Being 73 years that Maarten Joustra has celebrated his birthday on June 10, he has no plans to consider an alternative date.
“But sometimes I wonder about it myself,” he says of his birth date, recorded in Red Cross dossiers taken from World War II Dutch and Nazi German files.
Born Alter Heimann in Amsterdam to Jewish parents then in hiding, Joustra was found in July 1943 among some 100 children and babies assembled on a Dutch railway platform awaiting transportation to Nazi death camps in Poland.
“That day a woman called Mia van Seggelen-Smit rode her bike to the station, as she had been doing for a few months,” Joustra explains. “She looked pregnant and was getting bigger each time she came. On this day, she removed some of the padding that made her look pregnant and hid me under her clothing.”
Van Seggelen-Smit then walked from the station, placed Joustra in a wicker basket on her pushbike and took him to her home in Haarlem.
Read the full article by Marea Donnelly in The Daily Telegraph.