Aerts Guillaume & Maria

Aerts, Guillaume Jean Alphonse Maria Aerts-de Vries, Maria Catharina Margaretha Johanna Maria de Vries landed a job at the Amsterdam Population Registry at the beginning of 1943. She had just arrived from Heerlen, in the southern province of Limburg to look for work. Soon after the start of her new career, the resistance group of Gerrit van der Veen* undertook a major attack on the Registry. The attack was intended to destroy the personal registration cards of the Jews among the Amsterdam population, cards that were ostensibly marked in the system with a black corner on the top. The attack succeeded in destroying a large part of the population registry. However, unknown to the group, a clean copy of the data was in the hands of the German authorities, so that the attack had no effect in preventing the deportation of the Jews. All those involved in the attack were also caught and executed. In order to re-establish the entire original registry, a large number of additional employees were brought in from other areas of the country, among them Guillaume Aerts, also from Limburg, who was to work in the department that physically issued identity cards. The initial chaos after the attack provided an opportunity to issue false identity cards for Jews. Guillaume was soon approached by a Hungarian Jew, Berkovich, asking for a false card for his wife and children, Robert, b.1927, and Judith, b.1924. Soon Guillaume Aerts joined with Maria de Vries, by now his fiancée, to help persecuted Jews by using their position in the Registry. Meetings were arranged in town after work, often after curfew, which increased the danger to all, at times in the presence of a lawyer, Nico Kotting*, who had become expert in falsifying and “aryanizing” official papers. As a security precaution, it was mostly Maria who would go to these meetings with the necessary official stamps. They would meet Jews in immediate need of false papers who would put their fingerprints on the ID as well as on thecard that was to be entered in the Registry. Some of these meetings were at the home of Abraham Polak, who himself received papers for his family and foster daughter Henny Goldberg. Guillaume Aerts would then make the necessary entries in the Registry, mostly during lunch hours or when working late. Sometimes he asked Jews to come to the Registry during the lunch break, when Guillaume would be mostly by himself as the duty officer at the front desk, for them to get their false papers. Maria took care of most of the typing involved in creating a false ID, entering the data of the Jew who was to receive the document. Over time, Guillaume became suspect in the eyes of the SD and he was called to their headquarters for interrogation. He succeeded in talking himself out of any ‘wrongdoing’, and continued in his rescue work. When suspicion became more intense, Guillaume resigned his position in January 1944, after Amsterdam was officially Judenrein (”Free of Jews”). Jews who benefited from the illegal services of Guillaume and Maria were, among others, Leo Schloss, b.1932, as well as his parents, Hugo and Beta Biena Schloss, the Elias family, the brothers Armand and Marcel Polak, Hans Wolff and the Reich family, all from Amsterdam. Guillaume and Maria married in January 1945, during the infamous Hungerwinter. On November 6, 2005, Yad Vashem recognized Guillaume Jean Alphonse Maria Aerts and Maria Catharina Margaretha Johanna Aerts-de Vries as Righteous Among the Nations.