In addition to tracing her father’s family history during World War II, Mandy O’Donnell (née Spiegel) has been researching her mother’s side – the Schuitevoerder-Kopuit family. Her mother, known in South Africa, whilst at school, as Suze Shipman, and later as Suze Spiegel, was originally from Amsterdam.
From Amsterdam to Cape Town – and back again
Mandy’s maternal grandparents left Amsterdam for Cape Town in 1929 for her grandfather, Japie, to work in the diamond trade, as employment was scarce in Holland. They returned to the Netherlands two years later as they were missing their family and home. Fortunately, they decided to return to Cape Town in 1933, securing safety for their immediate family from the horrors that were to come. Almost all their extended relatives who remained in Europe perished during the Holocaust. The family eventually settled in Lester Road, Wynberg.
Letters that open a window to the past
While Suze did tell her children many stories of her past, most of what Mandy has recently learned about her mother’s family comes from a remarkable collection of letters discovered among Suze’s possessions after her death in 2017.
“Before my Ma’s passing, I had no idea that she had kept many letters, including her long correspondence with a surviving cousin, Sonja Kopuit. They were very close as young children before Suze left Amsterdam,” Mandy explains. “The letters provide an incredibly vivid picture of life in Amsterdam before the war.”
The letters, written between 1936 and 1949, are now being painstakingly transcribed, some needing sensitive translation into English. Mandy is reading each one and piecing together the story they tell of a family caught in the upheavals of pre-war and subsequent displacement.
A cousin’s courage
Sonja, at 19 years, was detained by the Germans in 1941 during their occupation of the Netherlands and placed on a deportation train probably to the Westerbork transit camp – a gateway to the killing centres of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor. In a moment of extraordinary bravery, she broke a window and jumped from the moving train soon after it left the station; she then found her way onto a return train into Amsterdam.
It was a perilous journey. The Germans knew that a young woman had escaped from the transport and were searching for female escapees on trains. Fate intervened when a man nearby silently handed Sonja his train ticket, knowing inspectors were checking for a woman without one. His simple act of courage saved her life.
Sonja went into hiding in Amsterdam, and Mandy hopes the letters will shed light on this dangerous and defining period.
The search for identity
Like many survivors and their descendants, questions of identity linger. “As evidenced by the letters, Sonja struggled before and after the war with her Jewishness,” says Mandy. “And my siblings and I have also grappled with our own sense of identity – shaped both by our family histories and by the challenges of growing up in apartheid South Africa.” ●
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