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It was a “quirk” in the conscience of a German commandant that spared the life of Westford resident Dirkje Frieda Legerstee’s mother during World War II.
Legerstee presented the dramatic story of how her mother, a Polish Jew from Lublin, and father, a Dutchman deported as a labor slave from the village of Mijnsheerenland, met each other in Nazi Germany, barely escaping.
Legerstee presented their love story on May 25 at the J.V. Fletcher Library to an audience of about 50.
The story has all the elements of a Hollywood drama.
When Legerstee’s mother, Anja Deborah Kuperman, was betrayed by two women while posing as a Ukranian so as not to be sent to a concentration camp, she was brought before a Nazi commander.
“Prior to this a French woman had been shot,” said Legerstee, who draws her information from a diary her mother kept. Anja was certain she’d be killed, too.
The commandant told Anja she had no right to be in Germany and he started to pick up the phone, presumably to have her taken away. But, said Anja in her diary, something came over her as though an angel was sitting on her shoulder.
Anja speaks her truth.
“Yes, I’m a Jew,” she said. “You have taken everything I love away from me — the blood of my parents, the blood of everyone I love is on your hands. You will never take this from me. I am a daughter of Israel. You can kill me but even in death you cannot take this away. I am a Jew. I am a daughter of Israel.”
“‘Too bad you’re not a German,'” said the commandant, according to Legerstee, “and with a flick of his hand, she’s dismissed.” Legerstee attributed his reaction as an momentary quirk in his decision-making.
“Through a quirk of a commandant’s conscience and the help of ‘Angels in Human Skin’ my parents survived…,’ wrote Legerstee in her program.
With the Russian Army advancing, Anja and Arie are sent on a death march with legions of other Jews. They survive by rolling into a ditch and hiding.
After the war, the two were labeled “Nazi War Victims” and eventually sponsored to come to America.
In her program, Legerstee writes “When I was about 11, the discovery of a photograph of lamp shades made from human skin pulled me across a threshold of innocence and planted a desire to honor the sacred flesh of my forebears. It has taken decades to create my response.”
Legerstee has pieced together an oral presentation with powerful war era photographs curated from online sources and her family archives. Around the library meeting room was a display of her artwork. A series of collages hang from a line strewn across the back of the room with such titles as “The Greening Power of Forgiveness,” and “Propaganda’s Fool.” A simple metal urn sits atop a wooden beam with the title “A Cup of Life.” A veiled face on burlap is framed by rustic two-by-fours with a strip of red material slicing the canvas. At the front of the room was an over-sized collage of imagery and photos telling her parent’s love story.
Legerstee is an ordained minister with 25 years of service to churches in the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ.
