Esther Boas

Prepared by the Witnesses of War team

Esther Ruth Boas-Barendse was born on 6 July 1942 in Amsterdam, German-occupied Netherlands, to Salomon Boas and Seraphina Prins. Anti-Jewish restrictions prevented her mother from giving birth at a nearby hospital, so Esther was delivered at the Portuguese Jewish hospital. In early 1943, the family was forced to leave Amsterdam South and move to Amsterdam East.

Warned of an approaching roundup, her parents entrusted their infant daughter to their former neighbors, the Assman family. However, a neighbor belonging to the Dutch Nazi movement, the NSB, recognized Esther’s pram and betrayed her. She was arrested and taken to the children’s nursery opposite the Hollandsche Schouwburg, where Jewish children were held pending deportation.

The Assmans continued trying to save her. Nursery worker Virrie Cohen took Esther outside in a pram and secretly transferred her into another pushed by Ida Assman. The family then moved her into hiding in the northern Netherlands, eventually placing her with Henri Assman and Janke Dijkstra in Leeuwarden.

Her parents, meanwhile, had been imprisoned in Westerbork. Hoping that inclusion on the Barneveld list would protect them from deportation, they arranged for Esther to rejoin the family in Barneveld. That protection proved temporary: the group was sent to Westerbork in September 1943, and on 4 September 1944, Esther and her family were deported to Terezín (Theresienstadt), the ghetto-concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. She suffered severe malnutrition but survived, together with both parents and her paternal grandmother, until liberation in May 1945.

After returning to Amsterdam, Esther rebuilt her life within the Jewish community. She trained as a nurse, married in 1963, and later ran a kosher catering business in Amstelveen.