The Heschel School

Louis (Lou), Susan (Liesel), and Rudolph (Rudi) were the three children of Leo and Ella (née Spiegel) de Winter. The family lived in Holland at the outbreak of World War II. 

Leo and Ella emigrated to the United States in the spring of 1940 thanks, in large part, to visas issued by Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes. With great effort, luck, and help from an extensive network of personal and business connections, they managed to also get their children out of Europe and safely to America at the end of that year. 

Leo was born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, on February 8, 1895. A consummate businessman, he traveled the world for an import/export company before establishing his own business in 1922, a company named Eldewe that exported evaporated, condensed and powdered milk. It was during one of his travels, to Austria, that Leo met Ella Spiegel, who was born in Vienna on July 9, 1894.

Ella married Leo in 1920 and moved with him to Amsterdam, where they had their three children: Lou was born in 1921, Liesel in 1923, and Rudi in 1927. Ella regularly entertained Leo’s business clients and the family, which kept a kosher home, celebrated holidays with extended family, including Leo’s mother, Sara (whom the children called Oma); his older sister Rosa (whom they referred to as Tanta Roos), her husband Julius Barmat, and their son Louis; Leo’s younger brother, Albert, his wife, Henrika, and their children, Louis, Rachel and Sidonie; Leo’s younger sister, Tilly, her husband, Otto Arenson, and their son, Gustav; and Ella’s brother Albert Spiegel, his wife Stephanie, and their children Theo and Judith. 

The de Winters enjoyed a fine life and didn’t consider leaving their native country until Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, in what is known as the Anschluss. Even after the Nazis triggered World War II with the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Leo was hesitant to leave Holland; he felt confident that the country would remain neutral as it had during World War I and didn’t want to leave so much family behind. (In fact, the de Winters had sailed to Southampton, England, just as the war broke out, and secured the necessary papers to emigrate to the U.S. but decided to turn back at the last minute.)

Then, in the winter of 1940, Leo became ill and, at the advice of his doctor, he travelled with Ella to Nice in the South of France to recuperate that spring. Oma and Tante Roos moved in with Lou, Liesel and Rudi during their parents’ absence. On Thursday May 10, the children’s suitcases were packed to travel by train to Paris, where they had made a plan to meet their parents for a holiday weekend before returning home all together. However, that night, the German army invaded the Netherlands, making the reunion impossible. The children, accompanied by their aunt and grandmother, realized there was no escape route and spent the next few nights seeking shelter from air raids in their cellar. Within days, Holland surrendered. 

Communicating with their children by telegram and aided by their extensive network of friends, family and associates, Leo and Ella made every effort to secure exit permits for Lou, Leisel and Rudi. In the meantime, they traveled back south, this time to Bordeaux, where the city’s Potuguese consul, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, issued transit visas to Ella and Leo, along with letters of support. They were among the thousands of refugees he saved that spring, in defiance of official orders. The de Winters were told that they would have a better chance of extricating their three children from German-occupied Holland once they were in the United States. So they traveled on to Lisbon and took a Pan Am Yankee Clipper seaplane from there to New York, arriving on July 20. Sadly, Leo died from his undiagnosed illness on August 9, 1940, just a few weeks after their arrival, when he was only 45 years old. 

Lou, Liesel and Rudi finally left Holland on October 23, 1940. First, they traveled by train from Amsterdam to Berlin, where they spent the night, before taking another train to Rome. They stayed there for three weeks with their father’s sister Helena, her husband and their three daughters, who had come from Warsaw, Poland, and obtained false papers that enabled them to survive the war in Italy as Polish catholics. From there, the de Winter children travelled by plane to Barcelona, then took another flight to Lisbon. In Portugal, they stayed at a pensione until the end of November, when they finally sailed across the Atlantic aboard an American Export Lines ship called the Sibony. On December 3, they docked in Hoboken, New Jersey, and were reunited with their mother after eight months. 

They initially lived together in a rented apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The apartment was two blocks away from the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue, where the assistant rabbi at the time, David Cardozo, was Dutch, drawing an influx of refugees from Holland like the de Winters. Rabbi Cardozo helped prepare Rudi for his bar mitzvah on December 21, just a few weeks after their arrival. 

Rudi married Lydelia Wellstead in 1954. They had three children, Deborah, James, and Julia, and seven grandchildren, among them Heschel graduates Carolyn (MS '08) and Rebecca (HS '14) Sussman. Rudi served in Korea in 1946, was a longtime partner at the law firm Kramer Levin, taught at NYU’s Graduate School of Real Estate, and volunteered for Nassau Suffolk Law Services after his retirement. He died in 2018 at the age of 91. Lou and his wife Simone Seban had three children and four grandchildren. He died in 1983 at the age of 62. Susan and her husband Warner Posen had three children, seven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. She died in 2019 at the age of 96. Their mother, Ella, predeceased them; she died in 1974, shy of her 80th birthday.

In addition to their aunt Helena and her family, who lived as Polish Catholics in Italy during the Holocaust, Tante Roos survived several years in Theresienstadt, and her son, Lou, who was married to a non-Jewish woman, lived out the war under the pretense of not being Jewish himself. Similarly, Ella’s brother Albert Spiegel, his wife, Stephanie, and their children, Theo and Judith, also survived because Stephanie, who had converted to Judaism when she married into the Spiegel family, managed to destroy documentation of her Jewish identity and pass as a gentile with her daughter. They hid Albert and Theo in their attic, along with three neighboring Jewish children whose parents had been deported. 

Their uncle Albert de Winter and his family and their aunt Tilly Arenson and her family, as well as the de Winter matriarch Sara, were deported and murdered at Sobibor, Auschwitz and Vught.