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Survivor
& Witness in Western North Carolina |
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| Choosing to Remember from the Shoah to the Mountains | ||
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Date: August 26, 2004 Name – HENDRIK COLIJN Birth Date – JULY 19, 1924 Place of Birth – THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS Parents' Names – HENDRIK A. COLIJN SOPHIA W. N Grandparents’ Names – HENDRIK COLIJN (former Prime Minister of the Netherlands) HELENA GROENENBERG Siblings – ROB COLIJN ELIZABETH FRANCOIS Spouse - ANN FELDERHOF COLIJN Children
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HENDRIK O. COLIJN CHRISTIAN, ERICA, FREDRICK A. COLIJN R. PETER COLIJN soon to adopt a girl WALTER
S. COLIJN
CHRISTOPHER,SARAH, ANNETTE C. SLANEY MALCOLM, EMMA |
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HENDRIK COLIJN Righteous Gentile Summary of interview August 26, 2004 By Idelle Packer Hendrik “Henk” Colijn, current resident of Hendersonville, NC, celebrating his 80th birthday this summer, helped his native Holland survive the wrath of the Nazis during World War II by joining the Dutch Resistance. Born in the Netherlands in 1924, Colijn spent his childhood in the Dutch East Indies (now called Indonesia), but was back in his homeland by age 15 for his high school education. The Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and by 1943 18 year-old Colijn had refused compulsory recruitment in the German war industry and joined the underground. Punishable by death or concentration camp imprisonment, Colijn built his own crystal radio and distributed news from the BBC, stole ration cards from government distribution centers for Jews in hiding, and worked in cells directly managing weapons smuggling and espionage. Until the age of 21 when the war ended in 1945, Colijn was on the run from the Nazis, begging help from strangers and obtaining false documents, all the while continuing and intensifying his involvement in the Dutch Resistance. Seemingly by the grace of God, Colijn stayed just out of reach of being sent to concentration camps for the risks he took in defiance of the Nazi occupation. His parents and sister, captured and sent to concentration camps in the Dutch East Indies, were not so lucky. The full interview discloses Henk Colijn’s many close brushes with the German authorities, his high school romance that saved his life and became the love of his life, his father’s grueling ordeal in a concentration camp on the Island of Java, and the heroic journey by his mother to find him. To read the interview in its entirety click here. |
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