...and so began an adventure which would have been absolutely impossible to imagine beforehand...
The events in National Socialist Germany also aroused an increasing sense of unease in the Jewish Speyer/Dressou family in Kortrijk, Belgium. After the November pogrom in 1938, Rachel Speyer and her brother-in-law Mauritz Dressou decided to take in Jewish children from the German Reich. They were eventually successful: on 13 January 1939 they were able to take in Dora Steuer and her younger sister Betty. In March, they were joined by eleven-year-old Erika Glaser from Vienna. Through their selfless support, the Dutch-Belgian family helped to save the three girls. To this day, the families maintain close contact.
Rachel Speyer ran a factory for furnishing fabrics in Kortrijk. This assertive woman had been able to convince her three younger sisters, Clémence and Marie-Henriette as well as Berthe, with her husband Mauritz Dressou, to leave Amsterdam in the early 1930s in order to build up the business. The three single sisters lived together in a large house in the centre of the city. Berthe and Mauritz Dressou moved into a house nearby together with their children Anne and Leonard.
The German invasion of Belgium ruined their plans for the future. On 13 May 1940, the Speyer/Dressou family of seven and their foster children Dora and Betty Steuer boarded a completely overcrowded train to escape together to unoccupied southern France. After a crazy three- day journey, they reached Nice safely, although without their luggage. All other options for escape were a failure, so they decided to leave for the Dutch colony of the Dutch Indies (now Indonesia) in March 1941. Beforehand, they made contact with the American Ottilie Gobel-Moore, who took Dora and Betty Steuer to her estate in Villefranche-sur-Mer and facilitated their escape to the United States.
The following war years were a dramatic odyssey for the Speyer/Dressou family. Their attempts to gain a foothold in Batavia and Bandoeng that seemed so promising, were thwarted by the Japanese occupation of the Dutch Indies. The consequences were internment and imprisonment. Miraculously, they all survived and were repatriated to the Netherlands in the spring of 1946. In the summer of 1946, they returned to Kortrijk and moved into a house together.
Anne Manneback-Dressou, born in 1931, wrote an impressive description of the dramatic events in her autobiographical „Bericht über meine Kriegsjahre (1940 – 1946)“/“Report about my war years (1940 - 1946)” in 1994. AS