After Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, my mother decided to flee Germany and came to Amsterdam. She said, knowing the Germans, that she knew what was hanging over us: „die bringen uns alle um“ (they will kill us all), but then met with disbelief. She found shelter with the Röttgen family in the Ruysdaelstraat in Amsterdam. They had a bookstore and formed the link between my mother and my father Salomon Munnikendam, whom she had met through Ab van West – who was also in books. It was understandable that the engagement took place so soon after their acquaintance, because „it was as if the flame had hit the pan“. That’s how she alwasy said it. In January 1934 they became engaged and in October of that year they were under the chupah oft he Shul in Wattenscheid, where Levy Spiero was also on the board.
After my parents were married, they went living in the Lomanstraat 2, 3rd floor, where I was born in September 1938. Not long after the „Kristallnacht“ took place on 9 November 1938, also the shul, where my parents had received their chuppah, went up in flames.
My parents had already decided to take grandma Spiero into their home. She had been a widow since 1937 and apart from all the horrors of recent years, she was deeply traumatized by the loss of her three children, Paul, Rudolf and Walter. Paul died of diphteria at young age in 1897 and Rudolf and Walter got killed in action in 1918 as soldiers in the First World War. Two billiant pupils of the second grammar school, aged 18 and 19. She never got over that, which was also the reason that she admitted my mother as a ±14 year old (foster) daughter in the family.
My father was a sergeant in the Dutch Army and after the mobilization we had to move to the to the Prins Bernhardlaan in Weesp. His regiment was there. When the war broke out, granny Spiero, a German citizen, was not allowed to stay in the area of the waterline. She was seen as dangerous to the state ..........……! My mother, grandmother and I had to return to Amsterdam by taxi, where we finally ended up in the Haarlemmermeerstraat 90 2nd floor on 5 June 1940, first via a guest address in Valeriusstraat. My father also returned after the capitulation.