12 June 07 – Holocaust survivor Pieter Steinhardt, a warm friend and supporter of the Holocaust Centre, passed away at 8.30am yesterday, Monday 11 June, following a painful but courageous battle with cancer. He leaves behind no family.
 
“Pieter attended almost every event here at the Holocaust Centre,” said co-founder Mrs Marina Smith. “We used to see Peter coming up in his beloved car to join here the family of child survivors to which he belonged. The memory of his loyalty and interest in our work will remain with us, and it is with real sadness that we mourn his passing.”
 
Pieter was born on the 6th April 1936, the only son of German parents who had fled to the Netherlands during the rise of the Nazis in Hitler’s Germany.
 
After his father’s arrest by the Gestapo, his mother sent him into hiding, aged only five or six years old. “Above all other feelings, a sense of guilt engulfed me about leaving my mother and maternal grandparents,” he recalled in the recently published book ‘Zachor: Child Survivors Speak’. “I knew I would never see them again.”
 
Pieter was placed on a farm near Arnhem, together with a married couple and two teenage boys. Different hiding places were arranged, to which they could retreat within minutes if a raid was conducted by the Germans. When a raid finally came, Pieter and one of the teenagers were hidden in a box above the cow stalls. “We were so frightened,” Pieter recalled. “I tried to breathe quietly, but the more I tried, the louder it seemed.” Then the Germans found and dragged out the married couple and the other teenager.
 
Pieter could hear everything as the Germans confronted the farmer. Despite the beatings which followed, he would not give up the hiding place, and was taken away to a concentration camp. To Pieter, the farmer and his wife showed courage ‘beyond what any other two persons would have had.’ “Their sense of what was right and their religious conviction is a memory which I will bear forever.” Pieter was moved to another farm, where at night he and two other children would sleep in bunks in a false wall.
 
In 1946, Pieter came to live with his aunt in London and was educated here, assimilating quickly. His Holocaust experience, however, would haunt the rest of his life, making it difficult for him to ever again trust or feel close to other people.
 
Aged seventeen, he revisited Amsterdam. Under the flat where he had lived with his parents was a café. “The people in the café looked at me as if I had returned from Mars,” he remembered. “I couldn’t stand it. I left my coffee, went outside and burst into tears.”
 
Pieter found work in the accounts department of the Gas Board in London. He was soon involved in union activities, becoming the chief shop steward of the gas division in NALGO, later to become UNISON.
 
“He had a first class brain and must have been a pain in the neck to the management as he argued so logically for his work colleagues to improve their conditions or present their grievances,” says Steven Frank, a fellow Holocaust survivor and longtime friend. “But he always did so fairly, when he knew that they were being wronged. He was not for strike action to get at the management.”
 
In later years, Pieter became associated first with the Child Survivor Group and then with the Child Survivors Association of Great Britain, of which he was a founder member and the first vice chairman. He worked tirelessly for the London Jewish Cultural Centre, and regularly attended the Hidden Children group at the Holocaust Survivor’s Centre in Hendon.
 
Although he threw himself into such activities, Pieter would say of himself, “I have never had any real friends; I always hold back.” The tribute of another friend and fellow Holocaust survivor, Dr Martin Stern, gently belies that bleak reflection:
 
“He is a man who, despite a terribly difficult life, inspired great respect, and who under even the most difficult circumstances was determined to make his contribution to Holocaust education. He was a stickler for honesty and decency, and his final illness showed how he was loved and respected to an extraordinary degree by an amazing circle of people.”
 
Pieter Steinhardt’s funeral will take place tomorrow.