Searching for Sophia

Assignment takes local teen to unexpected places



LIFE LESSON—When Thousand Oaks resident Carly Shukiar, above,first laid eyes on a photo of Sophia van Hasselt, at right, she immediately felt a connection. What she learned about the Dutch girl’s untimely death would eventually take her on a journey across the Atlantic Ocean.

LIFE LESSON—When Thousand Oaks resident Carly Shukiar, above,first laid eyes on a photo of Sophia van Hasselt, at right, she immediately felt a connection. What she learned about the Dutch girl’s untimely death would eventually take her on a journey across the Atlantic Ocean.

Nine- year- old Sophia van Hasselt lined up to die with the other prisoners.

She and her parents, Simon and Geertje, and her older sister, Hermi, had been taken from the small village of Haulerwijk in the Netherlands and led to a gas chamber at the Nazi-controlled Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland on Feb. 12, 1943.

In a black-and-white photograph snapped three years before her murder, Sophia, dressed as a bridesmaid at the double wedding of her aunts and uncles, smiled and stood close to her family.

The photo, now filed in a museum archive, inspired Thousand Oaks High School sophomore Carly Shukiar to explore Sophia’s short life.

“The first thing I noticed was that she was such a beautiful girl,” said Carly, 14. “It immediately made me very sad knowing that she didn’t get to live out her full potential.”

Finding Sophia

For nine years, Carly’s father, David Shukiar, a cantor at Temple Adat Elohim in Thousand Oaks, has teamed with the Remember Us program to “twin,” or match local students preparing for their bat or bar mitzvahs with children who died in the Holocaust. The names of the victims are taken from an online database maintained by the Yad Vashem Museum in Israel.

The students are encouraged to find the victims’ relatives, although many are dead or unwilling to speak about the past.

“In most cases, either whole families were destroyed or there’s just no one left to make contact with,” Shukiar said.

In 2013, ahead of her bat mitzvah, Carly was matched with Sophia van Hasselt. The teen was excited to learn her “twin” had a photo, a rarity among Holocaust victims found in the database.

The wedding-day picture was attached to details about Sophia’s life and death, and kept in the Yad Vashem archive, which holds the names of 4 million Jews who died at Nazi hands.

Also listed was the name of the person who submitted the information, Sophia’s cousin, Sara Kirby, whom Carly and her parents found after an extensive online search. For the Shukiars and Kirby, who still lives in the Netherlands, it marked the beginning of a friendship and frequent correspondence.

The Shukiars learned that Kirby, now 74, was a baby in the Netherlands when World War II broke out. Her father, her uncle and her uncle’s family all died at Auschwitz.

To escape death, the tiny child was hidden with her mother at a Catholic hospital and then, until she was 4 years old, lived with non-Jewish families who risked their lives to save her. Meanwhile, her aunts, uncles and grandparents perished in the Auschwitz and Sobibor extermination camps in Poland.

Kirby has only a few photos of her cousin, whom she never met.

“Looking at photos of Sophia, she looks like a lively girl with lots of spirit, and that is the way I would like her to be remembered,” Kirby told the Acorn in an email. “A few years ago I met some people who . . . knew her, and they confirmed this.”

Carly related to her spirit.

“Sophia’s so much more than just a name on paper or just a picture,” she said, noting that they share similar personalities. “She was outspoken, she always had a smile on her face, she was energetic. I really connected with that.”

In July, the Shukiars flew to the Netherlands and met Kirby for the first time at the home where the van Hasselts lived, about two hours from Amsterdam.

“Hands down, my favorite moment was when Sara walked in for the first time,” Carly said.

“I had been talking with her for so long and writing her letters. To finally see her in the flesh was the most amazing thing. My entire family, we were all crying. It was so beautiful.”

David and Leasa Shukiar watched as the two embraced.

“To watch Sara and Carly hugging each other brought tears to our eyes,” Leasa said. “Here she was hugging the closest person we can ever get to Sophia in the very house she lived in. We were overcome.”

The family toured the home, where many of the original materials have been preserved. They walked up and down the same wooden stairs used by the van Hasselts and ate at a table made from their old floors.

Then they visited the school where Simon van Hasselt served as headmaster. Renamed after him and moved to a new location years ago, its students remember van Hasselt every year on his birthday, Nov. 5, and on another day gather to read poetry he wrote.

In a letter he wrote before his family’s deportation to Auschwitz, Simon van Hasselt asked the school to send them food at the camp. Many families had offered to hide his daughters, but he wanted the family to stay together. They died two days later.

Since finding Sophia and her family, the Shukiars light a candle for them on Holocaust Remembrance Day. They now consider the van Hasselts and Kirby part of their own family.

“I want to never forget Sophia,” Carly said. “Every year I put Sophia’s picture by our candle to make sure that we all know that we’re remembering Sophia as well as all the other victims.”

Remembering Sophia

Before her bat mitzvah in November 2013, Carly practiced reciting Torah portions— sections of the Hebrew Bible—while facing the picture of Sophia.

She honored her at the ceremony with a chair containing a prayer book and tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, and a display with information about her life and death.

Since Sophia did not have her own bat mitzvah, Carly wanted her picture and her memory to be part of hers.

“One of the things my dad told me was that I would be able to feel Sophia, my twin, with me while I chanted my Torah portion,” Carly said, “and I would almost be able to feel her hand on top of mine as I was moving the yad (pointer for the Torah). That just really spoke to me. So when I was doing my Torah portion, I definitely had her on my mind the entire time.”

Kirby said she’s grateful to the Shukiars for embracing Sophia.

“Carly is still young and will be able to carry on remembering Sophia for a long time to come,” she said. “It feels a bit like handing over the torch.”


Photos courtesy of the Shukiar family

Photos courtesy of the Shukiar family

UNITED—Carly Shukiar, right, makes contact with Sophia’s cousin, Sara Kirby, in the Netherlands.

UNITED—Carly Shukiar, right, makes contact with Sophia’s cousin, Sara Kirby, in the Netherlands.

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