Philip Slier
| Philip ("Flip") Slier | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 4 December 1923 Amsterdam |
| Died | 9 April 1943 (aged 19) Sobibor extermination camp |
| Occupation | Typographer |
Philip ("Flip") Slier (4 December 1923 – 9 April 1943) was a Jewish Dutch typesetter who lived in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Slier left documentation of his experiences as a forced labourer in the Molengoot labor camp in a series of 86 letters that he wrote to his parents between April and September 1942. His family concealed his letters in their Amsterdam house, where they were discovered more than 50 years later.
Philip Slier (rhymes with "beer") was born on 4 December 1923 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on the top floor in their third floor apartment at 128 Vrolik Street. To his friends and family, Philip was known as "Flip".
His best friend Karel van der Schaaf describes his demeanor as brutaal - an uninhibited, extremely daring and bold, but good-natured teenager with a sense of humor, who liked being around others. Deborah Slier, editor of reference book Hidden Letters and Flip's cousin, says his letters show him to be "likeable, optimistic, humorous, and affectionate." He had a musical inclination as he liked singing and he played the flute and mandolin. Another of his hobbies was photography, for which he had a passion.
As a teenager, he was "5 feet 7 3/4 inches tall, weighed 156 lbs, had black hair and gray eyes".
Flip’s first girlfriend, Truus Sant, played the drums in a musical band called the AJC band - "Arbeiders Jeugd Centrale" (Worker's Youth Center). He played the flute in the band. Flip’s parents did not approve of her because he was Jewish and she was Christian. The Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940 when Flip was seventeen years old.
On 23 April 1942, when Flip was eighteen years old, he received a notice with instructions to board a train to a labor camp. These instructions came from the Jewish Council of Amsterdam, who were complying with orders from the German occupiers, who threatened dire consequences (arrest) if the notice was ignored. He went to Camp Molengoot (English: "mill gutter") where he was forced to perform hard labor under harsh conditions. The camp was at Collendoorn, a small settlement just north of Hardenberg. The work was in digging a canal for a mill flume, a mill gutter. From Molengoot, Flip wrote to friends and his family almost daily, giving an eyewitness account of life in the camp with his dozens of letters. Camp Molengoot was to be closed and the prisoners were to be sent off to Westerbork transit camp (essentially a temporary detention holding area) on 3 October, Yom Kippur.
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