Huize Dina opens its doors at its first location in Santpoort — a home where Jewish girls from mostly disadvantaged backgrounds could receive a safe and virtuous upbringing. In 1930, the home was named after Dina Sanson, founder of the “Association for the Protection of Jewish Girls,” and provided a home for Jewish aged 14-21 years old who, usually due to poverty or even violence at home, could no longer be cared for by their parents.

Neighbors and Tilly’s parents file a report with the juvenile police. An official statement is drawn up.

Tilly is admitted to the Tehuis voor Werkende Meisjes (Home for Working Girls) at Olympiakade, Amsterdam — a modern shelter opened in 1926. Unlike closed institutions, it offered “semi-freedom”: girls could work or study, had their own rooms, wore normal clothes, and lived under supervision in a family-like setting.

Tilly is admitted to Beth San, a Protestant reformatory on Nieuwe Herengracht in Amsterdam — an observation home for girls with difficult backgrounds who had become caught up in an immoral and troubled life. Beth San sought to guide its girls toward a calm, modest, and respectable life in society.

Tilly enters Huize Dina in Santpoort. After her time in Zeist she was allowed to go to Huize Dina, near the dunes, where she had more freedom. However, she also experienced periods of depression there. Here too, she attempted suicide.

Tilly is hit by a military car on the streets of Amsterdam. She spent several weeks in hospital with a skull fracture. The injury was serious enough to require prolonged medical care and kept her away from her usual surroundings for an extended period.

Tilly reached the age of majority at 21 — legally an adult, expected to stand on her own feet. The legal connections with the child judge and the familyguardianship ends at this day.

Tilly’s daughter Mirjam “Mieke” de Jong is born in the Wilhelmina Gasthuis, a large public hospital in Amsterdam. The support dossier names Alwin Jacob Garcia as the father. Not long after the pregnancy, Garcia broke off all contact with Tilly.

Tilly’s daughter Mirjam “Mieke,” who had been living in a children’s home since 1941, is taken into hiding in Betondorp, Amsterdam. With the help of a kind nurse she was secretly smuggled out and taken to the nurse’s house. In this way Tilly’s daughter survived the war, growing up there until her marriage in 1970.

Alida is deported in a cattle train from Westerbork to Auschwitz. Of the 949 people who were forced into the train wagons together with Tilly that day, only thirty would return after the war. Three days later, upon arrival, Tilly is murdered in the gas chamber.

Mina spends her first four years with her grandparents at Waterlooplein 16 while her father sits in prison. In 1930 her mother Klara forcibly takes her back.

Family and neighbours file the first child-police report; interim guardianship follows. One grandmother calls the household ‘bar smerig’ (‘utterly filthy’); the housing supervisor calls it ‘very neat’. The case opens on contradiction.

The girls’ mother Klara dies of an ectopic pregnancy, aged 31, and is buried at the Jewish cemetery in Diemen. Salomon drifts from address to address; six children are left without care.

Mina, Sara and Levy are placed in the Jewish orphanage in Utrecht; Marietje, Alexander and Jeannette elsewhere in Amsterdam. Six siblings, four institutions.

At fourteen, Mina is transferred to Huize Dina — her behaviour, the file says, ‘left much to be desired’. The same house in the dunes (and the same directress, Hetta Prins) as Tilly and Jetje before her.

Achisomog records Sara’s compulsive washing rituals; Hetta Prins, the directress of Huize Dina, calls Mina a spoiled ‘krengetje’ (a little brat). 

The German occupier seizes Huize Dina. The girls, directress Hetta Prins and her staff are forced to leave Santpoort and move the girls home to Amsterdam.

The Huize Dina girls, the Engers sisters among them, are reunited in a new building at Amstel 254 — a temporary collective home, and a question of whether an institution can truly offer belonging.

Mina and Sara are transported to Westerbork, together with directress Hetta Prins and the other Huize Dina girls. Mina is sixteen; Sara, fourteen.

Liberation. Of the whole family only Jeannette (1938–2025), the youngest sister, survives, hidden in an Amsterdam children’s home. Stolpersteine (brass ‘stumbling stones’ commemorating victims of the Nazis) for Mina and Sara now lie at Duinlustparkweg 96, Huize Dina’s old address — Mina’s laid in 2018, Sara’s beside it in April 2026.

In a confidential conversation with guardian Clasina Kruimel-van Dijk, Mina urgently asked that Henriette (Jetje) be removed from the parental home. “The mother demanded money both before and after Mina’s stay” in the reformatory, the guardian noted; supervision alone, Mina argued, could not be enough to safeguard her. Service in Zandvoort was suggested as the safer alternative.

The family guardian found Jetje’s parental home far too dirty — no regularity or structure, and street prostitution besides, with the money going to Jetje’s mother. She reported that Jetje had to leave both her family home and her job in Amsterdam.

Henriette’s parents were summoned and argued that she had previously been removed from home without reason. They explained her obstinacy in service and said they had reprimanded her sister Sofie. The juvenile judge promised a short stay followed by service near Amsterdam.

Hetta Prins, the directress, decided that Jetje could visit her parents’ home in Amsterdam once every two months — but warned the judge and the guardian that visits would stop if matters did not proceed satisfactorily. Home contact was conditional, and monitored.

Guardian Kruimel reported that a letter left by Mina suggested the girls’ mother had formerly compelled her daughters to engage in street solicitation. Around the same time, directress Hetta Prins reported that Henriette had begun to improve — but should remain in Santpoort.

The family guardian reported that Jetje was much more difficult than her sister Mina and must therefore remain in Huize Dina. The same note recorded that Mina and her future husband were grateful for the care received, and would soon marry.

After a visit to the Swaab family in Amsterdam, directress Hetta Prins decided she could no longer permit Jetje to visit her parental home — not even once every two months. It was too dangerous.

Henriette married Emile Frank in Haarlem in March 1940. He was murdered in Sobibor on 26 March 1943. From Westerbork he wrote her a letter, kept today in the Jewish Museum’s collection — the interwar welfare story cut across by wartime persecution.

After five years, the war is over. Mina’s daughter Betje grows up permanently with the Kruimel family in Zandvoort; she never saw her biological mother (who survived the war in hiding) again. Henriette and her daughter Michele survive and begin a new life in Haarlem.