Salo Muller

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Salo Muller (1969)

Salomon "Salo" Barend Muller (born February 29, 1936 in Amsterdam ) is a Dutch author . As a child, he survived the Holocaust . From 1959 to 1972 he worked as a physiotherapist for the Ajax Amsterdam soccer team . In 2018 he managed to get the Nederlandse Spoorwegen to provide a total of 50 million euros as compensation for deported Jews. In July 2020, he turned to Chancellor Angela Merkel and asked the German government to pay compensation as well, as the Deutsche Reichsbahn also earned money from the deportation of Dutch Jews.

biography

Childhood in hiding

Salo Muller is the son of Lena Blitz (born October 20, 1908) and Louis Muller (born July 20, 1903). Both worked for a textile company in Amsterdam's Jodenbreestraat. The family lived at Molenbeekstraat 34 in the Rivierenbuurt .

During the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II , Salo Muller's parents were arrested along with other Jewish employees in 1942 because of their Jewish origin. The mother had brought Salo, then five years old, to kindergarten that morning. The last words he remembers from her were: “Tot vanavond en Ran zijn hoor!” (“See you tonight and be good!”). In the evening he was tracked down by German soldiers with his aunt Judith Menist-Blitz, his mother's sister, and her husband Louis, and brought to the “children's house” at the Amsterdam collection point Hollandsche Schouwburg . Four days later, Salo Muller was fetched from the “children's home” by his uncle with the help of Walter Süskind . His parents were in the Westerbork transit camp and continue by train to Auschwitz deported . His mother was murdered there on February 12th and his father on April 30th, 1943. Louis Muller's parents and siblings and Lena Muller-Blitz's mother were also killed in extermination camps in 1943. A brother of Louis Menist, the Ab Menist union, was executed in April 1942 as a resistance activist by the Germans on Leusderheide .

Salo Muller was placed in eight different hiding places by the resistance, including in Friesland , where he was called "Japje". Sometimes he had to hide under floorboards where he was bitten by rats and mice. Once he drove with the farmer he was staying with to a grocery store to get flour and bread. When the dealer threatened to reveal that he was hiding a Jewish child, the farmer stabbed the man in front of the boy's eyes with a pitchfork, according to Salo Muller, and buried his body. After the liberation, Aunt Judith brought her nephew back to Amsterdam. He could not remember his real name or his birthday and only spoke Frisian . He was anxious and often sick, he stuttered and suffered from asthma .

Physiotherapist at Ajax Amsterdam

Muller (left) supports the injured Ajax player Horst Blankenburg from the pitch.

In Amsterdam, Salo Muller first attended primary school at the age of ten. He was expelled from high school for rebellious behavior; he switched to a business school, which he left without a degree. Since he would have liked to become a doctor, his aunt gave him the idea of ​​going to a school for physiotherapy instead. During this time he met his future wife Conny van der Sluis (born 1941), whose parents had been murdered in the Sobibor extermination camp . She was living in Toronto at the time and had come to Amsterdam to do an internship in the fashion industry. The marriage took place in 1963 and the couple had two children.

Muller's trainer, who considered him particularly talented, recommended him to the football team at Ajax Amsterdam , where he worked from 1959 to 1971, during the club's "golden years" with Johan Cruyff , Piet Keizer and Rinus Michels . If one of the players was injured, "with his Buddy Holly glasses and black hair combed back strictly" he was the one who ran onto the field to treat him, which made him popular with the fans and a kind of "mascot" made. On his 80th birthday, the Ajax chronicler David Endt wrote: "Een voetbalmiddag zonder tenminste één reddende ren van Salo was incompleet." ("A football afternoon without at least one salo run from Salo was imperfect.") But there were also confrontations with the “Conservative football world”, in which injuries were mainly treated with painkillers and where a physiotherapist was met with critical new ideas. Muller: "You saw me as a necessary evil."

When the team traveled by train to away games, Muller had to remember that his parents, like around 107,000 other Jewish people, had been deported by train, which is why trains gave him “a queasy feeling”: “People were transported in cattle wagons, many suffocated, it was terrible. ”In 1968 he refused to take the train to a European Cup game, since the game in question was to be played on October 2nd on Yom Kippur in Nuremberg -“ Nuremberg of all places! ”- a day on which he remembers his parents annually. When Muller asked for a day off, the club threatened him with resignation and he gave in. Anti-Semitic remarks by a team doctor were downplayed by the club's management following a complaint from Muller. When he asked for a raise a few years later (his wife had calculated that he earned little more than two guilders an hour for 80 hours a week), Ajax fired him. In the period that followed, he expanded his own physiotherapy practice and also had prominent customers: "I have always worked hard so I don't have to think about earlier," he said in an interview. He was also the editor-in-chief of Fysioscoop , a physiotherapy magazine, for 30 years and wrote two books on the treatment of sports injuries.

Dealing with the past and getting involved

For almost 50 years Salo Muller did not talk about his memories and trauma, not even with his wife Conny, although she had a similar fate as his. In 1995 he took at the urging of his wife in Steven Spielberg's witnesses project Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in part what led him to a "breakthrough": "After that he did not hear more talking." In 2005 he published in the Netherlands his autobiography Dead vanavond en ran zijn hoor . He gave readings to school classes and published other books.

In 2014, Salo Muller learned that the French railway company SNCF would pay surviving Jews and their descendants in the US $ 60 million in compensation. He then sent a letter to the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), which before 1945 charged the German occupiers five guilders per person deported, and later even seven guilders and fifty cents. These costs were partly borne by the victims themselves, for example by having to buy tickets for the trip to Westerbork. However, the NS refused individual compensation. The editorial staff of a television program took up the topic, and Salo Muller himself sought personal contact with Roger van Boxtel , President of the NS and a former functionary of Ajax Amsterdam . In addition, Muller received support from lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld . At the end of 2018, the NS agreed to set up a contact point for victims of rail transports in World War II ( Commissie Individuele Tegemoetkoming Slachtoffers WO II Transporten NS ); Amsterdam's former mayor Job Cohen has been appointed chairman of the relevant commission . The NS made available 50 million euros as compensation; around 7,000 affected people reported.

In 2020, Salo Muller wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel on behalf of other Holocaust victims and also demanded compensation from the German government. The German Reichsbahn had received for the transports of Jewish people to extermination camps, according to estimates by historians the equivalent of about 16 million euros. Salo Muller: “The Reichsbahn also earned money from the transports.” Because of the complex legal situation, Deutsche Bahn cannot be sued directly, but the German government has a “moral obligation”, says Salo Muller.

Commemoration

In 2007, two stumbling blocks for Lena Blitz and Louis Muller, Salo Muller's parents, were laid in front of Molenbeekstraat 34 in Amsterdam. Stumbling blocks were also laid for Conny Muller's parents.

In 2008, Pietje Heddema-Bos and Klaas Vellinga, two men from the Frisian town of Drachtstercompagnie , were posthumously honored by Yad Vashem for their work in saving Salo Muller .

Publications

  • Sport en general . Gottmer, Haarlem 1976, ISBN 90-257-0322-4 (Dutch).
  • Everything about sport blessures . Aramith, Bloemendaal 1993, ISBN 90-6834-146-4 (Dutch).
  • Dead vanavond en ran zijn hoor ... Oorlogsherinneringen . Houtekiet, Antwerp / Amsterdam 2005, ISBN 90-5240-819-X (Dutch).
  • De foto. Novel . Verbum, Laren 2013, ISBN 978-90-74274-99-9 (Dutch).
  • See You Tonight and Promise to be a Good Boy! Was memories . Amsterdam Publishers, 2017, ISBN 978-94-92371-55-3 (English).
  • Mijn Ajaxjaren: de voorbesprekingen, de spelschema's, de kleedkamergesprekken, de trainingkamoen, de wedstrijden en nog veel meer van het gouden Ajax 1959–1972 . Just Publishers, 2017, ISBN 978-90-8975-502-5 (Dutch).
  • Nunes Vaz: a divorced family . Verbum, 2017, ISBN 978-90-74274-88-3 (Dutch).
  • Blootgegeven . Brug, 2020, ISBN 978-90-6523-543-5 (Dutch).

Web links

Commons : Salo Muller  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Oud-Ajaxverzorger Salo Muller: 'Genoeg is het nooit, maar ik ben er blij mee'. In: parool.nl. Retrieved July 30, 2020 (Dutch).
  2. ↑ Lena Muller-Blitz. In: joodsmonument.nl. October 20, 1908, Retrieved July 29, 2020 (Dutch).
  3. ↑ Louis Muller. In: joodsmonument.nl. July 20, 1903, accessed July 29, 2020 (Dutch).
  4. ↑ a b c d e Tel je zegeningen! - Oorlogsverhalen - Verhalen over de oorlog. In: verhalenoverdeoorlog.nl. Accessed July 30, 2020 .
  5. ↑ a b c d Tobias Müller: Who never lets up. In: juedische-allgemeine.de. May 8, 2019, accessed July 29, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Abraham Menist. In: joodsmonument.nl. Retrieved July 31, 2020 (Dutch).
  7. ↑ a b c Muller does not give up - The great victory of the Ajax masseur. In: 11freunde.de. April 16, 2019, accessed July 29, 2020 .
  8. ^ A b Hoe Salo Muller de NS alsnog de rekening van de oorlog presenteerde. In: vn.nl. January 17, 2020, accessed July 30, 2020 (Dutch).
  9. ↑ a b Dutch Nazi victims demand compensation for transports to concentration camps. In: swissinfo.ch. Retrieved July 29, 2020 .
  10. ^ Train ticket to the extermination camp: Nazi victims demand compensation. In: stuttgarter-zeitung.de. July 29, 2020, accessed July 29, 2020 .
  11. ↑ Annette Birschel: Holocaust: "The Jews even had to buy a train ticket". In: welt.de . July 30, 2020, accessed July 30, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Stumbling Stones Molenbeekstraat 34 - Amsterdam. In: tracesofwar.com. Retrieved July 29, 2020 .
  13. ↑ Yad Vashem eert redders Salo Muller. In: at5.nl. May 15, 2008, accessed July 29, 2020 (Dutch).
personal data
SURNAME Muller, Salo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Muller, Salomon Barend (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch author, physiotherapist and Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH February 29, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Amsterdam