NORTH BEND — To a group of teenagers, the thought of a human life being traded for cigarettes or potatoes seems absurd.

But it has happened. And if human rights aren’t carefully protected, it could happen again.

“Have you ever read Anne Frank? She got turned in for cigarettes,” said Jerry Paster, the companion of a Holocaust survivor who spoke to 250- plus students at North Bend High School on Thursday.

Paster, who introduced Anneke Bloomfield, a speaker for the Oregon Holocaust Resource Center, told the teens that during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, potatoes and cigarettes were incredibly valuable. Money was worthless, and to the Nazi regime, so were certain lives.



While her own story of the Holocaust never turned to concentration camps, nor were her family members killed during that era of extreme anti-Semitism, the hardships they faced altered them forever, as well as Bloomfield’s view of human rights.

A petite woman with honey-blond hair, Bloomfield said she grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in The Hague, Netherlands, in the 1930s. By the time she was 3, in 1938, her father, who worked for the Shell Oil Co., learned danger was coming for Jewish families. To protect his loved ones, he began drastically changing their lifestyle.

First, they moved into a three-story townhouse outside of the neighborhood. Then, instead of going to temple on Saturdays, they started attending a Christian church. Her father began volunteering at the church’s library, and he placed Bloomfield and her three brothers into a Christian kindergarten.

“Which was very much of a switch,” Bloomfield said.

The 73-year-old explained her father wanted people in the neighborhood to believe they were Christians. The family had gone into hiding.

North Bend Senior Schyler Clark said he hadn’t known about the presentation until that morning. However, he was interested because he didn’t know much about the Holocaust.

“It’s history of what’s formed how we are today,” the 17-year-old said. “It’s so crazy to believe that some people say the Holocaust never happened.”

Living in fear

A month after Bloomfield’s fifth birthday, fighting began near Bloomfield’s home. German soldiers soon moved into a house nearby.

“We called them the Gestapo guys as kids,” she said.

The family found themselves living in constant fear. Food was scarce, and Bloomfield and her brothers were sent to live in other areas of the country to avoid detection. By the time the war had ended, she had been sent away three times.

When she was home, she was often plagued by memories of a Nazi soldier who had once searched her room.

“I was so scared. I had nightmares for years,” Bloomfield said, remembering how the soldiers would block off neighborhoods in search of hiding Jews, young men who could work and valuables.

On one day, a soldier entered her family’s kitchen and found a cubbyhole large enough for a person to hide. He shot his gun three times into the space and told Bloomfield’s mother, “‘If you were hiding anyone in there, they sure aren’t living anymore.’”

The fear that gripped her neighborhood was felt in other ways among the residents.

Bloomfield recalled a day when German soldiers began searching the area and a neighbor invited them to his home for coffee. Bloomfield said her mother was angry that the neighbor could entertain the soldiers when she barely had food to feed the children. But the soldiers chatted with the man for so long that they finally decided to call it a day. Later on, the neighbor came to Bloomfield’s home to explain himself. He told her mother his son and several other men were hiding in a chicken coop three doors down, and he gave the soldiers his last bit of coffee so they would not discover them.

The last time she was sent away, Bloomfield found herself begging for food from soldiers, with her “freckles, dirty hair and holes in her shoes.” Between the ages of 7 and 8, she said she didn’t gain an ounce or grow an inch.

Throughout her hardships, Bloomfield said she only wanted to be with her family.

“I would have rather stayed home, through thick and thin, rather than be sent away,” Bloomfield said.

Hearing it firsthand

Barb Scavera, a board member of the Congregation Mayim Shalom — a Jewish congregation that meets in Coos Bay — helped put on the event. Bloomfield also was featured at Marshfield High School on Wednesday.

Scavera said she wanted students to learn about the Holocaust and human rights from a person who had dealt with these issues firsthand.

“You take for granted all the things that you have,” Scavera said.

Aloura DiGiallonardo, 18, said she was fascinated by Bloomfield’s talk.

“I think it takes a lot to share personal experiences, especially ... at a high school,” DiGiallonardo said. “The fact that she is trying to use her own experiences to affect others ... is amazing.

“I think more people should speak out like she has.”

The purpose of her message, Bloomfield told the students, is to make them aware of what people can do when they let prejudice over take them.

“If I can make one of you aware so we’ll never have another Hitler, I’ll stand here and keep talking,” she said. She added she’s only been speaking about her experiences with the Holocaust for 13 years. Seven of them have been with the Holocaust Resource Center in Forest Grove.

After the war, Bloomfield eventually moved to Canada, then to California and finally Portland.

Prior to her talk, Paster, Bloomfield’s “chauffeur” and “significant other,” told the teens about Eastern Europe before and during World War II. He said that rights were taken so slowly and steadily from Jews and other individuals that they accepted the changes.

“These students need to know how it occurred. How people get accustomed to and accept the changes,” he said before the event. “If you cook a frog in hot water, it will jump out. But if you put it in cold water and then heat it up, you’ll cook the frog.”

He told the students they all have an obligation to uphold human rights. He reminded them of Japanese internment camps in America during World War II to explain that atrocities don’t happen just on foreign soil.

“We as Jews have a debt to the 6 million ... but you have a debt to the people who give you these rights,” Paster said. That obligation, he said, is to become the most educated, active and civically responsible people they can be. “If you don’t, you won’t.”