Erika Heymann

Erika Heymann: The Boarding House on Borrowed Time

When the Germans took the Netherlands in May 1940, Erika Heymann was offered a way out. Her husband was Jewish; she was not. Divorce him, and the machinery closing around Dutch Jewry would leave her and her two children alone. She declined. Over the following three years she took Jews into the small Amsterdam boarding house she ran, was caught, was sentenced for the offence the Gestapo filed as *Judenhilfe* — aiding Jews — and came out of a concentration camp with the leukaemia that killed her at fifty-four. Yad Vashem named her Righteous Among the Nations in 2010, sixty years after her death.

A Communist Marriage

She was born Erika Geck in Offenburg, in Baden, in 1895. In 1921 she married Stefan Heymann, a Mannheim man three months her junior, born there on 14 March 1896. He had trained as a bank clerk from 1913 and joined the German Communist Party in 1920, and by the middle of the decade he had left banking for journalism: editor of the Mannheim *Arbeiter-Zeitung* from 1926, later chief editor of the *Schlesische Arbeiter-Zeitung* in Breslau. The couple had two children and moved as his work moved — Mannheim, then Berlin, then Silesia.

It was a marriage doubly marked for destruction under the Nazis: a Communist newspaperman who was also a Jew. The family had no illusions about what 1933 meant, and no time to arrange a dignified exit.

Breslau, and Then Amsterdam

Stefan was arrested in Breslau on 12 May 1933, four months after Hitler took power, for Communist Party activity — a case bound up with his refusal to give up a journalistic source. He was sentenced to two and a half years. Erika did not wait. On 14 July 1933 she left Germany for Amsterdam with the children.

What followed was the ordinary, grinding version of exile that rarely gets written down. A middle-class editor's wife in Berlin became, in Amsterdam, a domestic worker: governess, cook, cleaning woman, taking whatever paid. She also ran a small boarding house. Both facts — the daily labour and the lodging business — would matter enormously later. Through the 1930s she built connections in Amsterdam's socialist circles, the network of German exiles and Dutch left-wingers that would become, after 1940, the only infrastructure available for hiding people.

Stefan's own path went the other way and much deeper. Released in 1936, he was rearrested on 14 May of that year at Offenburg and passed through the camp system for nine years: Kislau, Dachau, Buchenwald, then Auschwitz from October 1942 to January 1945, then Buchenwald again until its liberation on 5 May 1945. He survived. They never lived together again.

The House on Borrowed Time

After the occupation began, Erika Heymann began sheltering Jews in her home. The names that are known include Erwin Geismar, Abraham Keizer, and Chanan Floersheim, a young German Jewish refugee who survived the war and later wrote his own account of it.

Her boarding house was, in retrospect, close to ideal cover, and it is worth being precise about why, because this is where whatever skill she possessed actually lived. A pension has lodgers by definition; strangers coming and going provoke no comment from neighbours. It licenses the purchase of more food than one household would need, in a city where ration coupons were the primary instrument for detecting hidden people. And a woman who cooks and cleans for a living can absorb extra domestic labour without visibly changing her routine. Whether Erika reasoned it through in those terms is not recorded. What is recorded is that she did it, and that it worked for around three years — a long run, in occupied Amsterdam, where roughly three-quarters of Dutch Jews were killed, a higher proportion than in any other country in Western Europe.

The Raid and Vught

In September 1943 the Gestapo raided the house and she was arrested. She was sentenced to confinement for the duration of the war for *Judenhilfe*, and sent to the concentration camp at Vught in the southern Netherlands. Conditions there did specific and permanent damage: she was exposed to benzene, and developed leukaemia. She was released in 1944, on Hitler's birthday — the kind of arbitrary clemency the regime periodically dispensed as theatre.

She did not recover. Stefan, liberated the following year, went east and became a functionary of the East German state, serving as ambassador in Budapest in 1951 and Warsaw in 1953 and later as a professor; he died in East Berlin on 4 February 1967. Erika stayed in Amsterdam, her illness worsening, and died there on 6 April 1950.

Why Erika Is Called a Genius

She was not a genius, and the sources on her life do not come close to using the word. She left no body of work, no invention, no idea. She was a cook and a cleaning woman with two children and a husband in Auschwitz. Any account that dresses her up as an intellectual is a lie about her, and a diminishing one, because it swaps the thing she actually had for a thing she did not.

What she had was moral clarity that did not degrade under pressure, and it is worth naming the specific form it took. The Nazi state's most effective tool against non-Jewish spouses was not violence but the offer: divorce, and be safe. It worked on very many people, and it was designed to, because it required no cruelty from the person accepting it — only paperwork and silence. Refusing it in 1940, with two children and no income beyond domestic wages, is the decision that defines her, and she made it before there was any hiding operation to be loyal to.

Whatever else she demonstrated is best described as tradecraft rather than intellect: the practical competence to run a household concealing people she was not supposed to have, for years, under a rationing regime built to expose exactly that. It is a real skill, learned under threat, and it consists mostly of ordinary tasks done with total consistency — provisioning, storytelling to neighbours, keeping a routine unchanged. She was eventually caught, as most were. The honest word for Erika Heymann is not genius. It is nerve.

Legacy

Her recognition came late — 2010 from Yad Vashem, with the award presented at Holocaust Museum Houston the following year — and by then everyone who could have handed her the medal in person was gone. That delay is itself the story of the Righteous: the rescuers who died early, poor, and ill were the last to be found, because the people best placed to testify for them had scattered across three continents. The men she hid lived. One of them wrote the book that carried her name forward.

Achievements

• Righteous Among the Nations — 2010
• Worked as resistance fighter