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A Dutch "Safe House" for Jews during the Holocaust
(JTA) Cnaan Liphshiz - Van Iperen, a Dutch novelist, published a best-selling book last year about the nine-room country estate east of Amsterdam she bought in 2012 for her family. During renovations, she discovered double walls, secret doors and walled-off annexes that had been concealed so well that they were left undetected for decades. In one secret space, she even found wartime resistance newspapers. Her new home had been the center for one of Holland's most daring rescue operations conducted by Jews for Jews during the Holocaust. The High Nest recounts how sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper opened their safe house to dozens of Jews and others in need. The operation's secrecy kept it out of the history books. The sisters, intellectuals from a Liberal Jewish family, arrived at the estate near Naarden in 1943, amid deportations to death camps and growing awareness of the annihilation of Europe's Jews by Hitler. By that time the Nazis had killed 75% of the Netherlands' prewar Jewish population of about 140,000. "Everyone who could was in a panic to find a hiding place," van Iperen said. In June 1944, Eddy Musbergen, one of the hundreds of Dutch gentiles who betrayed or hunted Jews in hiding, reported his suspicions about the estate to the authorities. The sisters and their families were sent to the Westerbork concentration camp, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. At Bergen-Belsen, Janny met Anne Frank before she died, as she recalled in a 1988 documentary. Janny died in 2003.