Middle school students at Roeper School
in Birmingham hear from Anneke
Kooistra-Burke.

Child .of

Holocaust rescuers

Anneke Kooistra-Burke's
parents hid eight Jews
in their Utrecht home
during the Holocaust.

tells of her experiences.

WITNESS

DIANA LIEBERMAN
StairWriter

i

if A

5/12

2000

56

magine being 31h years old, hear-

ing muffled thumps and phantom
whispers in the night.
You turn 4, 5, 6 years old, all
the time being told the sounds are in
your imagination.
Meanwhile, during the day, your
father goes on mysteri6us errands and
soldiers search the house. Your parents
have you and your two sisters con,
fined to the attic for varying periods
of time, while more suspicious noises
take place below.
•
To Anneke Kooistra-Burke, now 62
and a resident of Mayville, Mich., these
memories are all too real. They took
place in the home where she grew up, a
small house in Utrecht, Holland, during
World War II.
On May 2, Kooistra-Burke shared
her story with middle- and upper-
school students at Roeper School's
Birmingham campus.
It wasn't until the war ended, she
said, that she learned the source of the
sounds and actions that had frightened
her so much for three years: her parents,
Wopke and Heil, were hiding eight Jews
from the Nazis. And thanks to her par-

ents' efforts, all eight survived.
Kooistra-Burke explained that her
parents took such strict precautions
because they felt their children were too
young to keep secret the presence of
eight extra people in the house. Even if
the little girls had understood what was
going on, they likely would have
revealed the secret at play with friends.
The news eventually would have made
its way to the Nazi occupiers.
It is not easy for Kooistra-Burke to
speak in public. She began by warning
the Roeper students that she is subject
to panic attacks. Tears came to her
eyes more than once during .her 40-
minute presentation.
"For three years as a little child, I was
told what I had seen I had not seen;
what I had heard I had not heard," she
said. Today she receives a pension from
the Dutch government to help compen-
sate for the emotional damage she suf-
fered during the war. Her younger sister
has removed the hinges from all doors in
her home, so no one can be locked in as
she once was.
Despite her obvious discomfort,
Kooistra-Burke said she feels driven to
tell her parents' story whenever possible.
"I feel this is my mission, to share
with the groups I am allowed to

speak to," she said.
"My parents were not heroes. They
were people like you and me. But they
did care."
In 1978, the names of Wopke and
Hell Kooistra-Bos were added to those
of the Righteous Among the Gentiles at
Yad. Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memori-
al, and, in 1983, Queen Beatrix of the
Netherlands honored the couple.
During the early 1960s, Kooistra-
Burke took a year's leave from her job in
the Netherlands to work on a kibbutz in
Israel. She met her future husband there,
Detroit native Donald Burke, and con-
verted to Judaism.
Most of what Kooistra-Burke has
learned about her family's secret annex
came from those who survived the war
hidden there, rather than from her par-
ents themselves. On Christmas Eve
1944, she was told, after the family had
celebrated Christmas together, the chil-
dren were sent to bed. Then her father
brought out a homemade menora and
played "Hatikva" on the piano.
"My father called the state of Israel
`God's signature to the world,'" she
remembered. Her father Wopke
Kooistra-Bos died in 1984, but spoke in
Israel many times after the war. "He
used to say, 'My eves are not on China,

my eyes are not on America — my eyes
are on Israel.'"
His wife Heil is still alive, and wel-
comes short notes, especially from
young people.
"I cannot say I hate you and love
myself because hate stems from self-
hatred," Kooistra-Burke said. "When
there is love in my heart, there is no
space for hate."
She called on the Roeper students
to symbolically adopt a Holocaust vic-
tim, to live their lives with added
appreciation because of another whose
life was cut short.
Her message was not lost on the
Roeper students.
Kara Sensoli, 17, of Macomb
Township, said she didn't think some-
thing like the Holocaust could happen
in the United States. "But there are
forms of it every day."
"We're not as accepting a society as
we should be," agreed Liz Pattison, 17,
of Troy. "A lOt of people here [at Roeper
School] are very aware of that."
Parent and teacher Michelle Stamler
of Royal Oak said, "There's a heightened
sense of creating a safe place here,
because the Roepers and the world they
left were so unsafe."
Noted educators Annemarie and
George Roeper founded the school that
bears their name in 1941. They had fled
their native Germany when the school
owned by Annemarie's parents, who
were Jewish, was taken over by the Nazis.
The couple dedicated themselves to
creating an environment in which the
powerful few would never again be able
to impose their will upon the less pow-
erful minority.
Roeper School moved to its
Bloomfield Hills campus in 1946 and
became a school for gifted children 10
years later. The high school program was
added in 1965.
Today, the school's enrollment stands
at about 640 students, representing 60
communities in southeast Michigan.
Lower school students attend classes on
the Bloomfield Hills campus, while the
middle and upper school campus is in a
former Birmingham public school. ❑

Kooistra
s -Burke can be

reached at (517) 843-6824. Her
mother's address is: Heil Kooistra-

ius, ,Spaarestraat 61, Utrecht,
VC3522, the Netherlands.

