Dutch-led Suriname team digitises 100,000 documents to preserve Jewish history in the Caribbean

When the Dutch took control of the colony, they continued this practice. When Jewish people were forced out of other places in the Americas, they often fled to Suriname.

On Christmas Eve in 1942, more than 100 Dutch Jewish refugees, fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust, arrived in Paramaribo.

Liny Pajgin Yollick, then 18, was among them. In an oral history project for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she described the relief she felt when she arrived in Suriname to the sound of a familiar song.

“I remember it was morning and they played Dutch National Anthem for us when we arrived, and everybody was crying. We were very emotional when we heard that because many of us never thought we would ever hear it again,” she said.

When the Netherlands was freed from Nazi German occupation three years later, Teroenga, the magazine published for the Jewish congregations in Suriname, ran with the headline “Bevrijding” (“Liberation”). The archive at Neveh Shalom has a copy of every edition of Teroenga.

Key to De Jong’s preservation project has been 78-year-old Lilly Duijm, who was responsible for the archive’s folders of documents for more than two decades.

Born in Suriname, when she was 14 she moved to the Netherlands where she eventually became a nurse. But she returned to her homeland in 1973, just before the colony got its independence, and her four children grew up in Paramaribo.

More than anyone, she knows how precious the archive was.

“I told the congregation, as long as the archive is still here, I will not die. Even if I live to be 200 years old,” she tearfully told AP. “This is keeping the history of my people.”