Born to Jewish parents in Amsterdam in 1930, Leo Cohen grew up at a time when the Netherlands was occupied by Nazi Germany. His remarkable resilience saw him survive brutal interrogation by the Gestapo at just 13 years old, as well as Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen camps and the ‘the Lost Train of Tröbitz’. After liberation, Leo spent almost two years recuperating in a Dutch sanitorium, making a full recovery and going on to study mathematics at university and becoming an international journalist. In 1957, he and his wife emigrated to Adelaide where they brought up two daughters. He worked for several companies over the years and went on to run his own real estate business. A keen chess player since a boy, Leo was a chess master and played in worldwide tournaments. He won South Australia’s State Championship in 1958 and continued to play for the rest of his life. Leo lost around 25 close family members during the Holocaust and many more of his extended family.
Leo was born on 17 February 1930 in Amsterdam to Jewish parents Martijn Cohen and Rebekka Reimer. His father was an engineer building mines and as a small child Leo lived in the southern mining area of the Netherlands. However, following his parents’ divorce when he was 3 years old, Leo returned to Amsterdam with his mother. They lived with her parents, his grandparents, Barend and Matthea Reimer née Andagt.
In 1936, Leo’s mother married Mr Simonis, a non-Jewish, Catholic man. They lived in a typical 17th/18th century house overlooking the canal in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter, at 153 Oudezidjs Achterburgwal. Leo’s stepfather sold and repaired bicycles on the ground floor and there were 3 floors and an attic above. Leo’s early childhood involved going to school, visiting his grandparents Barend and Matthea nearby and playing with his little stepbrother Bob, born in 1938.
Following the invasion of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany on 10 May 1940 and the Dutch forces’ surrender five days later, the country now followed the same Nazi regime of antisemitism and persecution. All the non-Jewish children at Leo’s primary school were removed and replaced by other Jewish children in the area. Although he could continue his elementary education, he was barred from going to high school because he was Jewish. On 5 May 1942, regulations regarding Jews wearing the yellow Star of David came into effect in the Netherlands. Both his mother and he were each enforced to wear the star which identified them as Jood (“Jew” in Dutch). His stepfather, who joined the Dutch resistance, tried unsuccessfully to get false papers for Leo from the Catholic church but Leo boldly resisted the Nazi occupation in his own way. With his blondish hair, he did not look typically Jewish. Unable to attend school, he regularly ventured outside without his yellow star, to shop for his mother or courier papers for the Dutch Underground. But in June 1943 the Gestapo came to Leo’s house late at night and demanded he be delivered to their office the next day. He had been ‘dobbed in’. One could get paid 7.5 guilders for reporting a Jewish person in hiding (‘kopgeld’ in Dutch or head money as a reward for betrayal). He was to suffer brutal interrogation for most of the day. He played dumb, declaring to be only half Jewish, and risked his own and his family’s lives by not disclosing his mother’s heritage, his stepfather’s dealings with the Underground or the fact they were hiding several Jews in their house, using a special ring on the electric doorbell to alert those in hiding that the person entering was known to them. Leo remembers the elderly Dr Suchet who Leo called ‘Uncle’, who his family hid. Leo discovered later that the doctor had suffered a fatal heart attack whilst in hiding, and his body had to be taken out of their house during the night rolled in a carpet and left beside the canal.
Just 13 years old, Leo was sent to a police cell and then to an Amsterdam adult gaol. Within three weeks, Leo was heading for the central railway station by tram with his fellow inmates. Whilst being herded onto a train, Leo attempted to escape but was grabbed by one of the Grüne Polizei (Green Police or the Ordnungspolizei, the uniformed police force in Nazi Germany). Leo found himself on his way to Camp Westerbork, the transit camp in the northeastern part of the Netherlands, close to the German border, where Dutch Jews were sent before deportation to concentration camps. Wearing a special uniform and living in the orphanage section, he worked as an Ordinance for the camp police, collecting papers from different factories. Leo’s mother had sewn paper money inside the lining of his coat, not knowing his destination but ‘just in case.’ Leo devised a plan to escape to the south of France by crawling under the wire surrounding the camp. However, he told the boy in the next bed in the dormitory who betrayed him. Leo was sent to the punishment blocks where he wore blue overalls with red inserts and had to do all kinds of work. Every Tuesday, a list of names of those who were to be deported were read out and the camp became increasingly empty. Those in the camp lived in fear of being on the next transport. Leo was finally allowed out of the punishment barracks but this time he decided not to look for a way to escape – he saw for himself what would happen to him if he was caught trying to get away. After about six months, Leo was among those transported by animal wagons to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. He was 14 years old.
Life at Bergen-Belsen was unimaginably harsh through systematic cruelty, neglect and starvation, while sickness was rife. Leo remembers the daily Appel (roll call) involving standing for hours in all types of weather. There were so many people dying that one stepped over bodies. ‘Some even ate dead bodies but not me’, Leo says.
On 10 April 1945, just days before the camp’s liberation, Leo was amongst 7,500 Jews deemed ‘Austauschjuden’ (‘exchange Jews’) sent on three transport trains to Theresienstadt/Terezin camp. About one-third were Dutch Jews. At 15 years old, Leo was on the third train, alone amongst mainly Hungarian Jews, with whom he could not communicate. It was a perilous journey, being attacked from the air by the allies who did not realise the train held prisoners. Heading first for Berlin and then south towards Czechoslovakia, they stopped at Guben station where a bomb destroyed the building, and another hit the train but miraculously missed Leo’s carriage. At one point, they got out of the train on to an embankment. Leo saw planes coming over the trees, shooting. They appeared ‘Next to me, very close’. A German soldier shouted ‘Liegen’ (lie down) but Leo didn’t understand. He finally fell to the ground and saw where a bomb made a hole. He tried to souvenir fragments, but it burnt his hand.
After almost two weeks, the train finally stopped on a destroyed bridge at the Black-Elster River outside the little German village of Tröbitz. They were liberated by the Russian army on 23 April 1945. The train became known as ‘The Lost Train’ (Der Verlorener Zug) of Tröbitz. It was the third of three trains sent to Theresienstadt. Only the second train made it. The first was freed by American troops a few days out of Bergen-Belsen.
After travelling cooped up for some time with no food and water, Leo’s fellow passengers were suffering from exhaustion and major illnesses. The Russian troops discovered a train car filled with many dead bodies and those close to death.
Leo had typhus and his temperature went up to 43.7. He was treated in the Russian military makeshift hospital but miraculously, for the third time, Leo survived. He spent four months in a German sanitorium at Leipzig Dösen and then, along with several other Dutch people, Leo was able to return to the Netherlands on 24 August 1945. He asked a German man to find him some new clothes as he was ‘in rags’. Wearing a coat and a pair of traditional German knickerbockers that were clean but ludicrously too big, he got as far as Maastricht in the south where his parents met him. As soon as his mother saw him, she exclaimed ‘What have you got on!’
Leo arrived with tuberculosis and pleurisy. The doctors were loath to allow him home, but his mother and stepfather convinced them because they had a large house in Amsterdam. His younger stepbrother was sent away because they did not want him to contract TB. At the end of 1945, Leo was sent to a sanitorium at Santpoort near Haarlem where he stayed for around two years. Leo did occupational therapy work such as weaving mats and the Dutch government sent him teachers. He passed all his high school exams in Haarlem and then completed a mathematics degree at Amsterdam university paid for by the Dutch government. Leo taught for two years before becoming an international journalist, travelling the world. He learnt nine languages but began with Russian, in honour of the Russians who liberated him.
Leo married Jenny Julia Rijvordt and, wanting to leave Europe, emigrated to Australia, arriving in May 1957 on the Sibajak. A talk by a South Australian Migration Officer touring the Netherlands made them decide on Adelaide. Originally intending to live at the Glenelg migrant hostel, they met a local on the bus who offered them a room in their modern West Croydon house.
Leo’s first job in Adelaide was as a public servant in the railway station’s taxation department. Over the years, he has worked for several companies including Phillips, Hendon, Mayne Nicholas and Black & White Taxis, been a part-time cleaner in a city department store and a construction company secretary. He also ran his own real estate business.
Leo learnt to play chess when he was in fourth grade of primary school in Amsterdam, encouraged by the head teacher Mr Pepper. His mother bought him his first chess set. All his teachers died during the Holocaust except one. Leo became an avid chess player and continued to play tournaments after moving to Adelaide. He won South Australia’s State Championship in 1958, only a year after emigration, and was a key figure in the SA Chess Association. Leo continued to travel throughout Europe taking part in chess competitions until breaking his hip when he was 80 years old.
Leo and Jenny brought up two daughters Elaine and Raelene in their home in Croydon.
Leo spent his remaining 40 years with his life partner Ann, and they shared a unit in Reynella East. He had four grandchildren Daniela, Anton, Annabella and Azarni. He also had three stepchildren as well as step grandchildren and great grandchildren. His family, travel, reading and playing chess brought him great joy. He religiously did the crossword in the morning paper, loved to share his knowledge and loved owls. Leo remained in contact with his mother and stepbrother and sisters in the Netherlands. Leo Cohen died on 18 August 2023, aged 93.
Although Leo’s mother Rebekka survived the war, her parents, Leo’s grandparents Barend and Matthea Reimer and other family members, were murdered at Sobibor. Leo recalls: ‘But one day they [his grandparents] came to my Mum and Dad to visit, but they had to go before eight o’clock, home, because Jews were not allowed out after eight o’clock in the street’. His grandparents let Leo’s family know that they had been picked up. ‘That’s the last we ever heard’.
Rebekka’s brother Gerrit Reimer was sent to Dorohucza forced labour camp in Poland where he perished. Around 15 other members of his family were known to have died at Auschwitz and another at Bergen-Belsen.