The 75-year-old grandfather Hannes Bogaard lived in the small house together with his daughter Aagje, his sons Antheunis (Teun) and Willem and granddaughter Metje (daughter of Hannes jr.). From 1939 until 1943 they hid more than 150 Jewish people who went into hiding there. Besides that, it functioned as a kind of intermediate hiding place for about 3.000 Jews who the Bogaard’s sent into hiding at other places.

Unfortunately, this would not remain unnoticed. The place was known to the people in the area as the “Jew farm” and it was raided several times. This was mainly done by Dutch policemen. During the first raid nobody was found but during a second raid on November 11th, 1942, which lasted from 1 PM until well into the evening, a brickwork cellar was discovered, and twelve adults and a 4-year-old girl in there. During the skirmish in the house the girl ‘Leny’ was spirited away by Metje. Thanks to Metje’s action Leny survived the war.

The other people were deported, and Grandpa Hannes was arrested. He was released ten weeks later. But still Grandpa Hannes Bogaard considered it his duty as a Christian to rescue Jews. In the Autumn of 1943, a third raid took place by Dutch WA members and a couple of SD men. Despite threats to shoot down Antheunis and to set fire to the farm and thanks to the inexorable attitude of the Bogaard’s, the hidden people were once again saved from arrest and deportation by the Germans.

A false story by someone who was apprehended for illegal slaughtering having twenty-five kilograms of meat in his possession, meant the end of the heroic actions of the Bogaard family. On October 6th, 1943, the fourth and fatal raid took place. We wanted to know everything about the, collected pictures, reports and all publications about this brave family and their farm to clearly understand the past events.

All the material and interviews gave us a clear picture of what the farm must have looked like in those years that we were able to make a model of the farm as it must have looked in 1942.
The model is built to scale and is shown in the museum supplemented by authentic photographic material.

During the Second World War the laborer’s house of Sam and Antje Breijer at the 1742 IJweg, in Nieuw Vennep was also a well-known hiding address in the Haarlemmermeer.
Between 1943 and 1945, 19 to 20 people lived in this small house, its dimensions were 6 x 4 meters (18 x 12 ft). Neighbours only discovered about the hidden people when Sally Cohen (pseudonym ‘Uncle Henk’) and the others appeared from the house bearing the Dutch flag on VE-Day. On August 22nd, 2003, it was torn down to make way for a new house. Crash took the initiative to record and preserve its history. Some typical parts of the small house were saved and put on display in our museum.