When Dini Hansma started kindergarten in the Netherlands in 1937, she did not realize she was different from her Jewish friends. Hansma remembers playing with Rika and Sarah Philipson, daughters of the local Rabbi, in their home and admiring their Jewish traditions.

When World War II came along, the Jewish sisters were barred from public schools, and Hansma was forbidden from playing with them. 

“Who would have thought at that time that six years later both were murdered in Auschwitz,” Hansma wrote in a letter almost a century later. “In the photo, I hold hands with them physically. Now I hold hands with them spiritually.” 

Hansma survived the war and immigrated from the Netherlands to the United States, where she currently resides in Orem. She said she will never forget her young Jewish friends.

Hansma is in her 52nd year serving as a missionary at BYU’s Family History Library. Genealogy, she said, is her life’s mission. Her goal is to give a face and a place to the people who don’t have one, like her childhood friends who died in the Holocaust.

“I always have said I had not been able to do anything during the war…