Hotel, Holocaust and Hope   

My research for Connecting Small Histories, on musicians at Eastbourne’s Grand Hotel, led to a poignant story of the Holocaust and a Dutch Jewish family – writes Anne Krisman Goldstein…

The Grand Hotel’s first musical director in 1903 was the virtuoso violinist, Herr Von Leer, the Viennese professional name of Simon Van Lier, from The Hague.  His Palm Court string orchestra played for prestigious guests including Elgar, Debussy, Dame Nellie Melba, the Wright brothers and Ernest Shackleton.
Simon was not the only Dutch musician in the family to come to Eastbourne. His brother Jacques, ‘the Paganini of Cellists,” had played for the Berlin Philharmonic. Flora Manheim, Simon’s wife, was a respected violinist and spirited leader of women’s orchestras. She had spoken out about prejudice against females conducting male musicians.

It was when I looked more deeply into the family tree that this story became one of tragedy.  Simon’s wife Flora, one of their daughters, Fifi, her husband Machiel and a son-in-law, Leonard, who all lived in the Netherlands, had been murdered at Auschwitz.

Simon Van Lier’s British grandson is Steven Frank, a child survivor of Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp. He has received the BEM for services to Holocaust Education.  My friend Karen Van Coevorden, a teacher and Holocaust educator, was in contact with Steven. She thought the world of him. “He’s the granddad I never had,” she said. I got in touch and we began to share stories, photographs and press cuttings about the Van Lier family.

Steven was five years old when the Nazis occupied his home town of Amsterdam. His father Leonard David Frank, a lawyer, helped the Dutch Resistance to hide Jews, even at times in his own home. He arranged papers for them to escape to Switzerland via France.

He could have fled to England.  However, he was the legal member of a board that governed a forward-thinking Jewish mental hospital. He did not want to leave his vulnerable patients behind with no-one to speak for them.  Leonard was betrayed and arrested in late 1942.

Thanks to the brave intervention of three of Leonard’s colleagues, Steven’s mother Beatrix and her children were placed on the Barneveld List – 700 prominent Dutch Jews who were kept in De Schaffelaar Castle instead of being sent to concentration camps.

Beatrix showed ingenuity and resilience. She dressed as a male cleaner to get inside the prison where her husband was arrested and tortured and spoke to him. Leonard Frank was killed at Auschwitz on 21 January 1943.

Beatrix and her three sons were deported via Westerbork transit camp in a cattle truck to Thereseinstadt concentration camp in September 1944. When they arrived after a horrendous 39 hour journey, she volunteered to work in the camp’s laundry, aware it was one of the only places with hot water. She washed her sons’ clothes in secret to prevent them from succumbing to a typhus epidemic, feeding the boys crumbs made into a paste to stave off hunger.

The family survived and were liberated by the Red Army.  After a month recovering with the Red Cross, they flew to London with the RAF, thanks to pressure from Beatrix.  She was re-united with her father Simon.

Not only had Beatrix’s husband been murdered, her mother and her sister Felicia had been killed at Auschwitz.   A stolpersteine (stumbling stone) in the town of Goor, the Netherlands, remembers Felicia and her husband Machiel.  https://www.tracesofwar.com/sights/72584/Stumbling-Stones-Deldenstraat-82.htm

Beatrix stayed at the Grand Hotel’s Van Lier suite when she was 80, a birthday present from her grandchildren.

Steven Frank has been honoured for his Holocaust education work by having his photograph taken by the Duchess of Cambridge. In her image, his granddaughters look at him with love and admiration, a sign of hope for the future. He holds the cooking pot that his mother used in the camp to mix crumbs and water.  https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/duchess-of-cambridge-photographs-holocaust-survivors-for-jewish-news/ 

Author: Anne Krisman Goldstein

With thanks to Steven Frank for permission to use these photographs