautiful country and if you want to go sightseeing in Holland I'd love to take you. I mean, it really is a beautiful country. But it never held any...it never had any grip on me. I never felt this is a place where I would like to actually live and stay.

Interviewer: Though you met a lot of love there. Through your foster parents.

Manno Cohen: Oh yes, sure. That's not because there were no people that I loved and liked and related to - no, it had nothing to do with the people around me. The country itself - maybe also because what the country did to us during the war. I mean, this fallacy that Holland, the Hollanders were so good during the war and saved all those Jews - it's just not true. There were a lot of good people during the war - make no mistake. If it wouldn't have been for the good Hollanders I wouldn't be sitting here today. My family wouldn't have survived and not only my family, the twenty thousand people that were there after the war. But how many were killed? Holland didn't lift a finger. It was so difficult for my dad and his group to find addresses that would harbour Jews, that would give them shelter. It was so terribly difficult - that last address we had, the last people we were living with didn't know we were Jewish. After the beginning, the very first places we stopped telling everybody that we were Jews. We just were Christian. Okay. These people didn't know and they gave us shelter because my dad had to flee from the north of Holland because he had to work for the Germans which he didn't want to and this appealed to the Hollanders and he had taken his wife and children with him - this was the story - because there was hunger and he could look after them when they were with him and when they were there, they were separated - he didn't want to separate.

Interviewer: Could he be considered as a Dutch, your father?

Manno Cohen: As Dutch?

Interviewer: Physically, yes?

Manno Cohen: Physically he was Hollander, yes, he was Dutch. He was very Dutch.

Interviewer: He looked?

Manno Cohen: Yes, he looked Dutch.

Interviewer: That saved him, too.

Manno Cohen: What saved him most were his clothes - he was always dressed like a Dutch Nazi - in black. With boots, you know? He was always dressed in black. If he was outside he dressed in black - that was his uniform. He was dressed in uniform - it was the safest thing to do. My mother had to peroxide her hair - she was very Jewish-looking, tremendously Jewish-looking. Real black hair and...

Interviewer: So?

Manno Cohen: They peroxided her. It was something terrible - Mom and Dad had to do...Dad had to do that - he didn't have the first idea how to do this, how to go about it and she didn't ever, she couldn't ever tell, so the roots started showing they had to disappear into a bedroom and close, lock the door and start working on her hair. And one day she had to go...there was a wedding in the family where we were staying and everybody went to the hairdresser for once in their lives - they went to a hairdresser, these farmers. And she also had to go with the young women, to go to the hairdresser. She never told the hairdresser that her hair was peroxided so many times and this farmers' hairdresser - I mean, this was in a tiny little village - he had never seen peroxided hair. I mean, it's not like today, this is 1943. He'd never seen peroxided hair so he didn't know what it was all about so he...so Mom thought "nu", as long as she's at the hairdresser she'll have her hair permed. You know what happened? All the curls burned off as you held her hair in your hand. I mean, it was...but as I was telling you, the last address we were staying at, these people didn't know we were Jewish. This guy had a Jewish brother-in-law and he refused to save his Jewish brother-in-law, but he saved us. Afterwards, we told him we were Jewish - we were chucked out of the house. The war was finished. We were chucked out of the house. We had to leave there because he did not want to shelter Jews. Even when the war was over he didn't want to have them in the house. He was so scared. And this was the general attitude. People...years later when I came back to Holland to live after I'd been living in Africa for ten years, I came back to Holland and started talking to people about this. They told me that they had seen the Jews being taken to the stations and walking down certain streets in Amersfoort and recognizing people they knew and waving goodbye to them. I mean, it was so typical - they waved goodbye to the Jews.

Interviewer: But probably they were not aware of what's...?

Manno Cohen: Why were they aware in Denmark? Yes. This was not the first thing the Germans did - they had done other things already. They were Jews - who cares? It's...right through history it's all the same, so if the Holo....the Jews were no good either in Hollnad. I mean, many Jews were killed because of the fear of life, of their own life of other Jews. Like all the Jews were adminstrated. There were lists of Jews. These weren't burned, these lists. They were handed over the Germans. If these lists would have been burned and we're talking now, I know, fifty years later, and we're talking in retrospect. It's very easy what we're doing now, but still, if these lists would have been burned...

Interviewer: Yes, but of course they were not aware of what's going to happen to them?

Manno Cohen:I don't believe it, I don't believe it. If my dad was aware, I don't believe it. I'm sorry. That the masses didn't believe it, okay. But the people in charge, the people that formed the Jewish board of deputies, the Jewish whatever, the people that are supposed to have been more knowledgable, even, maybe, more intelligent than the masses - they must have...Honestly, if people like my dad believed, they must have believed, they must have known. You can't tell me it was a secret.

Interviewer: And after the war, what was actually your identity?

Manno Cohen: Very difficult. What were we? Then...you asked me before, the identity during the war which was very easy because as a child it was...First of all we were allowed to be Jews again. That didn't mean we dropped Christianity altogether. It doesn't work that way. But..

Interviewer: But you longed for these ceremonies?

Manno Cohen: No, no, no. We became Jewish and my parents...

Interviewer: Could you be Jewish just like that?

Manno Cohen: No, also not. But we got out of the environment, of the...we got out of the Christian environment because we very soon already had a independent home. What I mean by this is we were living completely on our own. We had for the first time in two and a half years our own roof over heads - there were no other people in the house. There was no more Christian influence, yes? So my parenst could start straight away bringing back a certain Jewish identity. My grandmother, who was living around the corner from us, was a very, very traditional Jewish woman and she started immediately. She didn't want any Christian grandchildren. She started immediately and it was, actually, if you do this with children it's very easy to change over, to sway them from one thing to the other. How old was I? 1945 - I was nine years old. I'd just turned nine. So it wasn't that difficult. My sister was seven years old - it was completely easy. So as long as you don't take away everything without putting anything in its place, you can do, very easily change people at that age. So, yes, we became Jews immediately again. And I don't think I've ever lost altogether some of the identity that was put into me - I'm very careful, explaining this - into me by the non-Jews, by the Christians during those years. I'm Jewish, I'm 100% Jewish, no doubt about it, absolutely this is the only country that I feel comfortable in. This is the first time in my life since I'm here - I'm here now eleven and a half, twelve years nearly - first time in my life that I really feel that I have no roots here.

Interviewer: But still, you can't quite...I mean, you came only twelve years ago. What did you feel after the war until twelve years ago? What were you? A Jew? Dutch?

Manno Cohen: No, no. I was Jewish. I was Dutch in the very last place, but I'm Dutch because my pasport says so. My passport's written...

Interviewer: A citizen of the world?

Manno Cohen: More or less yes. I was comfortable wherever I went. When I was in the Far East or I was in Africa or wherever I went I was comfortable. But I never felt that this is my place like I have the feeling...and this had got nothing to do with Zionism. When I came here I started developing roots and I wouldn't like to move away again. Maybe because I get a bit older also. I mean, it's not necessarily that I suddenly found home - maybe wanderlust had disappeared. But this is the first time really that I feel at home. I'm here, that's it. And with all the nonsense in this country and there's plenty of it, this is the place, it's the only place for Jews, and I'll tell anybody who asks me and who doesn't ask me also, who is Jewish, that there's only one place to eventually go to. You don't need to come now, but eventually live is here.

Interviewer: What is your relation to Germany?

Manno Cohen: I have no problem there. I have a problem with Germans, not with Germany. Germany is a country, it's a beautiful country.

Interviewer: You visit there?

Manno Cohen: Oh yes. Many times. I did business there. I have a problem with Germans, especially with older Germans. People that are older than me and I always had a problem with that, but the younger Germans, I have no problem. Definitely not. I have a problem with what's happening in Germany today, but I've got the same problem with what's happening in America today. The same thing is happening there. The same thing is happening all over the world. And although it's not directed against Jews in all these places - it's not always us - and I don't think today it's only directed against Jews in Germany, yet...might turn that way, who knows? With Germany itself I have no problem. But as I say, the older German, the man and the woman, because they're just as guilty, that could have been eighteen in 1945, I definitely have a problem relating to them and I tried to stay away from them as much as possible. It wasn't always possible, but I did try to stay away from them and I did prefer to do business, which I did a lot in Germany, with the younger people.

Interviewer: With them you have no problem?

Manno Cohen: No problem. Why should I have a problem with younger Germans? it wasn't their fault. You can't visit the sins of the fathers on the children. I won't say that they won't do...wouldn't have done the same, but are you...have you got problems withe Spaniards? No. Same thing. And they only renounced the laws in 1968. Yes. So they were in 500 years, nearly. They had anti-semitic laws in Spain. The Inquisition laws were only renounced in 1968. Nobody has problems with Spaniards. Anybody got problems with America? Where there's so much anti-semitism? Nobody. Most people haven't.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.

Manno Cohen: Pleasure.