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CHAPTER TWELVE Family Reunion in the winter of 1994, my son philip met a dutch girl in florida and later in the year decided to travel to Holland to visit her. While he was in Holland, he happened to pick up a telephone directory, and to his amazement he found a listing for Engelschman, spelled the same way we spell our name in Dutch. Philip decided to make a telephone call, and sure enough he was put in touch with an uncle of the person he called. Right away Philip called me from Holland and told me that he had found some of our family. I thought that he was either joking or that he’d been drinking. But Philip insisted that he had talked to Louis Engelschman, whose father and my father were brothers. He said that Louis had shown Philip proof that we were related and gave me Louis’s telephone number. I called as soon as I got off the phone with Philip and had a long conversation with my new-found first cousin, Louis. He explained that I had never known about that part of my father’s family because my father’s brother, Louis’s father, had married out of the faith before I was born. My family was Orthodox, and intermarriage was forbidden. Most of the Engelschman family had sat shiva for Louis’s father; that is, they had declared him dead. To them he was.Although I had never known my father to be a fanatic, I don’t remember anyone in my family ever talking about any of this. I was also surprised to hear from my new-found cousin that my father had supplied their family with matzo, which is the unleavened bread that is eaten during Passover. These matzos were packed in large, round boxes and were picked up at our house by the oldest brother, Henry. This proves 91 that my father and his family were keeping in touch with each other without any of us children knowing about it. When I had returned to Amsterdam from the concentration camps, there were no telephone directories to look people up and, because the registration office had listed my family as having died in the camps, Louis’s side of the family had given up looking for survivors.As far as I knew, just one person who had survived the war held the key to both sides of our family: my cousin Duifje. I knew that she had survived because she had actually come to my house in Amsterdam after I returned from the camps. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to speak to her. My eyes were very bad then, and by the time I got downstairs, she had disappeared. I had no idea what her married name was, and I had no way of finding her. It turns out, though, that Louis had been working on a family tree for the past ten years and had learned that I was living in Toronto. Several years before, on a trip to the United States, he had come up to Toronto to find me. He had looked me up in the Toronto telephone directory but could not find my name because he was looking for Michel Engelschman. He had no way of knowing that I now spelled my name the English way, Englishman.After that last attempt, Louis had given up trying to find me. But now that we had spoken, Louis couldn’t wait to have a family reunion, and he planned one for September 1994. Unfortunately, in August of that year, I had a heart attack and needed coronary bypass surgery. Needless to say, I was in no shape to travel.As soon as I recovered, though, we rescheduled the reunion, and Rika, Katy, her husband Danny, Philip, and I arrived in Holland on Friday, May 12, 1995. We were greeted at the airport by Louis Engelschman and Rika’s cousin, Elizabeth Van Buiten, her husband, Jan, and their son, Benny. When I first arrived in Amsterdam, I was forced to rest for a few days while my foot recovered from an infection. But as soon as I was able to get around, my son-in-law, Danny, went with me to my former house on the Plantage Muidergracht. I wanted to try once more to get inside the house and look for the papers I had left there. I rang the doorbell and this time, when I explained...

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