OLYMPIA — Jim Leonard, administrator of Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, remembers the painting of a mysterious boy in his parents’ bedroom in his childhood home.
He would come to learn that it was of Dan Hoekstra, a young Jewish boy who Leonard’s Dutch mother pretended was her own to shelter him when the Nazis were methodically killing European Jews during World War II.
Leonard’s mother, Nell, likely saved the boy’s life, a story Leonard recounted Wednesday to at least 50 people at a commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day at Temple Beth Hatfiloh in downtown Olympia. And for the first time, he met the now-adult boy and his mother, Eline Hoekstra Dresden.
“My mom saved one life,” Leonard said, recounting her example. “You don’t have to save millions … just make a difference in one life.”
The Nazis killed 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. The goal of Holocaust Remembrance Day is to make sure no one forgets.
Leonard took the audience back to that time through words and pictures of his family’s story. He told how Hoekstra Dresden, an aspiring medical student, was in love with a half-Jewish man and gave birth to a son, Hoekstra. Soon, every Jew was expelled from the university and forced to wear a yellow star.
The Nazi crackdown soon would grow worse, and Jews would be rounded up into work camps and killed en masse. Hoekstra Dresden gave her son up to Leonard’s mother, Nell.
Nell Leonard served as Hoekstra’s mother through his toddler years, while Hoekstra Dresden was shipped to Westerbork concentration camp, a transit center for Dutch Jews to the east for extermination, said Daniel Kadden, a member of the congregation who helped organize the reunion.
Nell Leonard raised Hoekstra as her own, as seen in childhood photos. The middle of her home was renovated to be largely invisible to Nazis, notorious for raids seeking out Jewish refugees.
Hoekstra Dresden still was alive in the prison camp when Canadian forces liberated it. Then, three months after Victory in Europe (VE) Day on May 8, 1945, Hoekstra Dresden came to retrieve Hoekstra.
Nell Leonard, who died in 1987, saw him three times before she died.
Hoekstra said it was the “biggest negative effect on me in my life.”
Hoekstra Dresden said it was “very, very difficult” reuniting with the son who didn’t know her. “He was nestled so in her (Nell Leonard’s) heart.”
When Jim Leonard finally met Hoekstra and Hoekstra Dresden for the first time Wednesday, they locked arms together with Hoekstra Dresden’s daughter, Deb Mrowka.
Hoekstra Dresden, who lives in Portland and speaks to groups about her situation, said humor helped her survive the camp.
The Nazis “were so methodical in their extermination of the whole race,” she said.
“We’re here to remember. Never again,” she said.
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