About 300 Jews remain in this city of the 2,000 who lived here before the war, a Jewish Telegraphic Agency correspondent learned today upon his arrival here on the first lap of a tour of the recently liberated Jewish communities of Holland.
Utrecht was an underground rescue center for Jews thoughout the Netherland as a result of the assistance given the Jews by the local populace. In fact, Utrecht’s non-Jews are hailing the emergence from hiding places of their Jewish friends with as much elation as they greeted the Canadian troops who liberated the city.
Thousands of false identification papers were manufactured for Jews by officials of Utrecht’s water works. Fritz Troost, a non-Jew, saved the lives of numerous Jews and even arranged for the clandestine burial, with all religious rites, of Jews who died.
A Jewish butcher named medels, who revealed to the correspondent details of how Jews were saved, said that his own daughter and his son-in-law, Simon Keizer, are hidden in the homes of non-Jews for more than three years, although their seven-year-old son was deported to the Bergen-Belsen camp. Keizer has a relative, beatrice laizer in New York, also Edward Keizer in Chicago.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
