Family visits blossoming tulips

Elisheva (Ellis) Lehman (nee Cohen-Paraira) was born in Amsterdam on April 22, 1924. Her brother Abraham (Bram or Bob) was born on August 25, 1926. They were raised in Scheveningen, a seaside town in the Hague. Their mother, Susie Nabarro, died of cancer in 1938, and their father, David, remarried in 1941. David was an artist and, later, a traveling salesman for a cigar factory. At the age of 17, Ellis was forbidden by racial law to attend university, so she enrolled in a Jewish cooking school. Bram went to a Jewish school in the Hague. The family was forced into hiding in July 1942 after they received a deportation notice. Ellis and her boyfriend, Barend Spier, promised to communicate through a diary to be sent back and forth by the underground resistance. David's sister Sara, her husband, Klaas Klaren (a Christian and a Socialist), and his sister Dora Klaren secured a hiding place for the family in the storage room of the Krabbendam family's electricity store in Arnhem. The family was forced to relocate to Dora's home in Arnhem for a few days and then to a summer cabin where they stayed until October 1942 when the area was searched for Jews. Ellis and her stepmother, Mien Schpektor, traveled with false papers to Utrecht. Ellis's papers were poorly executed, but a German inspector surprisingly gave her clearance. They were hidden in Utrecht with Wop and Heiltje Kooistra and their three daughters until March 1943. They then joined Bram and David in hiding with the Crum family. Frans Van Schuppen, the director of the cigar factory where David had worked, paid five guilders per family member per day (six times David's salary) to the families willing to risk hiding Jews, plus cigars to trade for food in the black market. In September 1944, the area they were hiding in became a war zone, and the Cohen-Paraira family fled back to the Kooistras, where they stayed until the end of the war. In May 1945, Ellis returned every Tuesday afternoon to the bench in a park in Scheveningen in the hopes of meeting her boyfriend. She never found him. He was killed in Auschwitz. She met a soldier who served in the Jewish Brigade of Palestine, Nathan (Elmi) Lehman, and married him on December 12, 1945. Ellis moved to Israel in 1946 where she became a music teacher and raised four children. Ellis received a package with her boyfriend's diary on her wedding day, but she did not open or read it until 2007. For more information about Ellis's story, see "De Dagboeken Van Bernie En Ellis" (2011, in Dutch) and "The Lost Love Diaries", a 2011 Israeli documentary.