Juda Fruitmann, who was born on 21 December 1899 in Amsterdam, was the eldest of the two children of Marcus Fruitmann and Klaartje Muller. Juda had another brother, born in 1905 but already died in 1916. His mother Klaartje passed in 1911 and his father Marcus remarried in 1912 to Susanna Stokvis.
Juda was examined for the National Militia but was declared unfit for it. He had done the 3-year trading school and was an apprentice accountant now. On 5 October 1920 he left Amsterdam for the Dutch East-Indies and arrived there in Weltevreden, a suburp of Batavia.
In the course of 1921, Juda Fruitmann married Fanny Vleeschdrager, the daughter of Joseph Vleeschdrager from Amsterdam and the Austrian Ernestine Kleinmann, who lived in Den Haag. Fanny was born in Batavia (Dutch East-Indies) on 24 January 1903 and had an elder brother Lion, who was born in Den Haag but also a younger brother Elias, who was born in Batavia too.
Juda and Fanny had two daughters, namely Carla (5 November 1922, Batavia) and Eleonora (17 August 1930, Semarang). Somewhere in 1922 the Fruitmann family moved from Batavia to Semarang where they stayed until 1937. They returned to the Netherlands then, where they were registered on 24 July 1937 at the address Graaf Florisstraat 60b in Rotterdam. Juda now worked as a trade-employee. At some point the family moved to Blijdorp, where they have lived at Bentincklaan 37c and where they were registered too during the compulsory registration of all Jews in the Netherlands in 1941.
On 9 March 1943, Juda’s wife Fanny Vleeschdrager was arrested by the Rotterdam Police at Witte de Withstraat 47 – where she was staying at the time – taken into custody and brought before the German Sicherheits Polizei on 17 March. According to data from the archives of the Rotterdam Police she “departed” from there on 29 October 1943 to Vught and finally ended up in Westerbork on 21 June 1944, where she was imprisoned in the penal barrack 67.
On 3 September 1944 she was deported with the last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz as a penal case but she managed to survive the Shoah.
Juda Fruitmann and his two daughters Carla and Eleonora, were carried off to Westerbork on 11 May 1943 and housed in barrack 61, There Juda has made efforts to safeguard his spouse Fanny Vleeschdrager from deportation, based on her descendancy.
On 13 May 1943, on behalf of Juda, a request was made at the CV, the Central Information Service of the Jewish Council at Lijnbaansgracht 366 in Amsterdam, which reads: inform the Jewish Council Rotterdam, respectively Maurice Fogel: let Mr. Const personally contact the Central Service of Sibbekunde (genealogy) in Apeldoorn regarding the descendancy of the spouse of the person concerned. Submit this request to Calmeyer. And the answer on 14 May 1943 reads: Mr. Const is not aware of the matter. Request further information. In the end, all that led to nothing, despite the fact that Fanny Vleeschdrager survived the Shoah.
Juda and his daughters were less fortunate: on 18 May 1943 they were put on transport from Westerbork to Sobibor. The deportation train included 2511 deportees, who were all immediately murdered in the gas chamber upon arrival there on 21 May 1943, including Juda Fruitmann and his daughters Carla and Eleonora. There were no survivors of this transport.
Sources include the City Archive of Amsterdam, birth certifcate of Juda Fruitmann; City Archive of Rotterdam, family registration card of Juda Fruitmann; Municipal Archive Den Haag, family registration card of Joseph Vleeschdrager; the Rotterdam Police archives/arrest of Fanny Fruitmann-Vleeschdrager; the file cabinet of the Jewish Council, registration cards of Juda Fruitmann, Fanny Fruitmann-Vleeschdrager and of Carla and Eleonora Fruitmann; the Wikipedia website jodentransporten vanuit Nederland.nl and the publication University of Amsterdam by Van den Boogaard, C.P. (2019) “Voor de nazi’s geen Jood” (for the Nazis no Jew): how more than 2500 Jews escaped deportation by evading racial regulations. (https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/34197917/10.pdf).