Jacob Hiegentlich

Jacob Hiegentlich was born on 30 April 1907 in Roermond. His parents - wholesaler in confection goods Sallie Hiegentlich and his mother Rosalie Egger, deceased in 1927 - had five children. Four of them would, like their father, not survive the war.
Jacob Hiegentlich grew up in catholic Roermond in, as he once himself described it, "a confusing mixture of Roman-Catholic and Jewish culture". He vis…

In his book about suicides in Dutch literature - De laatste deur, Amsterdam 1983 - the author Jeroen Brouwers writes a chapter about Jacob Hiegentlich.

It is still an extremely sensitive topic: suicide during the Second World War. Historians have not known what to do with it for a long time. What is the place of suicide in war history?

Remarkably little has been written on this subject and there seems to be no list of names or memorial books at all. The Digital Monument (www.joodsmonument.nl) offers a place where relatives, sometimes for the firs…