Kitty Fonteyn

http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2009/06/0...

Kitty Zilversmit, 90; wrote of how doctor, ministers helped her survive Holocaust

By Gloria Negri

Globe Staff / June 7, 2009

"Now there were German soldiers regularly marching through our streets. They were always singing German marching songs, and the sound of their hob-nailed boots would reach our ears long before they came into view, " Kitty (Fonteyn) Zilversmit, a Holocaust survivor, wrote of the events of the 1940s in her book, "Yours Always, A Holocaust Love Story."

The situation for Jews living in Holland would soon get much worse during the occupation of the country by Germany during World War II. The Germans would require that Jews wear the Star of David when they went out. Nazis would uproot them from their neighborhoods and resettle them elsewhere.

As Nazi hatred for Jews ramped up, they began their process of deportation, sending Dutch Jews to concentration camps in Germany, where many were never heard from again.

That happened to Mrs. Zilversmit's parents, sister, her sister's husband, and two brothers. One brother, Leo, survived the notorious Buchenwald camp.

Mrs. Zilversmit, who wrote the book in 1995 at the urging of her grown children and as a catharsis for herself, died May 25 at Orchard Cove, a retirement home in Canton, where she and her husband have lived since 2000. She was 90.

Her daughter, Sue Howard of Scarborough, Maine, said she had become "very weak" after a stroke about a month ago.

Mrs. Zilversmit survived the Nazi purge of Jews, she says in her book, published by CDL Press of Bethesda, mainly for two reasons. One was the "fake appendectomy" - including "a general anesthesia, a small incision and three stitches" - performed on her by a doctor at one of Amsterdam's three Jewish hospitals, where she was training to be a nurse.

It saved her from being one of the 80 nurses the Germans rounded up one night and took away. She was left behind as a recuperating patient.

She said she lay in bed wracked with guilt as her "colleagues were being taken away . . . to an unknown nightmare."

The other reason she survived was the kindness of Protestant ministers, who risked their lives to save hundreds of Jews by hiding them in their homes or in other safe places until Germany was defeated and they were able to come out of hiding.

Mrs. Zilversmit lived underground from 1943 to 1945. "For 18 months, she lived only a short distance from the hideout of Anne Frank," Abe Plotkin, a fellow resident at Orchard Cove and a retired Globe reporter, wrote in Orchard Cove's newsletter in 2001.

Anne Frank was the young Jewish girl who with her family was hidden from the Germans in cramped quarters in a house in Amsterdam for two years before the family was betrayed and sent to concentration camps. She died in one of them. Her diary was immortalized in the popular book that bears her name.

Though Mrs. Zilversmit's experience was similar to Anne Frank's, she was given a Christian name, allowed to work in the nursing home run by her benefactors, and sometimes ventured out alone without the Star of David pinned to her. She was, in a way, hiding in plain sight.

Some of her book's most moving passages, Plotkin said, describe "the incredible bravery and warmth of the people who sheltered her, hiding her in the dark eaves under the roof of [their] nursing home where she worked."

One of the Presbyterian ministers who had helped her and had worked with the Dutch underground, Plotkin said, "was caught, tortured and executed in November 1944 - after saving about 200 Jews."

The subtitle of her book, "A Holocaust Love Story," refers to her love affair with Donald Zilversmit, which began in Holland when they were both 17. It survived their six-year separation during the war, when his parents left Holland in 1939 for the United States, on the cusp of the Nazi occupation.

He would leave the relative safety of this country to return to Europe during the war as an ambulance driver with the Canadian Army. He had been turned down by the US Army because he was not then a citizen.

Over the years of their separation, only a few letters reached him from Kitty through the American Red Cross. His wish to find her - he had emblazoned her name on the hood of his ambulance - was another incentive to serve overseas. He found her four days after the war ended in 1945, at the home of the family who had hidden her. They were married that year.

They came first to California, where Donald's family had settled. He had begun his studies at Utrecht University, but they were disrupted when his family moved to the United States. Kitty Fonteyn was born in Utrecht and received her nurses training during the war.

When the couple lived in California, Donald Zilversmit finished his studies at the University of California at Berkeley. For a time, they lived in Memphis, where he was on the faculty of the University of Tennessee Medical College from 1948 to 1966.

A nutritional biochemist, researcher, and educator, he is professor emeritus in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University.

Described by her daughter as "beautiful, with black curly hair, always smiling, very happy and always putting others before herself," Mrs. Zilversmit did not dwell on past sorrows.

"Mother could make the best of any situation," another daughter, Jo Feldman of Canton, said. "She was someone who always saw the glass half full and remained hopeful regardless of the situations."

She was adored by her family for little quirks, like mixing the Dutch and English languages. A son-in-law, Robert Karrow, of Chicago, "went to school to learn Dutch just so he wouldn't miss what she was talking about," Feldman said.

"She loved playing the piano and singing. She always saw the beauty in things and the good in others. Our dad was her knight in shining honor."

Her mother left them a lengthy list of the rules of life, Feldman said. They were simple, among them, "Be grateful for what you have. Help others who may not have as much. Be productive. Always wear clean underwear without holes."

In addition to her husband and her two daughters, Mrs. Zilversmit leaves another daughter, Lee Karrow of Chicago; her brother, Leo Fonteyn of Sydney; four grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

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ZILVERSMIT, Kitty (nee Fonteyn) B. Utrecht, The Netherlands, May 17, 1919. d. Canton, Mass. May 25, 2009. After a brief illness Kitty Zilversmit passed away on Memorial Day at her home at Orchard Cove, Canton, MA. Born in the Netherlands, as a young woman Kitty Fonteyn worked as a nurse at the Jewish Hospital in Amsterdam. In 1943, shortly after her parents were deported to a concentration camp, Kitty went underground with the aid of Dutch Christians and spent the remainder of the war working in a home for the elderly in a suburb of Amsterdam. With the exception of one brother, Kitty's entire family was lost at Sobibor concentration camp in Poland. At the age of 69 Kitty wrote a memoir of her traumatic war years in her book Yours Always: A Holocaust Love Story. Kitty is survived by her husband Donald Zilversmit, her brother Leo, of Sydney, Australia, daughters Lee Ann Karrow, Susan Howard, and Jo Feldman and grandchildren Katie and David Karrow, Ryan and Evan Feldman, and Laura Howard, and great-grandson Carson Feldman. A memorial service will be held on Friday May 29, 2009 at 11:00 a.m. at Orchard Cove, 1 Del Pond Drive, Canton, MA 02021. Donations in lieu of flowers can be sent to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Member and Donor Services, PO Box 90988, Washington, DC 20090-0988. The family welcomes visitors between the hours of 3:00 and 8:00 p.m. on Friday evening at their house in Hull Massachusetts. Stanetsky Memorial Chapels 781-821-4600