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CHAPTER SEVEN Finding the Children my first promising lead in the search for katy and philip came through the Dutch Red Cross. I found the names of two children on their list, Katy and Philip Pelsma, who were the same ages as the children I was looking for. I was anxious to check out this lead, but there was something I had to do first. As soon as I was strong enough to travel,I left the hospital in Eindhoven and travelled to Amsterdam by the one available means of transportation, hitching a ride on an army truck. I was wearing all my possessions: an old pair of army pants that an American soldier had given me, a shirt from the hospital, and my welder’s glasses. When I arrived in Amsterdam, I went straight to the house where I had lived with my family. I wanted to get the photographs and identity cards that I had hidden inside the wall of our flat.When I showed up at the door, the woman who now lived there became abusive. I explained that I just wanted to get my family papers back, but she threatened me with the police if I didn’t leave immediately. I backed off right away, because, believe me, the last thing I wanted to see was another uniform! I wasn’t sure what to do next, so I went back down the stairs and sat on the steps of Mr. Biermasz’s laboratory across the street from my old house. That was where and when I realized that I was the only survivor of my entire family. It was time to face reality.While I was sitting there, planning my next move, a man walking by suddenly stopped and said,“Aren’t you Mike?”I looked up and saw Bernard Ossendrijver, who was related to my oldest sister, Esther, by marriage. He asked me what I was doing in 54 front of my house, and I explained what had happened. He warned me that the people living in the house had been put there in 1943 by the Nazis, so they must have been Nazi sympathizers. He advised me not to stir up any trouble and to leave them alone. He asked if I had any place to sleep and any ration coupons for food. I told him that I did not have a place to sleep and I didn’t know anything about the ration coupons because, until then, I had been in the hospital. He told me that all I had to do to get the coupons was to notify the government registration office that I was back in Amsterdam and needed my food rations. It sounded simple enough. I should have known that it would not be that easy. When I got to the government office, the officials wouldn’t give me any coupons because, according to them, I was dead and, therefore, did not need food coupons. I asked the clerk if he had ever talked to a dead person, and when he said no, I told him that he was in the process of doing so right now! I asked him where I had supposedly died. He replied that I had been shot during the fighting in the Waterlooplein Square in Amsterdam in the spring of 1941. If I really was Michel Engelschman, I had to prove it by getting two nonJewish people to testify on my behalf. Fortunately, I was able to find two people to do so. One of them was a plumber named Mr. Van Rijn, who was more than willing to identify me. He had also kept all of my electrical tools for me during the war and returned them to me. Even with his testimony, it took about three weeks before I finally got my food ration coupons. In the meantime, the government officials gave me a few coupons to tide me over. Throughout this time, the Red Cross kept updating the list of survivors , but having spent more than two years in the concentration camps, and having seen so many Dutch Jews die, I knew that the lists would not be very long. In my heart, I knew that, with the possible exception of my sister Duifje, my family had not survived. I thought that Duifje might possibly have survived because of her physical strength—she had worked on farms and was trained for work on a kibbutz in Israel—and because of her ability...

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