A righteous life
An Australian woman who saved around 800 Jewish babies and toddlers in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during the Holocaust has passed away, aged 95.
AN Australian woman who saved around 800 Jewish babies and toddlers in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during the Holocaust has passed away, aged 95.
Dutch-born Constance Koster served with the Dutch underground in Amsterdam and with several members of the Dutch resistance.
Despite laying her life on the line, she survived and became a great-grandmother. Her extraordinary courage was recognised by the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne in May last year at a ceremony attended by Netherlands ambassador Annemieke Ruigrok.
During World War II, Koster defied the Gestapo, caring for and smuggling Jewish infants and toddlers to safe homes where they were “adopted” by Dutch families, avoiding the horrific fate of their parents and siblings.
She would walk the streets of Amsterdam, often with two babies hidden beneath her green tartan coat, pretending to be pregnant.
In a bizarre stroke of fate, Melbourne resident Ena Lewis-Krant met Koster to interview her for a Dutch radio program some years ago and they realised Lewis-Krant was one of the children Koster had risked her life to save during the war.
Lewis-Krant had been just 11 months old when her Dutch rescuer took her and passed her to a foster family in 1943. Months later, her foster parents were betrayed to the Gestapo, and she was transported to the Westerbork transit camp, where she was reunited with her parents, before the family was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Amsterdam-born Holocaust survivor Joe de Haan, a volunteer at the Jewish Holocaust Centre, said that if not for courageous people like Koster, he would not have survived.
“Members of my family were not so fortunate – they perished at the hands of the Nazis. My life was saved by very brave Dutch people like Constance Koster – who did not hesitate to save thousands of other Jewish people during the terrible war years, when finding hiding places was extremely difficult and the danger of betrayal ever present.”
BY AJN STAFF
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