In August I created an account on JoodsMonument.nl in an attempt to update entries about various family members who both perished and survived the war as well as to edit connections amongst various family members. While doing this I noticed someone had posted information about my grandmother’s uncle Max and his family. So I sent him a message inquiring about what his connection to my 2nd great uncle was. The next day he sent me a response explaining that he now resides in their house and that he was fascinated with the story of my grandmother’s cousin Bertram. He went on to sat that at some point relatively recent to my sending him a message that he had tried to get in contact with my grandmother’s sister Edith as she was the closest living relative to Bertram he could find. The reason he was trying to get in touch with my great aunt was that he wanted to have a Stolperstein dedicated to the memory of Bertram and in order to that he had to get the permission of the closest living relative. I responded back with Edith’s account of their escape from the Nazi’s and expanded up that by explaining where Max and my great grandfather’s descendants now were. I also put him in touch with Bertram’s oldest living 1st and 2nd cousins on both his parents sides.
And now a few months later family members from the Netherlands, Israel, and the United States will be meeting on April 29th at the former home of my 2nd great uncle for a ceremony as well as lunch or dinner at a restaurant called ‘t Pakhuys which is where the leather trading business of my great grandfather Alfred, his brother Max and their father Barend once was.