Sonja Dubois spoke to UTM students about her personal experiences during the Holocaust.
Dubois has spoken to over 100 audiences in the past 10 years. She defines her life as a jig-saw puzzle with missing pieces that she is slowly trying to piece together.
Dubois was born in October of 1940 in Holland with the name Clara Van Thyn. This is not where her story begins, however. To fully understand her story, one would have to start before that when her cousin left the country with his wife and daughter in 1938. They escaped the country just in time. The Nazi party attacked Rotterdam, the city where she lived, just a couple of months later. It took them just over a week to capture the entire Netherlands area. There were over 110,000 Jews that were killed in the Netherlands, and her birth parents were among them.
People who were chosen for resettlement had 24 hours to report to the trains. When her parents were called upon, she was only 22 months old, and they left Dubois with a complete stranger. The man gave her to a man and woman, that she called Mom and Pop. She was not told until she was 12 years old that they were not her real parents.
“I had suspected for at least 7 years that I was different. That these people I called Mom and Pop were not really my parents,” she said.
She was taken care of by “aunts and uncles,” who brought her medicine and food. She and other children like her were moved along the country in a system similar to the Underground Railroad. They were liberated on May 6, 1945 by the Canadians. A woman in a fur coat brought several possessions and the news that her real parents had died. A necklace of her mother’s was included, and she still wears it to special occasions.
Dubois moved to America when she was 13, and she had to sign a passport with her real name, which was the first time she discovered what her real name was. When she was 65, she received a picture of her birth parents for the first time. She was able to obtain it when she met with her last surviving family members, her second cousins that were the children of the cousin who left the country in 1938. She felt, at this point, that her story had come full circle. So, she began to put her “jig-saw puzzle story” together.
Most of her memories come from smells. Whenever she smells old wet wool, it reminds her of being there because she had a wool coat that got wet and smelled. She also has some visual memories from her time during the holocaust. For example, she does not wear black boots, because she remembers being just tall enough that she came to knee level and all she could see of the Nazi’s uniform was the black boots. She said that she does not remember her birth parents.
Dubois wants to help make sure that nothing like this ever happens again. She says it is important to communicate. This is how you prevent this from happening again in the future. History repeats itself, and the holocaust was not effective solely because of the Nazis, but because of the people willing to stand idly by and do nothing. She wants people to stay informed about what actually happened in history and not let people forget or get complacent.
