Art & Culture

Recipients of the citation this year are:
Shoshana Jansje Litten Serlui (Netherlands 1911 – Czechoslovakia 1945): Together with her husband, Dr. Manfred Litten, she directed the Youth Aliyah training farm in the city of Gouda in the Netherlands at the request of the Zionist Organization. After the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany in 1940, Litten Serlui realized that the evacuation of the students from the farm had to be planned.

She contacted the underground group led by Johan Gerard ("Joop") Westerweel and began collaborating with underground member Joachim Simon. She managed to save three students from the farm who were ordered to report to the local train station for deportation to the Ficht transit camp, from where Jews were sent to concentration and extermination camps.

With the help of the farm's in-house doctor and the director of the local hospital, Litten Serlui declared the three students to be suffering from dysentery and had them hospitalized in isolation in the hospital. She also placed the farm under full quarantine by order of the hospital, thus saving the students.

In 1942, Litten Serlui, together with Joachim Simon, and with the assistance of Dirk van Schaik, who worked on the farm, managed to arrange for all the members of the training farm identity cards without a "J" as well as food stamps and addresses of hiding places and escape routes.

In April 1943, the great Aktion was held in Gouda and all the Jewish residents of the farm were ordered to report to the train station for evacuation to the Fichte camp. Some of the farm members disembarked at other stations along the way and were evacuated to the pre-planned hiding places, while some traveled by other means of transportation and reached the hiding places. All the trainees arrived safely at their hiding places.

Dr. Manfred Litten, Shoshana Litten Serlui’s husband, was captured on his way to the hiding place in the city of Den Haag. An attempt to rescue him from there was unsuccessful and he was transferred to the Westerbork camp and from there to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz. After the evacuation of the farm, Litten Serlui lived with her son, Gideon, in the town of Riebeck and continued to coordinate the rescue of the campers from there.

In August 1943, she gave her 7-year-old son into hiding with a Catholic family in the city of Amersfoort, where he stayed for two years, survived the war and immigrated to Israel as part of Youth Aliyah in April 1945.

Litten Serlui continued to operate in the Dutch underground as part of the Joop Westerville group and participated in smuggling young people from France to neutral Spain over the Pyrenees mountains. She continued to find places of refuge, organize false identity cards, issue food stamps and find sources of funding for the underground.

In June 1944, Litten Serlui was captured at the train station in Utrecht by the SS, apparently following a betrayal. She was sent to camp Westerbork where she reunited with her husband. Both were sent to Auschwitz. Dr. Manfred Litten was murdered in Auschwitz in February 1945. Shoshana Litten Serlui was sent to a forced labor camp in Czechoslovakia and in April 1945 she perished on a death march from Zwodau camp.

Ellen-Ellie Waterman (Netherlands 1918 – Netherlands 1993): She became active in 1941 in forging papers and searching for hiding places together with Jaap Lembeck, a non-Jewish member of the Westerweel underground in Holland. In August 1942, as part of the Westerweel group, she helped secure hiding places for the students residing at the Youth Aliyah home in Loosdrecht. To do so she made contact with a student group in Utrecht and visited the Westerweel family home in Apeldoorn repeatedly.

Due to the arrest of her parents, she went underground in 1943 but continued to issue fake IDs and fingerprints and even build shelters for those in hiding. After the arrest of underground members Willie Westerweel and Giel Salome, Waterman continued to visit and care for hundreds hiding in Sevenum and Grubbenvost, Limburg province. Eight people hid in an apartment in Amsterdam that was registered under her alias, Eleonora Jonckheer, but after the arrest of group founder Johan Gerard ("Joop") Westerweel and member Bouke Koning in March 1944, she was forced to close this hiding place. After unauthorized travel by males was banned by the Nazi occupation forces in 1944, Waterman assumed some of the responsibilities of Harry Asscher in Friesland province.

Simha Kazik Rotem (Poland 1924 – Israel 2018): One of the most daring fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Joined the Zionist Youth Movement at the age of 13. Toward the end of 1940, after Rotem was injured and lost his brother and other family members in the bombing of their home, and the city’s Jews were ordered to enter the ghetto, Rotem was sent to relatives in the countryside but returned to the ghetto after three months. Thanks to his Aryan appearance and in exchange for bribes he paid to municipal employees in Warsaw, he managed to move from the ghetto to the Aryan area and back through the sewers. Later, as the ghetto fell to the Nazis, he managed to smuggle dozens of rebels to the Aryan side through the sewers. After the uprising was suppressed, he continued to obtain weapons for the Jewish underground. Rotem immigrated to Israel in 1946.

Paul Giniewski (Austria 1926 – France 2011): A member of the Zionist Youth Movement underground in France. Recruited in Grenoble, by Simon Levitt, one of the leaders of the movement, to supply false documents. He operated out of the home of Jewish rescuer Jean Latchiver, and as a student at the local high school hid false documents inside his textbooks and passed them on to Jews whose survival depended on them. He was arrested by Italian forces who controlled the area, but remained calm and presented them with his false ID card and they released him. Giniewski traveled by bicycle to various towns to approach mayors in an effort to recruit them to cooperate with the underground—a dangerous operation whose outcome could not be predicted. He would return to collect documents stamped by amenable mayors for Jews in hiding. On one such mission he fell on a mountainous route and was injured but returned to rescue activity after hospitalization and before he was completely recovered. After Germany invaded the Italian-occupied zone in France in September 1943, Giniewski was arrested again but was released by a French militiaman who became convinced he was not a member of the underground, thanks in part to patriotic poems Giniewski had written and were among his documents when arrested. The other people arrested in the same incident were executed. After the war, Paul Giniewski was a journalist and media figure in France.

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