Wooden car for hiding documents, crafted by Dutch resistance fighter Frans Gerritsen. Netherlands – France, early 1940s.
A desk model that looks like a children’s toy car, used by resistance members to conceal secret documents intended for transfer between parties along the Nazi-occupied Netherlands–France route. In the center of the car is a removable square, hidden behind decorative curtains covering the windows. When the square is pulled out, it reveals a compartment for hiding documents. The resistance fighter would extract the relevant document and then return the wooden square to its place for use in the next covert operation.
Frans Gerritsen (1915-1991) born in the Netherlands and married Henny in 1939 (also born in the Netherlands) on the eve of the outbreak of the war. Frans and Henny lived in Haarlem (Netherlands) and were active in the underground from the moment the war broke out. Frans was a graphic artist and design artist and specialized in forging seals and identity cards, with which it was possible to reach the Vichy area in France and find a hiding place. He worked in cooperation with Kurt Hanneman, one of the leaders of the Westerweel underground. As a skilled underground man, Frans prepared plans for building hiding places for Jews, invented a code system for registering those in hiding and a cipher for each of the activists, and specialized in building wooden toys with hollow openings for hiding documents used by underground members. At the same time as this activity, he and his wife Henny hid Paula Kaufman and Norbert Klein in their home, and Frans also secretly assisted Norbert in the hospital where he was hospitalized under Gestapo guard.
Well into the war years, Frans assisted in various operations to help 16 members of “HeChalutz” escape from Westerbork camp, and two friends escape from Vught camp. In one of his operations while attempting to help friends cross the Belgian border, he was caught but released after a few hours. In May 1944, he was forced to go underground with his wife and four children, after a failed attempt to release Joop Westerweel from Vught (Vught) concentration camp in the Netherlands. In time, Gerritsen told how he tried to smuggle friends out of Vught camp: “We were looking for a new way to smuggle friends out of the camp, in case the Germans started the complete annihilation of the prisoners. Kurt Walter discovered a sewer pipe that passed under the pool and the wire fence outside the camp; the diameter of the pipe was about 50 centimeters. He tried to pass through the pipe and managed to make some headway. He decided that in an emergency it would be possible to use this route, despite the water and mud that had accumulated in the pipe. To check the degree of ventilation, he tied a candle to a small board and sailed it through the pipe, and the candle came out of it at a distance of two hundred meters while still lit. Kurt did al this with the bastards all around him. In the field he hid a suitcase with civilian clothes. At a later time, I assembled a folding cart on three wheels, which fit the diameter of the pipe. The intention was that the friend would lie on his back in it and others would pull him through the pipe. Luckily, we didn’t need to use it. After liberation we painted it red…”. Frans and his wife managed to hide until liberation. Frans was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1964.
Provenance: Estate of Gerritsen’s friend and partner in underground activity Karli Oroszlan, born in Hungary and an underground activist in the Netherlands. He was an underground activist in the Westerweel group.
Other wooden items for hiding documents made by Gerritsen during the war years appear in the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem (a hollow wooden duck used by the Jewish underground woman in France Arnee Juive), in the Ghetto Fighters’ House (blueprints for a document hiding device, a wooden code tag, a wooden container for hiding documents) and in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam (a hollow wooden chess set in which documents were smuggled).
31×15 cm. Height: 15 cm. Light wear, good condition.
