Recently when I read an article on the BBC’s Magazine section about the escapades of Czech spy Vaclav Jelinek in his espionage missions in England. I noticed the following passage about Jelinek’s nom de guerre’s mother: Johanna van Haarlem.

I quote:

‘She had grown up in The Hague, in Holland, and was an 18-year-old virgin when she met his father on a train, in November 1943. Gregor Kulig was a Nazi. He was blue-eyed, 23, and Polish. Handsome. At a party four weeks later, she said, he raped her.

And when her father discovered she was pregnant, he exploded. "You are a sinner!" he told her. He ordered her to take the child to a distant town and give him away.

Full of sadness and desperation, in autumn 1944 Johanna travelled to Czechoslovakia by train. After a brief effort to survive there as a single mother, she walked into an orphanage in Holesovice, Prague. Sobbing, she kissed baby Erwin goodbye, and returned to Holland alone.

Her father - a Jew who had joined the National Socialist Movement to protect his family - destroyed the adoption papers and banned her from ever speaking about her son.’ (1)

Yes: you read that right.

Johanna van Haarlem was a jew in the Netherlands; whose jewish father joined the Dutch National Socialist Movement and thus apparently wasn’t sent to an extermination camp in Eastern Europe.

Not only was van Haarlam’s father a jewish National Socialist and thus apparently very special. She was also seduced by a fanatical Nazi and Polish member of the Luftwaffe named Gregor Kulig.

Who she now claims ‘raped her at a party’ in November 1943 when she was an eighteen year old virgin and by whom she conceived a son – who she named Erwin - whose identity Jelinek assumed at the behest of Czech Secret Service in the 1970s.

Not only did van Haarlem manage to have a jewish baby in the middle of the so-called ‘Holocaust’, but also managed to cross Europe by train on her volition in the closing months of 1944 – when the Red Army was rapidly advancing in the East and the Western allies pulverizing the Third Reich’s railways – close to the epicentre of the roundups of jews for (alleged) extermination and unsuccessfully attempted to live as a single mother in Prague before giving up Erwin for adoption.

One wonders about the naïve credulity of people who believe this sort of story.

References

(1) www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38261956