Lourens Geertruida (Dijk van); Father: Dijk van Adrianus ; Mother: Dijk van Wilhelmina (Doorn van)

Lourens-van Dijk, Geertruida Elisabeth Dijk van, Adrianus Dijk van-van Doorn, Wilhelmina Elisabeth Leon Beesemer (1905, Amsterdam – 1944, Auschwitz) and his wife Rosette Aap (1906, Amsterdam – 1944, Auschwitz) lived with their five children, born between 1928 and 1938, in Amsterdam. Leon was a merchant and Rosette took care of the children and the home. With the start of the deportations of the Jews from the Netherlands to ‘work in the East’ in the summer of 1942, the Beesemers tried to locate hiding addresses instead. First the children were taken to orphanages, and from there they were split up to various private addresses, many of them only temporary. For Karel Beesemer, born in 1935, a temporary address was found with Kees and Beatrice Boeke* in Bilthoven. From there he was taken to the van Dijk family, elderly parents Adrianus and Wilhelmina, both well into their sixties, and their then unmarried daughter Geertruida, in her early thirties. They lived in Renkum, in the eastern province of Gelderland, where they had a vegetable store. The van Dijks were strict Calvinists, who became the foremost caretaker. On Sundays, little Karel, already seven years old, accompanied the van Dijks mornings and evenings to church. For the outside world, he was an orphan, whose parents had been killed in the bombardment of Rotterdam in May 1940. Under this cover, he was also allowed to go to school. Although keeping his first name, that was very Dutch, Karel had to change his last name to Broekhuizen. Karel fully integrated into local village life and stayed with the van Dijks until the liberation of the area in April 1945. It turned out that Karel’s parents and one of his brothers had been murdered in Auschwitz. Another brother returned extremely ill and died soon afterwards. Karel thus stayed with the van Dijks and their daughter Geertruida even after her marriage to Aris Lourens, and was considered their own. On March 24, 2010, Yad Vashem recognizedGeertruida Elisabeth Lourens-van Dijk, and her parents Adrianus van Dijk and Wilhelmina Elisabeth van Dijk-van Doorn as Righteous Among the Nations.