Jan Westra, a person in hiding

One of the farms you can partly see to the right of the woods is the ‘Kunneman’ farmhouse. During the war, Jan Westra was in hiding there with the Berendsen family. Today, this farm is home to Wine Farm Kunneman. Jan arrived at Kunneman via the neighbouring village of Gelselaar. At night, he was well hidden in a hole beneath straw in a haystack, half underground.

On a hot summer night in 1944, around ten men in SS uniforms, armed with heavy weapons, entered the farmhouse and asked about those in hiding. Jan was arrested, along with four other people who had been in hiding in Gelselaar. He had been betrayed – shockingly, by another person in hiding. The likely motive? Jealousy: the betrayer had been seeing a girl from Gelselaar who had left him for another man in hiding.

Jan Westra was sent to Camp Amersfoort and later transported to the penal labour camp of Neuengamme near Hamburg, where he died. According to the official record, the cause of death was diarrhea. Jan Westra was only 21 years old...

A Note

During his transport to Camp Amersfoort, Jan managed to throw a note out of the train for his parents. Remarkably, it reached them later. Jan’s brother, Kees, survived the war. He went on to marry Mineke Wannink from Gelselaar. One of their sons was named after Jan. The tree planted in memory of Jan Westra in the Liberty Forest is a linden tree, a symbolic choice, as justice was traditionally dispensed under a linden tree.