Obituary of Sonja van der Horst

Sonja van der Horst Sonja van der Horst, a Holocaust survivor who lived in Olean, N.Y., for most of her life, died Wednesday in Chapel Hill, N.C., after a lengthy illness. She was 82. Mrs. van der Horst, whose home was on Hillcrest Avenue, had moved to North Carolina in October after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. She was born Chaya Eichenbaum Teichholz on Dec. 16, 1923, to Naftali and Chawa Teichholz in Tarnopol, Poland – now part of Ukraine. She had to take her mother’s last name because Jewish marriages weren’t legally recognized then. At age 15, she witnessed the Soviet invasion of Tarnopol on Sept. 1, 1939, when Poland was divided by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany under a treaty between the two nations as World War II began. After Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Germans entered Tarnopol on July 22, 1941. They forced the Jews into a ghetto and systematically eliminated them with a series of “aktions,” one in November of 1942 during which her father and sister, Malka, were shot to death and her mother sent to a concentration camp. Mrs. van der Horst survived by assuming a false Ukrainian name and working as a non-Jewish slave laborer in Germany. At the end of the war, she worked as a translator in a displaced persons camp, where she met Johannes Martinus Arnold van der Horst. They married Oct. 11, 1945, and lived in the Netherlands, where they had two children, before emigrating to the United States and settling in Olean, N.Y., in 1952. Mr. van der Horst, a native of Holland who died in 1978 at the age of 59, was a chemical engineer who worked with the van der Horst Corporation and later as an independent consultant. He was active in community affairs, serving as president of the Olean Public Library Board and of the local American Field Service Committee, which sent high school students from Olean to foreign countries. In their names, a distinguished professorship of Jewish history and culture has been established at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Mrs. van der Horst has donated her Olean home to Temple B’Nai Israel in Olean. Hans and Sonja van der Horst are survived by their four children, Tatjana Schwendinger of St. Louis, Mo.; Dr. Charles van der Horst of Chapel Hill, N.C.; Roger van der Horst, an Olean native now living in Raleigh, N.C.; and Jacqueline Sergent, an Olean native living in Oxford, N.C.; and eight grandchildren, Derek and Kristen Schwendinger, Anna and Sarah van der Horst, Evonne and Jonathon van der Horst, and David and Whitney Sergent. There will be no prior visitation. A Jewish service will be conducted at 10 a.m. Friday at Casey Halwig & Hartle Funeral Home, 3128 W. State Rd., Olean, N.Y., and Mrs. van der Horst will be buried next to her husband in a private family service at Portville Cemetery. The family and friends will be sitting shivah in Olean, New York at the home of Sonja van der Horst at 7 PM on Saturday night and at the home of Charles van der Horst and Laura Svetkey in Chapel Hill Sunday through Wednesday nights at 7 PM. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the UNC professorship at https://www.webslingerz.com/unccas/gift.html or another charity. For the professorship, donors must enter “JMA and Sonja van der Horst Professorship in Jewish Studies” under the “Designate Your Gift” heading. Other suggestions include: the USC Shoah Foundation Institute at https://www.usc.edu/schools/college/vhi/ and the Olean Public Library at https://www.oleanlibrary.org/memorials.html. Created by film director Steven Spielberg, the Shoah Foundation has collected video documentaries of all the living survivors of the Holocaust. Sonja van der Horst’s testimony can be seen on her Web site, https://www.sonjavanderhorst.org, and copies of the DVD are available from the family.