History of Sorts

I came across this death notification of Jacob Rosenboom. The reason why it drew my attention was the date. Jacob died on 10 April 1968, the very day I was born. Then when I did more research, I discovered that Jacob had lived in my hometown of Geleen in the Netherlands.

The Rosenboom-Wolf family lived in Sittard from 1933 and in Geleen from 1936 to 1938. An Abraham Rosenbaum/Rosenboom had come to the Netherlands from Germany in the early nineteenth century and had settled in Zevenaar as a merchant. His grandson, (also named) Abraham, married Josina Wolf from Lith (near Oss) in 1895. From this son, Jacob Rosenboom was born in 1896 in Zevenaar. Jacob married his cousin Vrouwtje (which means little woman in Dutch) Wolf from Lith in 1918, also born in 1896. In Zevenaar, daughter Saartje was born in 1919, son Herman Abraham in 1920, then in Didam in 1922, daughter Josina Rebekka followed by son Levie Rosenboom in 1923. Jacob’s mother died in 1922, after which his father remarried.

The Rosenbooms were traditionally merchants by trade, but Jacob, like his uncle Nathan Rosenboom, started working in the mines in the south of the province of Limburg at a certain point.

Jacob and Vrouwtje and their four children lived in Hoensbroek in 1929, then in Brunssum and from May 1933 in Sittard. Jacob was then a carpenter by trade. In October 1936, they moved to Geleen Jacob worked in Geleen at the state mine Maurits.

The family moved back to Sittard in November 1938 at 5 Vouerweg. (The company Philips had a factory at Vouerweg, where I worked for ten years) Daughter Saartje worked as domestic help and lived (most of the time) in Amsterdam from November 1938 to July 1940 and in Arnhem from 1941-1942. During of the German invasion, Vrouwtje Rosenboom-Wolf and his daughter Josina stayed in Amsterdam for a few months. Saartje returned to Sittard in March 1942.

The family probably went into hiding in the spring of 1943 when something went wrong with daughter Saartje: she died in Heerlen on 28 October 1943, aged 24. I am a father of 3 children, and I would not know how I would feel if one of my children died. The only thing I can be sure of is that I’d be devastated.

The rest of the family survived the war. Apart from the loss of Saartje, there were more victims in the family. In 1942, Vrouwtjes’s brother Herman Wolf was deported from Sittard with his wife and two sons and gassed in Auschwitz. Jacob’s sister Regina Koppel-Rosenboom, a young widow, had been murdered in Sobibor, together with her daughter. Jacob’s father, age 74, died in Zevenaar in January 1943; Jacob’s stepmother survived the war.

After the liberation in 1945, the five surviving family members returned to the Vouerweg in Sittard. Not much later, they lived at 45 Resedastraat. After the war, Jacob worked for some time at the Julia mine in Eygelshoven. They moved to Eindhoven soon afterwards.

The sons left home and married within a few years. Herman Abraham became a draftsman at the SBB, a nitrogen fixation company. It also has significance to me. Some employees died during the war, either because they had been in resistance or due to a bombing by the RAF in 1943, where the RAF had mistaken Geleen for Aachen in Germany. A monument was erected, for these men, in the street where I grew up. I passed it by many times without giving it a second glance.

Herman Abraham married Lena Offenbach in 1952 and moved to Amsterdam with her in 1959. He passed away in 2015.

Josina Rebekka was a shop assistant until her marriage in 1953 to the divorced Amsterdam tailor Tobias Lavino. She then left for Amsterdam. They had two children. Josina passed away in 2009. Levie Rosenboom became a miner and married Neeltje Groot in 1950. They had two children in Sittard and moved to Boxtel in 1957. Levie died in 2003 in Boxtel.

After Jacob and Vrouwtje celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary in Sittard in 1958, they followed their daughter and eldest son to Amsterdam in November 1959, where Jacob died on April 101968 and Vrouwtje in 1980.

Amazingly, all of this originated and in my hometown in an area I am very familiar with, and I never knew until today.

sources

https://www.stolpersteinesittardgeleen.nl/Stichting

https://www.joodsmonument.nl/nl/page/666557/familie-rosenboom