Haim Roet, who kept the names of Holocaust victims alive, dies at the age of 90

Rosina Roet. Adelaide Roet. Abraham Roet.

The names of those three Dutch Jews and others who died in the Holocaust could easily have been lost to history, their individual humanity lost under the overwhelming weight of six million victims.

Haim Roet, a relative, made sure this never happened.

Mr. Roet, who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a Dutch village, came up with the simple but powerful idea to commemorate Jewish victims of the Nazis by voicing their names.

“I’ve been trying to find a way to make the holocaust more personal so that people can understand the misery of six million souls who were killed because they were Jewish,” Mr Roet said in a statement. speech to the United Nations in 2016.

Mr. Roet died on May 22 at his home in Jerusalem. He was 90. His daughter Vardit Lichtenstein confirmed the death.

Made Mr. Roet There is a name for each persona memorial project in which the names of Nazi victims around the world are publicly read every year.

Mr Roet, whose surname is pronounced “root” in Dutch and “rote” in Hebrew, said he first recited the names of Holocaust victims in 1989, after the Dutch government decided to release two Nazi war criminals, Ferdinand Aus der Funten and Franz Fischerof their life sentences. Mr. Aus der Funten and Mr. Fischer had played an important role in the extermination of thousands of Dutch Jews.

Mr. Roet and a group of like-minded Israelis of Dutch descent staged a protest outside the Dutch embassy in Tel Aviv, where they read out some of the names of the 107,000 Dutch Jews who had died in extermination camps.

“It was a very moving event,” Mr Roet said in Hebrew in a video posted to YouTube by Yad Vashem, an Israeli organization dedicated to documenting and commemorating the Holocaust. “People were crying.”

“You see the names and all of a sudden you see what’s behind them,” he continued. “You see the date, you see the children, how each of the victims led their own lives, and I thought: we always talk about six million people. Maybe we should make it more personal on Holocaust Memorial Day by reading out the names of each victim.”

Mr. Roet worked to spread the idea, and in the early 2000s, Yad Vashem and the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, made the reading of victims’ names an integral part of the ceremonies on Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Similar ceremonies are performed in hundreds of Jewish communities around the world, organized by Yad Vashem and Jewish organizations such as B’nai B’rith International, the World Jewish Congress, and the World Zionist Organization. Other commemorations, such as the annual commemoration of 9/11, also include the names of the victims.

Haim Roet was born Hendrik Roet in Amsterdam on July 10, 1932, the youngest of six children of Shlomo Roet and Johanna Prins-Roet. He was 7 years old when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940.

In 1942, his family was sent to a Jewish theater for a week, where more than a thousand Jews were held before being sent to concentration camps. For reasons that are unclear, the Roet family ended up in a ghetto instead, where his grandfather Abraham lived with his sisters Rosina and Adelheid in a small apartment, close to an apartment for his parents and the four boys of the family.

In September 1943, SS officers came to fetch his grandfather and sisters. His grandfather died in the gas chamber of Auschwitz; his sister Rosina died of typhus in the camp; his sister Adelheid, her health devastated by years in concentration camps, died shortly after liberation.

“We never saw my sisters or grandfather again,” Roet told the UN in 2016.

The next morning the SS officers returned for the rest of the family. But his mother, who spoke German, yelled and argued with them so violently that they left, Mr. Roet later recalled.

His parents contacted the resistance, which found hiding places for the family. Hendrik ended up in Nieuwlande, a small village in the Netherlands that sheltered more than 100 Jews during the war despite the threat of execution by the Nazis.

He lived with Alida and Anton Deesker, who had three children and introduced him to strangers as their cousin. Life was dangerous – one unfortunate police patrol could have spelled the end – but the Deeskers took in two more Jews, a mother and her adult son.

After the liberation, a neighbor saw Red Cross signs stating that Mr. Roet’s parents were looking for their children. Over time, they found each other.

“A year and a half after being torn from my family, thinking I was all alone in the world, I was reunited in the middle of the night with my parents and my three surviving brothers,” Roet said in 2016.

In 1949, Mr. Roet settled in Israel and began using his Hebrew first name, Haim. His parents arrived a few years later. In 1958 he married Naomi Echel.

Mr. Roet worked for Israel’s Ministry of Finance and what is now the Ministry of Economy and Industry, and for the World Bank in Washington. He also became immersed in efforts to commemorate the Holocaust.

Determined to increase official recognition of Jews who helped other Jews survive the Nazis, he founded and chaired a nonprofit organization dedicated to honoring them, the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust.

In addition to his daughter Mrs. Lichtenstein, the vice president of an obstetrics and gynecology group, Mr. Roet is survived by his wife; another daughter, Avigail Omessi, an account executive for an accounting firm; a son, David Roet, the deputy director general and head of the North America Department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry; a brother, Abraham; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

One of Yad Vashem’s most important initiatives is to collect the names of as many Holocaust victims as possible. So far it has collected nearly five million.

“It is so important to collect the names,” Mr Roet said in the Yad Vashem video, “so that they don’t remain anonymous, and that each one of them will be remembered and have a certain place – if not in a physical grave, at least a grave in our memory and the memory of the Jewish people.”

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.