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 The Story of Jack Van Der Geest

 The story of Jacobus Van Der Geest is truly a spectacular one. Jack was born in September 1923 and was raised in The Hague in Netherlands, and as a young boy he became a member of the Dutch resistance with his father after the Nazi party occupied his country. As members of the resistance Jack and his family helped to hide Jews and set up small ambushes against the Nazi troops. In 1942 at age 19, Jack and his parents were betrayed by their next door neighbor after Jack’s sister refused to go on a double date with her and two Nazi soldiers. Jack and his parents were all separated and sent to different concentration camps, his sister was never taken because she was not home when the soldiers came for their family. Jack was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was mistaken as a doctor and forced to perform experiments on fellow prisoners. Eventually Jack became one of only eight people to ever escape the camp when he played dead at the early morning role call in 1943 and was thrown into a pile of dead bodies. After waiting there for hours until night fall, Jack (at a whopping 80 pounds) overpowered a guard and took his uniform. From there Jack ran to a town nearby called Weimar in Germany and took a leap of faith by knocking on the door of a small farmhouse. The couple inside had a son who was away fighting as a Nazi soldier, but they took him in anyways and fed and clothed him. The couple even gave him money, food, and a bike to help him make it back home. On his travel back toward the Netherlands, as Jack was moving through France, he was housed by a dentist in Neufchateau named Dr. Marvel who had help Jack get involved in the French Resistance. As a member of the French Underground, Jack’s job was to transport Allied pilots who were shot down in France across the country to a safe house. This underground path included several farms and country homes as protection along the way, the people who lived in these homes risked everything to provide a place for Jack and his transports to stay. On one occasion while Jack was moving one American pilot and two British pilots in a small farmhouse, owned by a widowed man who lost his son in the Blitzkrieg, Nazi troops entered the house while Jack and the other men hid under the floorboards. Jack had only survived because the widowed man had just made a large serving of stew for the Germans troops. Eventually with connections Jack had made with an American Pilot, Jack had traveled to the United States where he eventually joined the U.S. Air force. He published his autobiography in 1995 titled “Was God on Vacation,” after he heard a teacher claim that the Holocaust never existed. He lived in Rapid City, South Dakota with his wife until his death on March 2, 2009, he was 85 years old.

Bibliography

Van Der Geest, Jack. Was God on Vacation? Rapid City, North Dakota, 2002. 3^rd edition

Congressional Record. Tribute to Jack Van Der Geest. Accessed April 14, 2014.

            http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r110:S16SE8-0033:

Van Der Geest, Jack. Story of Escape from Buchenwald,  part 10. 2:59 mins.,Video

            www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3pyvSAPSEA

Picture on top: Jack at Buchenwald Memorial, Weimar, Germany, 2003. (2009) www.jackvandergeest.com

Picture on bottom:

Van Der Geest, Jack. Was God on Vacation? Rapid City, North Dakota, 2002. 3^rd edition.