SEQUIM –Tony van Renterghem of Carlsborg, a Dutch cavalryman who protected Jews and Allied service members during World War II while documenting the Nazi occupation of his native Amsterdam, has died of age-related causes.
He celebrated his 90th birthday June 28 at home with his wife, Susanne Severeid-van Renterghem, and their 12-year-old son, Pablo.
“Tony was the most amazing man. I am so incredibly blessed,” Severeid-van Renterghem said, “to have shared my life with him.”
As a young man in his native Holland, Mr. van Renterghem — who died Sunday — trained as a huzaar, a mounted cavalry officer who would serve for eight tumultuous years in the Netherlands Armed Forces. While working as a spy in Amsterdam, he was condemned to death by the Nazis but continually eluded them as he crisscrossed the city with a camera.
Hitler’s forces, descending on Amsterdam on May 10, 1940, began rounding up tens of thousands of Jews and non-Jews and taking them to concentration camps. During the ensuing five years, van Renterghem helped Jews and Allied pilots hide, and as chief of the Dutch Resistance unit known as the “underground camera,” photographed the occupation and the resistance.
“We said, ‘Somebody should record what is happening here,'” van Renterghem recalled in a 2006 interview with the Peninsula Daily News.
Through it all, he used an unusual technique when crossing paths with German soldiers: He would position himself on the same side of the street, and never confront them head-on.
“I learned to talk to them before they started talking,” he said.
The penalty for his covert activities was execution — but the occupiers, perhaps disarmed by the way he spoke to them, didn’t demand his identification papers.
Many of his wartime photos are stored in the Netherlands’ national archives, but a few months after Mr. van Renterghem and his family moved to Sequim four years ago, he gave a talk to a capacity crowd at Olympic Theatre Arts and showed some of the pictures he had kept for more than six decades.
Many of those images will be in Mr. van Renterghem’s memoir, titled The Last Huzaar: Resistance Without Bullets, to be released next year by Conserve, a Dutch publisher.
To write the book, Mr. van Renterghem had to relive the German bombings, the grinding shortages of food and supplies that worsened as the occupation wore on and the roundups of his countrymen and -women.
He hadn’t wanted to go back over it all, Severeid-van Renterghem said. But at age 88, Mr. van Renterghem decided it was time to embark on the task of writing down his extraordinary experiences.
He spent the last year and a half of his life on the book.
“He said it was one of the most difficult things he had ever done,” his wife said. Mr. van Renterghem suffered from intense arthritis in his hands, and his eyesight was almost gone, so she helped with the typing and proofing. “The words are completely his,” she added, and the book is riveting.
“He left an amazing legacy,” Severeid-van Renterghem said, adding that her husband provided her with a file of the basic facts of his life in Europe to help her write his obituary.
“He protected me,” she said, “even in death.”
Mr. van Renterghem received many honors from around the world, including the World War II Resistance Cross from Netherlands’ Queen Beatrix in 1985 and the Yad Vashem medal from Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority. A tree is planted in his honor on the Avenue of the Righteous at Jerusalem’s Mount of Remembrance.
After the war, Mr. van Renterghem started a new life. He immigrated to the United States in 1948 and went to work in the motion picture and television industry, serving as a technical, historical and script adviser and as an assistant to director George Stevens on the filming of 1959’s “The Diary of Anne Frank” and 1965’s “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” In that biblical epic, John Wayne played the Roman soldier charged with arresting Jesus, and at one point when the Duke wasn’t available, Stevens asked his assistant to stand in.
“I told him, ‘I’m not really an actor,’ and he said, ‘Neither is John Wayne,'” Mr. van Renterghem remembered.
In addition to his 35 years working in movies, Mr. van Renterghem was a writer and researcher for organizations including the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles. His first book, When Santa Was a Shaman: The Ancient Origins of Santa Claus and the Christmas Tree, was published in 1995 by Llewellyn Publications and has been translated into several languages.
For many years, Mr. van Renterghem lived on the beach in Malibu, where he met his wife, who was then 21, and 36 years his junior. They shared 34 years of marriage, living in Southern California, then retiring to Flagstaff, Ariz., and finally moving to Sequim, where the climate was easier on Mr. van Renterghem’s heart.
Peace was his passion, his wife said. One of his proudest accomplishments later in life, she added, was co-founding the Northern Arizona Veterans for Peace chapter and serving as its first executive director.
Mr. van Renterghem also was a founding member of the North Olympic Peninsula Chapter of Veterans for Peace. Member David Jenkins of Port Townsend called him “a true hero . . . who worked for peace and justice his entire life.”
Jenkins marveled at how Mr. van Renterghem — “a big man and a big target” — survived the Nazis’ death sentence throughout World War II. He remembers too the man’s zest for life. “His humor, intelligence and wonderful personality will be missed,” Jenkins said.
“He loved living here,” added his wife. “He found it a welcoming community.”
At the end, Mr. van Renterghem was in terrible discomfort, she said, and wanted only to be with his family. He tried to have breakfast with his wife and son every morning and enjoyed a 90th birthday party with just the three of them.
“Our main goal was to keep him home, here,” Severeid-van Renterghem said. “I’m so glad we were able to do that . . . He died peacefully, and I was at his side.”
“When someone is older and they have been ill for a long time,” she added, “there is some subconscious preparation that one does. But there is no preparation at all for the moment that they are actually gone.”
“He told me every single day how much he loved me.”
The family will hold a celebration of Mr. van Renterghem’s life, Severeid-van Renterghem said; the date and place will be announced within a few weeks.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
