“What I know about my parents and my early years I learned much later in my life. Since I was just three years old when I was sent into hiding, I have no recollection of my mother or father. My grandfather apparently also lived with us.” - Marian Nachman

Marian (Neuhaus) Nachman was born in s’Hertogenbosch, Holland on May 8, 1938. Her parents Martha Davids and Arthur Neuhaus had emigrated from Germany in 1936.

Her parents went into hiding in 1941, in a place that was too dangerous to take her, so she first went to live with the Bruning family in a nearby town, they had 12 children so they thought one more wouldn’t be notice, until one of the children mention in her school that a Jewish girl came to live with them. Mr. Bruning thought it was better she moves to another house, when she was three years old, she was sent into hiding with the Martens’ family living in a small town called Horst in Limburg not far from the German border where she spent the war years. Christine and Albert Martens had two sons Ton and Jan who became Marian “brothers” during the war and she was able to live in the open. Her name was Marianne Martens.

She was brought up as a Catholic child and went to the local convent school and studied for her first Communion; she was devastated to learn that the church would not permit her to go through with it.

Some time after May 9, 1945 her uncle Kurt (her father’s brother) appeared at the house telling her she had to leave to America to live with an aunt and uncle, she didn’t want to leave because for her the Martens were her family.

In 1946 she flew from Amsterdam to America to live with uncle Fritz, another brother of her father, aunt Ellen and cousin Bob, it was very difficult for her no one spoke Dutch, she felt lonely, lost and abandoned.

She lived in New York, at that time she was still not aware that her real parents were not the Martens and that the Germans had killed her biological parents; they were killed in Sobibor, in Poland in 1943. (She knew the details of what happened to them until 1996).

Her relationship with her new family was always very difficult, she always stayed in touch with the Martenses, after many years she finally learned that the Martenses really had loved her and had wanted to keep her with them, but they didn’t want to interfere when members of her real family appeared.

The trauma of the numerous sets of families and parents that she had during her childhood affected her adult life and still does.

Marian majored in French at Smith College, worked for the United Nations as a guide and as photo researcher at the New York Times