Kiwi author Doug Gold has carved out a niche writing novels inspired by true stories of World War II heroism with a New Zealand component. Saving Elli, like Gold’s earlier books The Dressmaker & the Hidden Soldier and The Note Through the Wire, is a fictionalised historical narrative based on a true story. It showcases a courageous Dutch couple, Frits and Jo Hakkens, who worked for the Resistance in Nazi-occupied Holland. At significant personal risk, Frits and Jo successfully hid Abraham and Gita Szanowski’s daughter Elli from the Nazis for two years despite regular raids on their house.
Tailor Abraham Szanowski was one of 398 Jews arrested in an Amsterdam raid by the Nazis in February 1941. Only two of these captured men survived the war.
Abraham was not one of them. He suffered a period of forced labour at Buchenwald before being transferred to Mauthansen in upper Austria, where he toiled seven days a week hauling huge blocks of granite up the 200 “Stairs of Death”. In October 1941, accompanied by other Mauthansen prisoners too exhausted to work, 34-year-old Abraham, “a walking skeleton” weighing less than 35kg, was loaded on to a truck destined for Hartheim Castle. There, he became an early victim of the Nazis’ first mass gassings.
When his widow, Gita, was called up by the Reich for mandatory labour deployment, she saw no option but to flee for her life. She handed her daughter Lena to her brother-in-law Jacob and little Elli to her close friend Jo Hakkens. Thanks to Frits’s skilfully forged papers and his Resistance contacts, Gita succeeded in reaching Switzerland after a perilous journey through occupied Belgium, France and on foot across the Swiss Alps. She was fortunate to be given refuge in camps at Champéry, then at Sonnenberg.
But inevitably, the stakes became too high for Jo and Frits. After one too many close calls, in March 1944, they reluctantly handed their beloved Elli to the LO, a Dutch Resistance group that sheltered and supported Jews and dissidents trying to escape the Nazis.
Elli was placed with a Dutch resistance family for the remainder of the war. Soon afterwards, with a bounty on his head, Frits was forced into hiding.
Gita and her two daughters survived the war. They were later reunited and, in 1949, moved to Argentina.
There’s a New Zealand connection to this story. Post-war Holland held too many painful memories for Jo and Frits, so in 1960 the couple emigrated to New Zealand with their three sons, Dikky, Marcel and Cees. They never stopped searching for Elli, without success. After they died in the 1970s when only in their 50s, Marcel and his wife, Gloria, picked up the search for Elli, their lost “sister”. It wasn’t until 2011 that the brothers finally tracked her down.
As part of his research, Gold travelled to Amsterdam, visiting the sites of Abraham’s former tailor shop, Jo and Frits’s house and the haunting Mauthausen memorial, site of the former Nazi concentration camp where Abraham endured the last torturous months of his life and thousands of Jews were murdered.
Sobering stat: “Of the 107,000 Dutch Jews deported to concentration camps, only 5200 survived.”
Gold has made a convincing job of creatively reimagining the emotions, conversations and decisions of his real-life characters, based on what he could discover about them and their circumstances from his research.
Saving Elli is a compelling, well-told story, even a page-turner, despite its harrowing subject matter. It does justice to honouring the courage and resilience of Frits and Jo Hakkens, and Abraham and Gita Szanowski.
