Summaries courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, the UC Irvine Libraries.

Name:                                                  Brookhouse, Ida

Birth:                                                    1923

Birthplace:                                            Amsterdam, Netherlands

Religion:                                               Christian

Age Group:                                          Young adult, Adult

Type of Exp.:                                        Rescuer

Left Family Home:                                N/A

Camps Occupied:                                 N/A

Parents Survived Occupation?              Both

Number of Siblings:                              2

Sibling(s) Survived?                              2

“Every day you’re confronted with the cruelty of the Nazi system.  We had to do something.”  Ida Brookhouse lived with her family in a mixed Amsterdam neighborhood, alongside Jews and other gentiles.  She portrays the Nazi presence during the war as an ordeal for the entire population.  Gentile men of working age were seized off the street and taken to Germany for forced labor, and the Nazis ordered citizens to hand over precious metals and vehicles.  Ida’s father joined the Dutch resistance movement early in the war, and this included aiding Jews; she describes helping her father smuggle false papers.  She says that the Dutch knew about the situation for Jews in Germany from refuges, and that entire families of Jews committed suicide when the Germans invaded Holland.  Ida’s family took in a seven-month-old girl when her Jewish parents went into hiding, and Ida and her sister risked arrest to get her back from a Nazi orphanage.  Ida recounts the “Hunger Winter” of 1944-45 and says that at the Liberation she weighed 80 pounds.

Ida speaks of her resistance activities with great conviction and says she would do it all again.  She displays medals of recognition that she and her family have received from Holland and Israel and expresses her admiration for the goals of the Israeli state.

 

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