At the eastern end of the Oosterscheldt estuary sits the little Brabantine town of Bergen op Zoom. The town’s picturesque nature is attested to in that so many Dutch painters of the medieval, Golden Age and baroque eras – as varied as Abel Grimmer, Gerard Houckgeest, Bartram de Fouchier and Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert – were either born in or did significant work in Bergen. The composer of sacred music Jacob Obrecht was born in the town in the 1450s and Erasmus of Rotterdam even lived and worked here under his patron, the local lord, Jan II “Big Lips” van Glymes.

Sitting at an important strategic point in the Low Countries, Bergen op Zoom was continually fought over across the centuries but as the Netherlands became more stable the former port and fortress turned into a prosperous market town where the farmers of the surrounding country could ply their produce. In the early 20th century, a bourgeois Jewish couple moved to the town – he German, she Dutch – who may have seemed unremarkable at the time.

Ludwig, or “Lutz”, Löb was born into a bourgeois Jewish family of the Rhineland in 1881. His family belonged to that increasingly assimilated class of German Jews who had embraced the opportunities offered by modern Europe while retaining at least some sense of their Jewish identity. The old world of the ghetto and the shtetl was far removed from the Löbs. Lutz was educated, ambitious and intellectually curious.

In 1907 he married Johanna “Jenny” van Gelder, a Dutch Jew from a prosperous family in The Hague. Their marriage marked the beginning of one of the most remarkable family stories of 20th-century Europe, though neither bride nor groom could have guessed it at the time.

For both husband and wife, Judaism had already become more cultural than devotional. The van Gelders, like many upwardly mobile Jewish families of the period, had become largely secular in outlook. Jenny would later write that she had grown up without any real religious formation and felt that something essential had been missing from her childhood. Lutz, meanwhile, was increasingly drawn to questions of faith and meaning that neither modern liberalising Judaism nor the increasingly secular assumptions of the age seemed able to answer.

Perhaps unexpectedly for them, their search led them to the Catholic Church. The Netherlands of the early 20th century was still a deeply religious country, divided into its various Protestant and Catholic “pillars”. Catholic life in particular was experiencing a period of confidence and renewal. New churches were being built, old ones restored, and religious orders flourished. In this context, converts were not unknown, but a Jewish couple embracing Catholicism remained sufficiently unusual to cause shock amongst relatives and friends.

Lutz and Jenny were baptised in 1907 a short time before their wedding. The decision came at a cost: relations with parts of their extended family became strained and, in some cases, permanently damaged. While the families may have been secular in outlook, some Jews at the time misinterpreted conversion to Christianity as a rejection of the culture and community of Judaism combined with embracing an historic foe – and one that surely the onward march of progress was proving to be an outdated interloper in the modern age. If the young couple’s conversion created a wound in their large families, it also gave them a new sense of purpose. Their Catholic faith was not a social convenience or intellectual hobby: it became the organising principle of their lives.

The first years of marriage were restless. Lutz worked as a teacher and engineer, and the family spent time not only in the Netherlands but also in the Dutch East Indies – today’s Indonesia. Children arrived in rapid succession so that by the time the family arrived in Bergen op Zoom in the early 1920s there were eight of them: Lien, George, Robert, Dorothea, Louise, Ernst, Hans and Paula.

Visitors to the household recalled it as unlike any other in town, with a pervasive atmosphere of seriousness, learning and intense piety. Prayer structured the rhythm of family life, religious books filled the house, and priests, monks and nuns were counted among their frequent visitors. This was not a dour home: Jenny was a popular hostess in the town and while Lutz was a bit more reserved and thoughtful he was still a loved and respected teacher.

One of the decisive influences in the family came from nearby Koningshoeven Abbey, the Trappist monastery just outside Tilburg about an hour east of Bergen op Zoom. The austere simplicity of monastic life exercised a profound attraction; Lutz and Jenny admired the monks and introduced their children to the monastery from an early age.

When the eldest son, George, finished his secondary education, he was determined to become a priest and, after some difficulties, entered the Trappist novitiate in 1926, becoming Fr Ignatius. Robert then followed as a religious brother (rather than a priest) and took the name in religion Linus. Ernst likewise signed up to the Trappists at Koningshoeven, taking the name Nirvardus.

The girls fared the same in rapid succession: Lien wanted to become a Trappistine nun but the nearest convent was the French-speaking one at Chimay in neighbouring Belgium. She was the first Dutch speaker to join, and as she made her profession as Mother Hedwigis she said: “I am offering myself for the return of the Jews.” Dorothea and Louise soon followed as Theresia and Veronika, and when a Dutch Trappistine foundation was started near Tilburg at Koningsoord in 1937 all three sisters moved to it. Of the eight siblings, only Hans and Paula had remained in the world – and even then Paula tried her luck as a novice before determining she lacked the religious vocation.

Six Trappist siblings with three brothers together in one monastery and three sisters in another was significant by any measure. Their father Lutz died in 1933 and was granted a pauper’s burial as he requested; their mother Jenny followed in 1938. The German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 and subsequent occupation transformed everything. To the Nazi regime, Baptism was irrelevant, as was religious profession: race was all that mattered. The Löb siblings were Catholic in faith, monastic in their calling, but entirely Jewish by blood.

The increasing persecution the German occupiers unleashed against Dutch Jewry drew sharp opposition from across the spectrum of the Netherlands’ society. A series of arrests and pogroms against Jewish neighbourhoods in Amsterdam in 1941 provoked a general strike in which hundreds of thousands of workers refused to work until the strike was harshly suppressed by the Nazis. As German plans for the “final solution to the Jewish problem” advanced, word began to spread that Dutch Jews were being rounded up and transported to camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The Catholic bishops of the Netherlands wrote a letter to the Catholic faithful of the occupied nation that was read out from most of the pulpits in the country in July 1942. “We have learned with deep pain,” the bishops wrote, “of the new dispositions which impose upon innocent Jewish men, women and children the deportation into foreign lands … The incredible suffering which these measures cause to more than 10,000 people is in absolute opposition to the divine precepts of justice and charity … Let us pray to God and for the intercession of Mary that He may lend His strength to the people of Israel, so severely tried in anguish and persecution.”

The response from the occupiers was draconian: every Catholic of Jewish descent in the territory of the Netherlands was to be arrested. On 2 August 1942, the Nazi authorities arrived at the convent of the Trappistines to demand Mother Hedwigis, Mother Theresia and Mother Veronika. The last was laid up in the infirmary with tuberculosis and the Germans decided to leave her there. The two sisters – in more than one sense of the word – bade their goodbyes to their fellow nuns, received Holy Communion from the chaplain of the abbey, and were taken off.

The SS then arrived at Koningshoeven to arrest the three brothers. One of the other monks asked Fr Ignatius if they were tempted to escape, but the eldest pleaded against it for the effect it would have on the monastery: “They’ve threatened to shoot 10 Fathers if we don’t come.” The Germans waited as the two priests among the three brothers offered their final Masses at the abbey and then bade farewell to the members of their community: “Until we meet again in Heaven!”

There was an almost farcical moment in this tragedy as the three brothers emerged from the monastery to see two of their sisters who – as enclosed monastics – they had not seen in over a decade. The enthusiasm and joy to be reunited provoked an SS guard to remark that you would think they were on their way to a party. “That’s right!” Mother Hedwigis said. “You’re just going to help us get to Heaven faster!”

These five reunited Löb siblings were sent to a collecting centre at Amersfoort, then to the transit camp at Westerbork, and finally on to Auschwitz where they met both their doom and their glory. Sister Veronika was eventually sent on to Westerbork but, owing to her medical condition, was sent back to her abbey where she died in 1944. The youngest brother, Hans, who had remained in the world, was conscripted by the Nazis for forced labour service at a zinc mine in Poland. As Soviet troops drew closer, he was put on an open transport truck heading westwards, but his feet froze and he died in the infirmary of Buchenwald (though some sources mistakenly say Auschwitz).

Only the youngest, Paula, survived, having been forced to live in hiding with an heroic Catholic family in Nijmegen for the duration. She had married Harrie van Brockhoven before the war and bore him a son. Of the eight children of Lutz and Jenny, she was the only one to live past the end of the war.

Today the Löbs are not often remembered outside monastic, pious or historical circles, but their beautiful and tragic story must rank them among the most remarkable of their time. The Nazis murdered them as Jews and the Church remembers them as Catholics – they were fully both, and that conjunction only adds to the significance of their lives and their sacrifices. Their story belongs equally to Jewish, Dutch, European and Catholic history. What was fostered in a Brabant town, flourished in a contemplative monastic context, and ended in death camps remains a testament to faith, family and fidelity amid the catastrophes of the past century. Rather than prodding with human curiosity about the Löbs, perhaps we should be pleading for their heavenly intercession.

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