In a charming Dutch brownstone house in the heart of The Netherlands, Henry Fenichel lived with his parents. Black and white photos show Fenichel playing with neighborhood kids and taking walks with his mother while they lived in their picturesque home.
“Life was good,” he said, “until May 1940.”
Born in 1938, Fenichel was just a toddler when the Nazis invaded The Netherlands.
“In a way, not much happened when they first came along,” he explained during a virtual event hosted by the Boone County Public Library. “You would see a cop on the street corner, but instead of it being a Dutch cop, it was now a Nazi soldier. After a while, the public transportation – the buses and trains – were taken over by the Nazis.”
Fenichel read a list of the events that marked the slow takeover of The Netherlands and ostracization of the Dutch-Jewish community. It began with banning Jewish people from owning radios, then they were banned from being part of any non-Jewish organization. Soon, children couldn’t attend their regular schools, and on it went.
“Each item by itself was no big deal,” he said. “They figured eventually this damn war will be over and life will return to normal. Wishful thinking.”
Soon, every Jewish person had to identify themselves with gold stars. Fenichel still has his, and he held it up to the camera. Then, he said, Nazis began rounding up Jewish men.
“Supposedly to go to labor camps,” he said. “Even that could almost be believed, right? There’s a war going on and you need to use the enemy manpower to build tanks and provide food to the soldiers. So, it almost made sense. That’s the point at which my father was taken away.”
Fenichel’s father was among the 1.1 million people who died at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“I mentioned that my story is sort of similar to Anne Frank, who was a teenager at the time and whose family went into hiding,” he said. “When my father went away, we figured eventually he’ll come back. But then after a while, they started to round up, not just men, but women, children, babies, grandmas. Do you need those in a labor camp?”
Fenichel and his mother went into hiding in the infirmary of a childcare center. Fenichel was determined to collect documents confirming his and his mother’s journey during the Holocaust. He showed an index card that had the address of their Dutch brownstone home, crossed out for when they were found and sent to Westerbork, a Nazi transit camp.
It was 1943, and Fenichel was 5.
“Every Tuesday morning, they rounded up a thousand people, usually between 900 and 1,200 … They were loaded up on trains, cattle cars. Most of them never returned,” Fenichel said.
He said he and his mother tried to avoid “the Tuesday morning shipment.” He said the simultaneous conflict in what was then Palestine territory meant some Jewish people were permitted to leave the camps to join family in Palestine territory. But, one had to have a pass and a connection to family there.
Fenichel did. His uncle on his father’s side was in Palestine territory at the time. While they were stationed in a camp, Fenichel’s mother received a card from the Red Cross. At first, the pass was denied because it didn’t have their ID numbers on it.
“Those Nazis and their damn numbers,” he scoffed.
Two months later, they received a pass with their numbers, “but still nothing happened.”
Then, one Tuesday, he and his mother were rounded up. He would later see in preserved documents from the Holocaust that Anne Frank was transported on the same train.
From there, they were sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where Frank died in 1945.
When the Fenichens arrived, it was 1944. Henry Fenichel was a 6-year-old boy who had lived half his life under Nazi rule. He and his mother were successfully transported from Bergen-Belsen along with 222 other Jewish refugees on “a proper train, not a cattle car” for a 10-day journey to Palestine territory.
Even with more humane accommodations, it was a tight fit on the train. Fenichel remembers he had to be tied to a luggage rack to sleep at night because there was no room elsewhere in the sleeper cabin.
In June 1944, Fenichel and his mother arrived in what is now Israel, but were soon separated due to his mother’s health.
“Apparently, my mother was not in great shape. So the social workers, in their wisdom, decided to separate us, apropos of what is happening to immigrants coming from the Mexican border to the U.S,” he said.
He was sent to a children’s home in a village near the northern Mediterranean coast. There, he went to school and stayed in a dorm. He said his mother visited him occasionally, and he spent family vacations and holidays with her. Eventually, his mother remarried and the family moved to Tel Aviv.
It wasn’t until he was a teenager that his family relocated to the United States. He was around 15 years old when they arrived on the Andrea Doria’s maiden voyage, sailing to New York. He got a view of the “Statue of Liberty on the left. On the right, skyscrapers of lower Manhattan and on a small black and white TV, all eyes and ears are on the inaugural speech of President Eisenhower. This is January 1953.”
He spent the rest of his teenage days in a Dutch neighborhood in Brooklyn, and later attended Brooklyn College, where he met his wife. He then went to Rutgers University and earned a Ph.D. in physics, which is what brought his family to Cincinnati.
He is now a retired physics professor from the University of Cincinnati, and he and his wife have been married for 60 years.
Fenichel eventually ventured back to The Netherlands to find the Dutch brownstone house. On his personal journey, he has also seen his father’s name printed on Holocaust memorials, and his and his mother’s names on documents showing where and when they were transported.
Today, he tells his story and shows documents related to his journey to educate and to combat Holocaust deniers.
He says his survival is “a miracle” as he acknowledges the 6 million Jewish people who died in the Holocaust. He also draws similarities between today’s refugees his family’s journey from their war-torn home.
Above all, he tells his story to warn people: “Don’t be a bystander.”
“You’ll see some terrible things happening, and unfortunately, we see more nowadays,” he said. “Try and speak up.”
