Schuurman Marie (Gutter)

Schuurman-Gutter, Marie Marie Schuurman (b. 1897), a widow since 1941, was left with 12 children in the ages of 3 to 20 to raise by herself. The family, strictly Calvinist, lived on a farm in the village of Andijk (prov. North Holland). The older boys worked the fields and the older girls were domestic servants in nearby Amsterdam. Marie’s brother, Daniel Gutter, who was active in a local resistance cell, asked her in March 1943 to help out for some days by hiding a Jewish woman and her infant son, who was born just weeks earlier in a hiding place in Zwolle, which she had to leave. Even though Marie initially saw no possibility given her family’s difficult living conditions, she did come through, reasoning that “God sent these people her way in order to save them”. Elise Nathans-Cohen and her baby son, Lex, were thus taken to the Schuurman home. The few days turned into weeks and months. Elise, now called Bep, was supposedly a refugee from the bombed-out city of Rotterdam. Only the pastor and the family physician knew the real identity of mother and baby. Elise and her son, now called Dikkie, stayed on the farm at all times, and Elise helped out with the many chores. A special hiding area was carved out in the haystack where she and the baby indeed passed some nights when house searches were feared. Some months after their arrival, however, the continuous fear and lack of space in the farmhouse for both mother and son made the situation too complicated, and Elise was taken to the hiding address of her husband. Dikkie stayed on and was now taken care of by both Marie and her daughters. He was treated with special care, sometimes at the cost of less attention to the small Schuurman children. In September 1944, with the liberation of the southern parts of the Netherlands, Marie, like all others, anticipating the imminent liberation of the rest of the country, told her children the real identity of Dikkie. However, their area stayed under occupationanother nine months, making their knowledge of Dikkie’s real background an extra strain on the family, as no one was to reveal the truth. In addition, the winter of 1944-1945 became the worst winter imaginable, the infamous Hungerwinter, without supply of food, electricity or gas. Even so, Dikkie was allowed to stay on. After the war, Lex returned to his parents who had survived. Every summer vacation until his emigration to Israel in 1970, he spent time with “Tante Marie” at the Schuurman farm and continued to stay in touch thereafter. On February 5, 2006, Yad Vashem recognized Marie Schuurman-Gutter as Righteous among the Nations.