The Teddy Bear and the Family Who Saved Him

An Interview with Joseph

A Visit with Joseph

Leslie: Today I find myself in Tel Aviv visiting Joseph. He and his wife live in a retirement home and their small apartment is filled with remains of his past.

Speaker unconfirmed: Hello. Hello. Bonjour. Bonjour. Bonjour. Good afternoon. Right.

Leslie: Joseph, you speak English?

Joseph: I speak English.

Leslie: How are you? Nice to meet you.

Joseph: I speak French. I speak Dutch.

Leslie: Great. All good.

Joseph: Come on in. This is Ruth.

Leslie: Hi, Ruth. How are you?

Speaker unconfirmed: The young lady. He has a whole album with all kind of papers. We can talk about this for a few hours.

Joseph: ID from my dad.

Childhood in Amsterdam

Leslie: Joseph’s parents are of Polish origin. He is born in Amsterdam in 1937 and he’s their only child.

Joseph: This was the the star that I had on on my coat. The first memory comes from the

The Raid and a Warning

Joseph: war when I went was on a Friday evening and I said good night to my parents and go to my room to the hallway and through the door comes a boot that just trampled the door. was from wood with the yelling go outside, go outside in German, “Raus!”. We had to go to a school to register and there they separated the men from the women, the fathers from the mothers and so on. The children stay with the mother

Joseph: and I was crying and the German soldier came to her and said, “Keep this kid quiet. We don’t want noise here.” Right? So she said, “If you bring his father back, he’s going to stop. He’s going to stop.” So he did. And this German brought us back. They were signed with a stamp 27 November 42.

Joseph: And when we came home, he said, “Tomorrow morning, we come back to pick up people that we missed.”

Leslie: Okay. So he wanted to let you guys know,

Joseph: right? And he said, “Next.” And then I cannot help you anymore.

Leslie: All right.

Joseph: So, the same night we disappeared. The only thing that I took from home that night to go into hiding was my teddy bear.

A Child in Hiding

Leslie: Faced with a rising danger, the family makes the difficult decision to part ways and entrust Joseph to a resistance network that can provide him shelter. Joseph is only 5 years old.

Joseph: When when I

Joseph: arrived there, I had to crawl between the ceiling and the floor for the night to stay the night till they figure out what where is another place to go. And there were a lot of people there. So you have to be quiet. You’re not allowed to make a noise because the other neighbors can hear. Now from that place,

Joseph: the next morning I went again to another place. There was a lady, a young lady, 22 years old, that used to bring children during the day from one place to another place.

Joseph: She brought me to a farm. The farmer, he said, “I have to take care of the cows and of the pigs to feed them and to clean them.” And I couldn’t.

Leslie: You had never done that.

Joseph: I’ve never done that. I’m 5 years old. They couldn’t pick up the pail with the food. Now he thought he’s getting a helper.

Leslie: Mhm.

Joseph: For his farm. I was not the helper. So he went back to the underground, got in touch with them. Send me somebody else. This is not the one that I need.

A Journey Through the Forest

Leslie: Joseph remembers the journey to the next hideout.

Joseph: It was at night. You go through the forest, through the woods. It is cold. You’re hungry. You’re tired. You don’t know where to go. You go with the lady. She teaches me how to walk in the forest because the forest at night, you hear every noise. And the the d the dry leaves and the little branches, the wood, they make too much noise.

Joseph: They make too much noise. So you put your foot down and very slowly you put your weight on that foot. And then you take the other foot and you continue the same thing. And you move very very slowly not to make noise because the Nazis were also in the forest. They’re looking for people.

Joseph: So we went further through through fields till we came to a beautiful house. It was dark. So we walked around the gravel and came to the back door. Door went open and we went inside the house. That’s when to a room. Everything is dark. There was There were no windows. The windows are blacked out.

Leslie: Uh-huh.

Joseph: And I fell asleep in the chair.

Leslie: This one?

Joseph: This one with my coat on with my teddy bear. But the teddy bear had a ripped arm. He was dirty. It was had an arm that was broken. That was ripped. And I fell asleep.

Leslie: That’s That’s the chair that you fell asleep on, right?

Joseph: This is the chair that I’m

Joseph: sitting in.

Leslie: You brought it back after

Joseph: right after they passed away, I brought took the chair back home. Now it is an antique chair. Now this it has but it has a value that you cannot explain.

A Family Who Chose to Keep Him

Joseph: The lady of the house that has no children brought me to her bedroom, covered me and let me sleep. And when she went down and said to her husband, “We keep the child. Go back. Tell the underground not to come anymore because they were known as a safe house.” The next morning, they told me how they called and how I should call them.

Leslie: To avoid being discovered, Joseph must address them as uncle and aunt.

Joseph: They gave me another name.

Leslie: What was your new name?

Joseph: Yiki. Not to go next to the windows. Not He is a doctor. People come to the house back in the days people would come to the to the doctor to the waiting room. The Germans would come. There’s a school 300 m further is a school which is headquarters Gestapo headquarters.

Hiding Close to the Gestapo

Joseph: We could hear them talk. We could hear them sing. They come to the doctor. So I need to be hidden in the house. So there’s a basement which is dark. There’s no light. You go down the steps. It is moist. It has like a a smell from mildew and so on. There you stay until we call you. If you don’t hear us calling, you don’t come out.

Leslie: But how long sometimes would you stay there?

Joseph: No idea. There’s no time. And the gravel around the house was an early warning system. We could hear who’s coming.

Leslie: Mhm.

Joseph: I could go to hide sometime. One time I went in this closet over there behind you.

Leslie: You would hide inside this as a kid?

Joseph: As a kid, it was hidden inside it once or twice.

Leslie: Can I open?

Joseph: Yeah, you can open it. Today there’s all kind of other things in there.

Leslie: I’m sorry.

Joseph: No. There were no shelves. No shelves in there.

Leslie: And you would hide in there.

Joseph: I would stand in there. While there, the Germans would stand next to it and talk. I could hear them breathe. I could hear them talk. You stand quietly until everything is safe. Was like a family. I

The Disappearance of His Teddy Bear

Joseph: was welcome there. But had no toys and the there was a traumatic happening that the the teddy bear was gone. I used to talk to the teddy bear. But they told me I told him the teddy bear disappeared. He went away. I don’t know where we went. We were looking for him and and my aunt and uncle were looking for him. They were looking for the teddy. Teddy bear didn’t listen to to what I told them. Must have gone through the door. Germans took him.

Leslie: That’s what you told yourself.

Joseph: Yeah.

Reunion with His Parents

Leslie: Joseph spends three years with the family. At the end of the war, his father finds him, but Joseph doesn’t recognize the man.

Joseph: My foster parents said, “Yes, this is your your father.” He said, “I’ll come and pick you up as soon as your mother comes back.” a mother. Who knows what? I have no mother.

Leslie: Did you want to leave with this man that you

Joseph: No, I didn’t want to live by them. I want to stay by them.

Leslie: You wanted to stay with your foster parents.

Joseph: These are my parents for the last three years. But I remember my mother came back from [unclear in captions] where we wound up. They started a new life in a one room apartment.

Leslie: So you were in a room with two strangers basically.

Joseph: Two strangers again. The strangers were arguing with each other. I got sick.

Leslie: What happened to you?

Joseph: I got asthma.

The Secret Behind the Teddy Bear

Leslie: Joseph is sent to the mountains for treatment. As an adult, he relocates to Israel, but stays connected with those who rescued him. One day, his foster mother reveals a secret.

Joseph: She asked me, “Can you forgive me?” “Forgive you for what? I did something wrong. What could you do wrong? You saved me. You took care of me.” And she remembered.

Joseph: She says, “When you came to us, you had a teddy bear and the teddy bear disappeared and you were upset and we helped you to look for it and for days you were crying. Your only friend, the only thing you had is gone.

Joseph: I forgot about it, Teddy Bear.” So she said, “I threw it away. He didn’t disappear. I took it away from you. So now comes the question, why?

Leslie: Of course,

Joseph: because the first of was dirty. He had a broken arm. But we were afraid that you will forget him somewhere in the house. Well, the patients are coming. And if there’s a teddy bear, there is a child. And we had no children and you were not supposed to be by us. The teddy bear could have given us all away.

Honoring His Rescuers

Joseph: That is Ali’s passport photo [name to verify] when she was younger. This is Pete when he was older.

Joseph: When I had problems in my teenage years, I went to my foster parents to talk, not to my parents. That was home. there. I could ask questions, they would answer me.

Leslie: Did you make them righteous, righteous gentiles?

Joseph: Right. In 1971 they came here to Israel. We went to Yad Vashem and they planted the tree in the avenue of the righteous. They got the medal from [name unclear in captions].

Leslie: Uhhuh.

Joseph: And they were very like honored. They didn’t expect it. They didn’t want it because it it draws the attention to the to the fact that they did something which was to them normal that you that you do things.

Leslie: They were good people.

Joseph: They were good. They were too good.

Leslie: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for for sharing your story. I will I will make sure to relay you know the message.

Joseph: Exactly. Exactly. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Speaker unconfirmed: Thank you. Bye-bye.