Maup Caransa

Maurits "Maup" Caransa (5 January 1916 – 6 August 2009) was a Dutch businessman who became one of the most important real-estate developers in post-World War II Amsterdam. Caransa was the first well-known Dutch person to be kidnapped for ransom. Caransa owned and built many notable buildings in Amsterdam including the Maupoleum (now demolished) and the Caransa Hotel (still standing on the Rembrandtplein). He influenced the Amsterdam football club AFC Ajax, through his friendship with its chairman, and by supporting the team and players financially.

Caransa was born on 5 January 1916 into a family of Sephardi Jews in Amsterdam. He grew up poor, and had his first paying job at age 5. At age 16, according to a well-known story, he bought a wrecked car for one and a half guilders, sold the parts for profit, then bought more cars.

During World War II, according to Frank Bovenkerk, emeritus professor of criminal science in Utrecht, Caransa, angered by the anti-Jewish violence of the NSB (National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands), joined one of the many knokploegen, "assault groups" that in turn beat up on NSB members and especially members of the WA (Weerbaarheidsafdeling), the NSB's violent paramilitary wing. After the war, Caransa would not speak of these matters, saying it brought back too many painful memories. Before the February strike in response to Nazi pogroms, almost all of Caransa's family, including his brother Joel who lived next door to him, had already been arrested. His sister Femma managed to hide, while Maup himself reported at Westerbork transit camp after his parents were taken there. He spent a week with them but was let go, while his parents were deported to Germany. His parents and his three brothers died in Nazi concentration camps. Because he married a Catholic woman in 1941 and did not appear stereotypically Jewish to the Nazis and their allies (he had blond, almost red hair and light-blue eyes), he was "destarred" after having agreed to sterilisation. He survived the war living in the Jodenbuurt, the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam; he and his sister were the family's only survivors.

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