Samuël de la Bella
Or, the reason we don’t trust the post-war tracing services.
I frequently get questions from my friends and family about why I insist on re-tracing all the steps that the post-war tracing services, such as the Dutch Red Cross, or the International Tracing Services, have already done in their own research. Today’s biography emphasizes exactly why I do not trust anyone’s research and why I encourage everyone to retrace and prove everything they think they know about any of their family who experienced the Holocaust.
Samuël de la Bella was born in Amsterdam on 6 January 1892 to Joseph de la Bella and Rachel Cassuto. Samuël was Joseph and Rachel’s second (and last) child; Esther, the couple’s first child, was born in Amsterdam in 1890.
Joseph de la Bella and Rachel Cassuto (the spelling of Rachel’s surname changes frequently) were married on 15 Jan 1890 in Amsterdam. Their marriage certificate states that Joseph was a shopkeeper and that his father, also named Samuël, was a merchant. David Cassuto, Rachel’s father, was a tailor.
Samuël’s family, much like the Pimontel family that were previously biographied, were part of the Netherland’s “Portuguese Jewry” and were Sephardic Jews. Sephardic Jews in the Netherlands, like Samuël de la Bella, descend from Jews who fled the Iberian peninsula during the Spanish Inquisition. The Netherlands was a popular destination at the time for Sephardic Jewish refugees due to the country’s shipping ports and status as a trading powerhouse.
In October 1911, Samuël de la Bella registered for his compulsory military service.
Samuël registered as a diamond cleaver upon his enlistment. He was reported to be 1 meter and 635 millimeters tall (or about five feet, three inches). Samuël was admitted to the military, but no other details about his service were recorded.
True to his military intake form, Samuël was admitted to the ANDB diamond worker’s union on 6 February 1909, at the age of 17. Samuël’s apprentice card does not appear to have survived, but he likely began training as a diamond cleaver several years prior, in his mid-teens.
On 15 June 1922, Samuël de la Bella married Lea Morpurgo, a woman about six years his junior. Lea was also from a Dutch Sephardic Jewish family in Amsterdam.
On his marriage certificate, Samuël’s occupation is listed as “kantoorbediende”, or an office clerk of sorts. His ANDB union card makes it clear that he lapsed on his membership several times around the time of his marriage, but it doesn’t list how or why. The most common reason that diamond workers let their membership lapse was simply because they forgot to pay their dues, could not pay their dues, or didn’t get the chance to pay their dues (unlike in 2022, paying union dues required physically going to an office and paying in cash). Another common reason that ANDB members lapsed on their membership was if they moved and switched unions; diamond workers frequently traveled outside of Amsterdam for work, and the ANDB union was only for those working within the Netherlands. I do not have any travel manifests for Samuël at this time, but that is not suggestive of anything, as many manifests were lost or simply have not yet been digitized.
There are a few more reasons Samuël may have taken a break from diamond work: after the First World War, the diamond industry entered a depression of its own and what little work remained, was moved largely to Belgium. Belgium became appealing for diamond factories because the Belgian economy had been decimated by the First World War, and thus, diamond work fetched lower wages in Antwerp than it did in Amsterdam. Furthermore, due to King Leopold’s annexation and pillaging of Congo, Belgium had a steady influx of cheap, raw diamonds.
Diamond workers willing to move to Belgium and take lower wages stayed employed in the industry: two of this project’s previous subjects, Jacob van Os and Emanuël Pimontel, chose to relocate to Belgium and stay with their industry.
However, unlike Pimontel and van Os, Samuël de la Bella did not come from a family of diamond workers. I worked through all of Samuël’s aunts and uncles and only one uncle, Aron de la Bella, ever worked in the diamond industry, and Aron did not stay in the industry for very long. Aron de la Bella listed his occupation as a diamond cleaver in 1881 on his marriage certificate, but he was no longer in the industry when the ANDB union was established in 1894. Aron’s occupation is listed on only one of his children’s marriage certificates; Aron’s alleged occupation by his daughter’s 1913 marriage is “commissionair in effecten”. While certainly “effecten” could be diamonds, and I have seen that before, that is very unlikely as Aron de la Bella not once held ANDB union membership.
Which brings us to: another possibility for Samuël de la Bella’s sudden career change could be that he was unable to get work during the Dutch diamond worker’s depression, and lacked the seniority or connections that Emanuël Pimontel and Jacob van Os used to stay employed during this time.
Whatever the reason for Samuël’s change in occupation, it did not seem to hurt the family financially: the de la Bella-Morpurgo wedding was photographed by the one and only Jacob Merkelbach, arguably the most famous Dutch photographer of the 20th century. Jacob Merkelbach was famous in the Netherlands for his portrait photography and was frequently employed by movie studios to create film stills to promote upcoming films. Merkelbach was the photographer and was mainly commissioned by the Dutch elite (his daughter, who took over his photo studio after his death, was even commissioned to take Queen Wilhelmina’s official state portraits in 1948). Merkelbach was not cheap, and we know, per Merkelbach’s records, that Samuël de la Bella paid and commissioned the photos, not the Morpurgo family.
Samuël shows up in a Belgium in November 1927, having been granted a visa to work as a diamond cleaver in Antwerp. Samuël probably had begun working in the industry again shortly after his 1922 wedding. It is likely he had another ANDB or ADB (the Belgian diamond union) card that has since been lost or destroyed, hence the gaps I’m facing while researching his career.
It does not appear that Lea traveled with Samüel to Belgium, nor does it seem that he stayed very long. There’s a note in the margins suggesting that he likely returned to Amsterdam in February 1928. I assume that he never intended to stay permanently, particularly because Lea did not go to Belgium with him.
The marriage between Samuël and Lea gives all impressions of a happy one. Samuël almost certainly returned home to Amsterdam in February 1928 because Lea would have been entering her third trimester of her second pregnancy. The happy couple welcomed a little boy, who they named Joseph, on 14 April 1928 in Amsterdam. Much like the Pimontel family, Joseph de la Bella was almost certainly named for Samuël’s father, Joseph, who had recently passed in 1925.
The couple had previously welcomed a daughter, Rachel de la Bella, on 5 December 1924, who similarly seems to have been named for Samuël’s mother, Rachel Cassuto (Rachel Cassuto passed away in 1931, so luckily, she got to meet her namesake).
As far as addresses go, Samuël’s shakey ANDB membership makes the couple difficult to track down. Furthermore, both Samuël and Lea missed a few required municipal registrations, meaning that there isn’t a clear picture of where they lived during the interwar period. In 1919, prior to his marriage, Samuël reported living at Plantage Badlaan 24 in Amsterdam. He only stated “boven,” or above, for the floor number. Perhaps the top floor?
An undated entry lists Samuël’s address as Nieuwe Kerkstraat 116, which is yet another beautiful Dutch building in Amsterdam. Eventually, at some point in the 1930’s, Samuël, Lea, Rachel and Joseph are registered as living at Kribbestraat 26 in Amsterdam, on the third floor.
This building was built in 1936, so it appears that the de la Bella family purchased the apartment while the building was under development and moved here after it was completed. They were likely the apartment’s first owners. This is also their last known residence.
Samuël de la Bella registered and paid his ANDB diamond worker union dues on 3 July 1939. Unfortunately, this would be the last time he would ever be eligible to do so.
On 10 May 1940, the German Reich invaded the Netherlands. By 14 May 1940, the main Dutch forces had surrendered.
On 21 February 1939, a law titled “The Decree Concerning the Surrender of Precious Metals and Stones in Jewish Ownership” passed in the Reich. Jews were prohibited from owning precious stones, and thus, Jews were also prohibited from working with them. Now that the Netherlands was under control of the Reich, it was also governed by its laws, including 1939 Decree. Samuël de la Bella may have been a registered and dues paying ANDB member, but as of May 1940, he was no longer a diamond worker.
Limited surviving documentation suggests that after May 1940, Samuël de la Bella supported his family as a cigar worker and as a traveling salesman.
During the occupation, it is likely that the de la Bella children attended a school known as “Joodsche School 11,” located at Jekerstraat 84 in Amsterdam. A surviving 5th grade class photo, from the 1939–1940 school year at the Vondelschool (which later became “Joodsche School 11”), shows that Joseph de la Bella already attended this school, prior to the occupation. He would have been 11 or 12 years old in this photo.
No known photo of Rachel de la Bella survives. However, in the last few years, a handful of Dutch researchers have launched a project to identify children in surviving school photos. A photo of Rachel is likely to be identified at some point in the future.
Starting on 1 September 1942, German authorities in the Netherlands opted to change how they carried out deportations. Large-scale deportations of Jews from the Netherlands did not begin until July 1942. In July and August, German officials had mailed deportation notices to select Jewish families. These letters summoned the receiver to a specific assembly point at a time and date listed in the notice. However, after the first few rounds of notices had passed, Dutch Jewish communities realized that there had been no communication from Jews who had obeyed the July and August “work summons.” The July and August 1942 deportations were largely made up of young people, meaning that despite the fact that two months have passed, many mothers had not heard from their doting sons. Some families had several children on these transports, and even those families had not heard from their children. This is despite the fact these children promised to write their loving parents, and despite the fact that these same children promised their anxious mother that they would write as soon as possible in order to dispell the rumors about “the East”. These mothers packed their children writing supplies. To Dutch Jews, things were not adding up.
In the last two weeks of July 1942, just shy of 6,000 Dutch Jews responded to work summons. How could they all just disappear, without a trace?
A large wave of German Jewish refugees arrived in the Netherlands in late 1938 and early 1939. With them, they brought rumors of cruel German work camps. During Kristallnacht, tens of thousands of German Jews were arrested. Most of them subsequently found themselves in various German concentration camps.
In December 1938 and January 1939, many of these Jews were released from the concentration camps (largely Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen) if they could prove their intent to emigrate from Germany. This left families of the imprisoned Jews scrambling for visas to foreign countries, any foreign country. Many of those families managed to obtain visas to the Netherlands, and with them, the former concentration camp prisoners brought their stories and experiences. However, for many Dutch Jews, the stories were just too shocking to comprehend.
Many Dutch Jews also believed that this sort of thing could not be repeated in the Netherlands.
The official government narrative was that the July and August 1942 deportees were being sent East to help build and establish a Jewish settlement. This story was parroted in local newspapers, and these papers even advised the young, strong workers on what belongings they should pack. Jews were reassured that the separation was only temporary, and that they would be reunited with their families once living quarters and other basic necessities have been established in the Eastern settlement.
The notice above emphasizes that Jews should pack durable, functional clothes with them and to be smart with their choices. It also notably recommends that they use a sturdy backpack over a large suitcase for their goods, and that all of their clothing should be easily washable.
As absurd as it sounds to us in 2022, up until this point, it had been fairly normal for countries to build and establish settlements in newly acquired land. Germany’s “Ostpreußen” was a well-known example to most of Europe at the time, and was a piece of land that Germany had recently reoccupied after losing it following the First World War. Jews were uneasy, but it wasn’t as out of place as it may seem to us now. Furthermore, territories like Ostpreußen made it easy for Dutch Jews to convince themselves that the rumors of deportations to Poland were one in the same as the “German work camps” as mentioned in the newspaper article above, since Ostpreußen had belonged to Poland in the not-so-distant past. Simple mistake, right?
It was often written off as simple mistake. That is, until the first 6,000 or so Dutch Jews were sent off with their belongings and never heard from again.
Starting 1 September 1942, German officials in the Netherlands begun carrying out raids in Jewish neighborhoods after curfew had begun. Soon thereafter, raids in Amsterdam were ordered so frequently, German officials started raiding Jewish homes and businesses at all hours of the day and night. In the first days of September, between 300–400 Jews were housed at the Joodse Schouwburg daily, suggesting that approximately the same number of Jews were arrested every 12–48 hours.
In 1942, Jews were traditionally held at the Joodse Schouwburg after their arrest. The amount of time that Jews spent at the Joodse Schouwburg was not consistent across deportations or arrests: it could be a couple hours, or a couple days. However, after their internment at the Joodse Schouwburg, Jews were forwarded to Westerbork transit camp. At Westerbork, they were registered and waited for further deportation orders. Some Jews stayed at Westerbork for a few days, some stayed for a few years, and most stayed for some time in-between.
The first tracing discrepancy for the de la Bella family appears at this stage: while we do not know what day the family was arrested, we do know when they were processed at Westerbork. Lea, Rachel, and Joseph de la Bella were processed on 9 September 1942. Yet Samuël was not registered at Westerbork until the following day.
The simplest explanation is that the post-war tracing services made a small mistake, and I agree with that.
There is one other possibility: a survivor from their transport, Isidore van Moppes, testified after the war about his arrest. When van Moppes realized that arrests were being carried out in his neighborhood, he bolted the door to his apartment shut. Isidore, his wife, and two kids all hid throughout their apartment. German officials eventually kicked in his door and found his wife and children, but did not find him. Isidore’s wife and children both stayed quiet and did not reveal to officials that Isidore was also hiding in the house, and the police moved to the next apartment.
Not too long after the raid, however, Isidore learned that those who had been arrested were sent to Westerbork and would be deported to “the East.” Isidore testified that he purchased a train ticket to Westerbork and on 10 September 1942, he voluntarily admitted himself to the camp. When his wife and children’s names were called for the deportation, his was not, and thus he volunteered to join the transport as well.
I am including Isidore’s experience for the sake of transparency, and so the reader can understand the information researchers have to consider when working on an individual’s case. However, I believe that unless an eerily identical situation played out in the de la Bella household, the family was likely arrested and deported to Westerbork together. The deciding factor being that: 9 September 1942 was a Wednesday. If Lea and the children had been arrested 1–2 days prior to their arrival at Westerbork, they were arrested during the work week. In theory, then, Lea, Rachel, Joseph, and Samuël would have all been in separate places, and thus, all would have arrived to Westerbork separately. Lea would have been at home, Samuël at work, and the children at (Jewish) school. Yet, 3/4 of the de la Bella’s were processed together. If the family was arrested after curfew, they all would have been together.
Thus, I suspect Samuël de la Bella’s intake date was a mistake. However, whatever the real reasoning for the date discrepency may be, it does not change the rest of the story.
Samuël de la Bella, his wife Lea, and their two children were deported from Westerbork on 11 September 1942. Rachel was 17; Joseph, 14; Lea, 44; and Samuël, 50. There were 874 Jews registered on this train, and to add insult to injury, Rosh HaShana began that night at sundown.
An original copy of the deportation list survives. We know that the de la Bella family was on this tran.
We also know that this train was among those that stopped in Cosel, and it arrived there at around 2:00pm on 12 September 1942. Survivor’s report that the SS boarded the train and ordered all men between the ages of 15 and 50 off the train.
We have again arrived at one of the most infamous Holocaust-era research dilemmas: did Joseph and Samuël disembark at Cosel?
Boys tend to look like children for a few years into their teens. Joseph had turned 14 at the end of April. It is unlikely that he would have been able to pass as an able-bodied man who was ready for hard labor.
Samuël was at the older end of the given age range, and even then, he was only three months shy of his 51st birthday. Would he leave his wife and two children on the train, when they certainly knew they were now in the East and close to the Eastern Front of the war? Putting his family in a situation where he would be unable to protect them from bodily harm?
The post-war tracing services concluded that Samuël de la Bella departed the train at Cosel. Yad Vashem, the main Holocaust research body, believes that the men from this transport who disembarked at Cosel were sent to the Niederkirch, Gogolin, and Annaberg labor camps in Silesia.
The post-war tracing services and the Dutch government concluded that somehow, Samuël had been transferred to a labor camp called Seibersdorf.
Seibersdorf is not referencing the town in Austria by the same name (where there was also a forced labor camp), but is almost certainly referring to Zebrzydowice, a small village in modern-day Poland that is not too far from Auschwitz.
Men at Zebryzdowice, like the majority of labor camps in Silesia, were put to work constructing the Reichsbahn and Autobahn. The goal was to connect the new, eastern parts of the Reich with the “old” Reich (as in, Germany proper). According to Loe de Jong, there were approximately 330 Dutch Jews at Seibersdorf over the course of the war.
Most Jews who are thought to have died at Seibersdorf were given a date of death as 31 Mar 1943, including Samuël de la Bella. I do want to clarify that in a large portion of scenarios, I do not nitpick the process of which a date of death was chosen by the Dutch Red Cross and Dutch government.
To quickly explain their process: researchers in the late 1940s and 1950s compiled as much data as they could about a camp via testimony, artifacts, and the post-war trials. Then, they used survivor testimony to determine which camps a specific deportation passed through. If logs and transport lists existed for those inter-Silesia transfers, they would check them for specific prisoners. If there was no sign of an individual after it was known that a specific transport group was moved from a location, then they were listed as deceased on the last day that group was known to be in that camp. There were ten survivors from the 11 September 1942 deportation from Westerbork, all of whom testified that they were moved from Seibersdorf at the end of March 1943. Thus, since a large portion of those who were suspected to have disembarked at Cosel have no documentation in any other labor camp in Silesia after March 1943, they were given a date of death of 31 March 1943, the last day of the month.
The process for larger camps, such as Auschwitz, was a bit different: Dutch Red Cross officials compiled data the same way that they did for the Silesia camps. However, since many individuals were never transferred out of Auschwitz, the date of death was calculated using Auschwitz’s average life expectancy. This date was next rounded to the end of the closest month; then, this date of death was applied to anyone deported within a specific time frame, who was also suspected to have been admitted to the camp as labor. For example, 30 September 1942 is the universal date of death given for Jews who were among the first wave of Westerbork deportations in the summer and fall of 1942 and are suspected to have passed selection at Auschwitz.
My point being: I understand that they gave the best estimate with the data that they had.
My problem, as you may have guessed if you have read any work of mine, is that this formula treats humans as emotionless data points and assumes that they will always obey rigid orders. Humans act logically, but to understand what was truly logical during the Holocaust, you need to look beyond an individual’s basic demographics.
Also, the Dutch Red Cross failed to check their own work.
Let us rewind and return to 2:00pm on 12 September 1942.
Samuël de la Bella was sitting with his wife, teenage daughter, and young son when their train stopped in Cosel. He certainly knew that in times of war, women and children were dangerously vulnerable. And while he likely also understood that the SS wanted able-bodied men for labor, Samuël knew that if he disembarked, he was leaving his family without a breadwinner and without someone to protect them at a time that they were traveling to a new and unfamiliar place.
Do not misunderstand me: there were many men on this train who were in this same circumstance and had to disembark because they were visibly much younger than 50. However, Samuël was three months shy of his 51st birthday. That was not Samuël de la Bella’s reality.
I believe, in absolute certain terms, that when Lea, Rachel, and Joseph de la Bella arrived at Auschwitz that evening, Samuël arrived with them.
The 11 September 1942 deportation from Westerbork arrived at Auschwitz on the evening of 12 September 1942. 674 of the original 874 deportees disembarked at Auschwitz upon arrival; the other 200 had disembarked at Cosel that afternoon.
Only 26 men and 34 women passed selection and were admitted to the camp as labor. The remaining 614 passengers were gassed upon arrival.
The range of prisoner numbers assigned to this small selection is not recorded anywhere publicly.
However, I do know that in the early hours of the morning on 13 September 1942, an unknown prisoner tattooed 63507 onto Samuël de la Bella at Auschwitz.
The scene at Auschwitz on 12 September 1942 likely played out as follows:
Joseph, Rachel, Lea and Samuël de la Bella disembarked from the train in the late hours of 12 September 1942. A crowd formed as the last Jews disembarked from the train. Once it is confirmed that the train is empty, the SS men begin barking orders at the crowd in German. The former German refugees who had been arrested and deported from Westerbork translate the orders into Dutch, and the de la Bella family comply and form into a line.
Joseph is in the front if he’s the shortest; if he is already taller than Rachel, she’s in the front. Behind them is Lea, and Samuël situates himself behind Lea so that he can keep an eye on all three of them and make sure that his family stays together.
Adrenaline is running through Samuël’s veins as he observes and listens to everything the SS men are saying. The majority of people are pushed to one side of the platform, but a much small group has been created a bit further down. Samuël scans the smaller group: what do they possibly have in common? Sometimes, when a guard approaches the next person in line, they don’t ask them any questions and just point to one of the two groups. Other times, they ask one or two questions before making their decision. But if the SS men asked several questions, the person being interviewed almost always was assigned to the smaller group.
Before Samuël figures out what group he wants to be assigned, the SS men are already interviewing Joseph.
Wie alt ist du? They bark at the boy.
Vierzehn, Joseph replies. He had been learning German in school prior to his deportation.
That triggers the SS man and he points Joseph to the larger crowd.
They then ask Rachel the same question. They nod at her answer.
Beruf?
Rachel lies and says that she is a secretary.
Verheiratet? Ledig?
Ledig.
The SS man finally quizes her about her health: tuberkulose? Polio? He lists a bunch of diseases at record breaking speed.
When Rachel answers with a firm nein, Samuël’s worst fear becomes reality: the SS man points her towards the small group. His family has been separated.
Lea is next, and she is almost immediately gestured towards the larger group.
Samuël knew he had to “pass” the interview. Without missing a step, Samuël lies with every answer. He’s 44, the same age as Lea. He’s also a skilled tradesman, yes, he works with his hands and has the callouses to prove it. His job also requires him to be incredibly good at math. The SS men are impressed, or as impressed as they can be, but suspicious. Samuël also claims to have a perfect bill of health, whether it was true or not, he claimed it in that moment.
The SS men cautiously bought what Samuël was selling; he is assigned to the small group. Only 26 men passed selection that night, and 50 year-old Samuël de la Bella was one of them.
Lea and Joseph were almost immediately taken to the gas chambers and murdered. The commanders at Auschwitz kept the gas chambers and crematorium running nearly 24/7. They were likely killed in the early hours of the morning on 13 September 1942, and by the time Samuël and Rachel were standing for their first roll call that morning, Lea and Joseph’s bodies were nothing more than a handful of ash.
The “women’s camp” at Auschwitz was barely a month old when Rachel was admitted in September 1942. In October 1942, a group of male prisoners were tasked with setting up a medical facility in the women’s camp. When they arrived, there were so many bodies, they found it difficult to move about. At times, they could not distinguish the dead from the living.
It is very possible Rachel’s body was among those that these men discovered upon their arrival that month. She was issued a death certificate by camp officials in October 1942, stating that she died in the camp on 2 October 1942.
Addendum, 11 July 2022: I recently obtained a new reference book, that, in short, has very few available copies and is also the life work of the world’s expert on Auschwitz (Danuta Czech, who has since passed).
This book notes that on 2 October 1942, a selection was carried out in Birkenau and 2,012 women were selected to be gassed.
While we cannot guarantee for certain that Rachel was among them, it is the most likely explanation for her death. I suspect, based on other entries around this time, that this selection was carried out due to the raging typhus epidemic in Auschwitz and that Rachel may have been sick already herself.
Samuël de la Bella, #63507, is listed in the Hospital Block 28 patient registry. The death certificates and other patient data from Auschwitz is rarely made public, so I cannot provide more detail on Samuël’s condition (however, I will write Auschwitz and ask if they are willing to disclose Samuël’s information from the hospital block registry. I will write a new post with the updates if they share that information).
With that being said, we can make some inferences based on what we know, and I think I have a pretty good track record thus far in that regard.
Samuël was registered in Room 7 of Block 28.
Room 7, and the hospital block in general, had a very specific operating procedure: ill patients would arrive to the hospital block. Prisoner physicians (who may or may not have had any medical experience or training in their civilian life) would examine a patient and decide if they needed to be formally admitted to the hospital block, or if they could get by with “outpatient”-type medical care. Then, the prisoner physician would present the cases he thought were in need of hospitalization to the SS camp doctor. It was the SS doctor who would diagnose the patient, decide whether or not they were to be admitted, and who was generally responsible for the patient’s fate.
Those who had recently been admitted to the hospital were assigned to Room 7.
The vast majority of inmates who were assigned to Room 7 died shortly after their arrival. If a patient was still alive after a day or two in Room 7, they would be transferred elsewhere in the hospital block.
Samuël de la Bella was not an exception to this fate. He died in Room 7, Block 28, on 15 October 1942; almost exactly two weeks after his daughter Rachel perished.
While yes, patients in Room 7 could be murdered by the SS camp doctor, and often were (typically by phenol injection), I think it is unlikely that Samuël was directly murdered by the SS camp doctor in Block 7.
Samuël would have learned during his first days at Auschwitz that prisoners do not go to the hospital block unless their prospects are looking grim otherwise. At the time of his death, Samuël had been in Auschwitz for over a month, which made him among the more “senior” of Auschwitz’s Jewish inmates at the time.
In 1942, Auschwitz was a hotbed of infectious diseases. Auschwitz was always a hotbed of infectious diseases, but camp conditions in 1942 were much worse than they were at any other time in the camp’s history. In the summer of 1942, when the deportations from Westerbork to Auschwitz began, construction of the latter camp still had not been completed. This lead to poor conditions, overcrowding, a lack of resources (and resources were already barely existent); all of which lead to an explosion of diseases. Add this to the fact that inmates were coming from all over Europe, many of whom had already been subjected to poor living conditions and thus, disease arrived at Auschwitz with virtually every new transport.
And this is not to disparage victims of any nationality, nor was it unique to any one country: for example, by summer 1943, Dutch Jewry became synonymous with Polio, thanks to a ruthless outbreak at Westerbork that year.
In 1942, the main infectious culprit at Auschwitz was typhus.
Typhus, malaria, tuberculosis, meningitis, dysentery, all ravaged the inmate population at Auschwitz. And despite being childhood diseases, measles, mumps, diphtheria, and anything in-between also repeatedly devastated already-ill prisoners.
Typhus is caused by the bacteria Rickettsia prowazekii, which is passed to humans from body lice. In Auschwitz, men were forced to sleep several to a single bunk bed, sometimes stacked on on top of each other, meaning that it was incredibly easy to get body lice. Thus, it was also incredibly easy to catch typhus.
While Samuël de la Bella was among the most senior of Auschwitz’s Jewish inmates at the time of his death, he was also a statistical outlier in terms of his actual age. The bulk of men and women who passed selection ranged from 18–40 or so, and even then, inmates skewed on the younger end of that range. The SS men did get more liberal with the ages of those admitted to the camp later in the war (the most famous example of this is Anne Frank’s family; they all passed selection in 1944 when arguably none of them would have been admitted to Auschwitz if they had been deported in 1942, perhaps with the exception of Margot). However, Samuël was deported in 1942, and the demographics of those admitted to Auschwitz showed that they were quite young.
To add one more thing for consideration: Samuël had been in Auschwitz for 4.5 weeks at the time of his death. Again, 1942 in Auschwitz was brutal. Samuël survived nearly twice as long as his 17 year-old daughter and was an abnormality in more ways than one.
I always could be wrong, but I strongly suspect that Samuël died shortly after he was admitted to Block 7 of typhus, or a similar infectious disease. Typhus has a 1–2 week incubation period, and the infection itself can last for several weeks if let untreated. In the second to third week of an untreated typhus infection, the infected individual’s brain begins to swell, which is often fatal.
Samuël de la Bella was likely infected with typhus shortly after his arrival at Auschwitz, which he either caught from his uniform (uniforms were often reused from the deceased, and body lice like to burrow in fabric), or from his bunkmates in his block. He then deteriorated rapidly over the course of his imprisonment at Auschwitz, and his age and the poor diet, sleep schedule at Auschwitz did not help him any. Samuel was admitted to Block 7 on 14 or 15 October 1942, where he later died. The earliest he probably would have been admitted to Block 7 was 13 October 1942. Samuël’s timeline at Auschwitz lines up perfectly with the course of an untreated typhus infection.
Thus, just a little over a month after the de la Bella family arrived at Auschwitz, all four of them had been murdered.
The de la Bella family highlights many of my frustrations with the tracing of Dutch Jewry.
Samuël and Rachel were both issued Auschwitz death certificates, in live time, during the war. Both certificates were issued in October 1942.
Yet, to this day, the Dutch government and the Dutch Red Cross both state that Samuël died in Seibersdorf in March 1943 and that Lea, Joseph, and Rachel went to the gas chambers and died on 14 September 1942 in Auschwitz (the small date discrepancy between 13 and 14 September 1942 is not a problem to me, everything else is).
The death certificates from Auschwitz include the prisoner’s date of birth, birth city, last address, and often, their parents’ or spouse’s names. A simple search of the death certificates brings back both Samuël’s and Rachel’s with their corresponding birth dates in the indexed data.
I understand that in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, it was not as easy as typing names into a database and seeing what came back. But sometimes, these tracing services did, in fact, find Auschwitz death certificates and thus did correctly assign a date and location of death for some victims. What caused them to miss Samuël, Rachel, and the hundreds of other Dutch Jews who have been assigned the wrong fate? Were the death certificates even checked before the tracing services declared that Samuël was sent to Seibersdorf, or that Rachel was killed in the gas chambers? Am I crazy to think that these “tracing services” only relied on formulas to “trace” Dutch victims of the Holocaust, and never actually consulted the surviving documentation?
I do not have answers.
If you have made it this far, thank you. A few more notes to address:
- Samuël could have been admitted to Auschwitz as labor for a variety of reasons. The scenario may not have played out the way I described it, but I do think that is the most likely option. Samuël could have snuck into the smaller group after being assigned to the large group, but I think at this selection, the small group was too small to pull that off. There are so many reasons Samuël could have been admitted to the camp, including something as simple as that the SS men just liked him. Those details were lost to history.
- Similarly, it is not clear why Rachel was admitted as labor. She was on the younger end of the usual admitted age range, and while its certainly not unheard of for older teenagers to get admitted, I cannot think of a good reason she was chosen when so few women passed selection. There were many perfectly healthy women in their 20s and 30s on that train who were sent to the gas chamber that day; only 34 women passed selection that day, despite the fact that nearly 700 Dutch Jews underwent this selection.
- Samuël and Rachel were certainly separated shortly after selection had concluded. They may have been able to communicate with each other (illegally) by passing messages through prisoners who worked in both sides of the camp, but I think it is unlikely Samuël heard about Rachel’s death.
- In the same vein, both Rachel and Samuël likely learned about Lea and Joseph’s fate within hours of their arrival. It probably took them some time to process and actually believe it, but they learned the truth sooner rather than later.
If you have any questions, or want any clarifications, please feel free to leave a comment!
Per usual, thank you so much for reading and helping me memorialize these victims. One of the most common questions I get is, “how can I support your work?”
Thus, you can find The van Os Project on both Paypal and Buy Me a Coffee; all of the money goes back into the project, largely for research materials to help improve my work (i.e. reference books).
