“Oh, yeah, I’m going to keep that closed for now,” she said, according to the recording. She explained that she had promised van Hintum that she would not let Zilversmit see it until the historian was finished with her book. “I hope that the trust between you returns,” Boelen said.
Zilversmit said her project would not interfere with van Hintum’s book, that she only wanted to tell her own family story. Boelen said at one point that perhaps the argument between the historian and the journalist boiled down to who should make them public first.
“The two things can exist completely side by side,” Zilversmit replied.
But Boelen would not budge.
When the conversation was over, Boelen took the women upstairs to the attic and showed them paintings she had made. Zilversmit was surprised — some depicted scenes from a book that Zilversmit’s aunt, Helga, had written about her experience in surviving the Holocaust.
The memoir, “Through the Eye of the Needle,” published in 2006, describes the terror of the family’s betrayal: Helga’s mother jumping from the roof, hitting an electrical pole and plunging the neighborhood into darkness. Her father hiding behind a chimney. Helga falling to the ground, hurt and captured. Her brother, Hans, able to escape and climb on a passing train.
Imprisoned for time in a military barracks, Helga was later sent to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, healthy and young, she was picked to make hand grenades and to move the baby carriages of murdered children. Some of the carriages held teddy bears and milk bottles.
“We still heard their screams,” she wrote.
One Boelen painting showed the carriages in flames. Another the gates of Auschwitz. Hans was depicted running for the train, Helga at her typewriter.
