Over the years, the Film and Video Archive has amassed a significant collection of home
movies or amateur film materials. We have nearly 65 collections of individuals telling
the stories of individual people before, during, and after the Holocaust. In this way, we pay
tribute to the very personal stories of people who had experiences during the Holocaust.
My name is Lindsay Zarwell. I'm an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
I work with the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, and it is my job to collect,
promote, preserve, and make accessible original films or historical films of the period of
the Holocaust. Today I'm going to share with you the story of Louis de Groot and the family
films that he donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in May of 2009.
Louis de Groot was a young Jewish boy living in the city of Arnhem in the Netherlands.
He was born in 1929 and lived with his mother, father, and sister. Louis's father, Meijer
de Groot, was an enthusiastic film maker. He had an 8 mm Bell and Howell movie camera,
and he recorded the activities of his family life from the years of 1936 to 1941. In these
home movies, we see the regular, joyous, happy life of family members living in the Netherlands.
We see scenes of ice skating, visitors coming into town, walking through the streets, walking
through the park. These are everyday, ordinary people, just enjoying life. Meijer and Sophia
de Groot learned of an impending roundup of Jews, and so, in November of 1942, they made
the very hard decision to go into hiding. Louis and Rachel hid in several dozen places
during the war. Louis had very limited contact with his mother and father. In this particular
situation, the Onderweg family was very involved in underground activities in the Netherlands,
and they housed Louis, and they took care of him until the end of the war. Rachel, who
had been in several hiding places as well, ended up joining her mother and father in
the city of Amsterdam, and just before Easter of 1944, Meijer, Sophia, and Rachel had been
denounced, and they were indeed arrested, and they were deported to Auschwitz through
Westerbork. Meijer died in September of 1944. Rachel and Sophia died almost immediately
upon arrival at Auschwitz in May of 1944. When it became difficult for the family to
live in the Netherlands, Meijer and Sophia decided to store some of their belongings
in a safe. The photo studio safe where they family films had been stored was actually
blasted by the Germans in 1944. They were looking for valuables in the city. The films
themselves were actually salvaged from the ruins of the photo studio safe and pieced
back together into the one twenty-minute reel that Louis donated to the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum. In working with Louis, I provided him with some very basic descriptions of the
film. Louis, unusually for a donor, wrote back to me with a six-page document describing
the individual people who appear in the film. It's an unbelievable amount of insight into
the actual story of Louis and his family, and I think as you watch, you will see how
illustrative the films are of a very individual or a very personal experience, and they are
the kinds of films that each one of us record in our daily lives, and it is very important
for us to see what life was like before the Holocaust through these images of joy.