Overview
Antje Noach was born in Deventer on 27 February 1876, the daughter of the Jewish couple Machiel Noach, a merchant, and Betje Luteraan. On 22 August 1895, she moved to Aalten, having been appointed as a teacher at the public primary school in Barlo. In 1905, she was appointed to the public primary school in Aalten.
She lodged with Spier, who was also Jewish and worked as a butcher, and moved house with the family several times. Over the years, her addresses in Aalten were:
She must have been a self-assured woman who, given the limited opportunities available to women at the time – this was still before the first wave of feminism – worked extremely hard at her studies in order to improve her position in life, while also taking an active part in social life. She was also a member of the Symphonia choral society.
Almost all of her brothers and sisters worked in education, perhaps because it offered a way of escaping the Jewish commercial milieu that was so typical at the time, including among the Jews of Aalten, many of whom were cattle dealers or small shopkeepers, and of moving up the social ladder. One of her nephews even went on to become a professor in Leiden – no mean achievement for the great-grandchild of a pedlar who had come to the Netherlands in the eighteenth century. Her story therefore also has an important dimension of social emancipation.
According to the population register, she left for Bocholt in January 1910. However, she apparently returned to Aalten at a later date. In 1921, she was appointed as a teacher at the state primary school in Kloosterveen, in the municipality of Smilde, and Aalten was recorded as her previous place of residence. She retired in 1936 and moved to Leiden, where she lived at Johan de Wittstraat 20.
She survived the war and lived to see the liberation, having gone into hiding with her nephew Erik (1921–2008) in a property diagonally opposite his family home at Hoge Rijndijk 80 in Leiden. Antje Noach died in Oegstgeest on 25 October 1959.
