A mysterious note from 1911 was found in a house in Sommelsdijk in South Holland. Fragments of the text have been deciphered, but much remains unclear. Since then, resident Jaap Reedijk has had a mission: to decipher what it says.
The piece of paper has a text on both sides. On one side is an advertisement that was easy to decipher. On the other side is something written in Hebrew that raises all kinds of questions. The only thing that is beyond doubt is the year: 1911, in the top right corner.
Jaap and his partner Trudy discovered the note while renovating their home, which is hundreds of years old, he tells the regional broadcaster Rijnmond† The letter was hidden behind a slat in the attic and fell to the floor when he removed the slat. “That note was clearly hidden there. But why?” Jaap wonders.
Jewish butcher family
His search for the origin and meaning of the letter started with finding out who lived in his house in the past. Jaap came across a Jewish family of butchers. “They originally came from Maassluis. A number of them became butchers here on the island. Almost all of them died in the war,” he says.
His first thought was that the note had something to do with World War II. But that’s probably not right. He asked for help via social media, which he received from a man from a university in Israel. “He has said that it is about a ‘delayed trip’ and ‘something at Easter’,” said Jaap. “He also advised asking Defense if there was any encryption in it.”
A few weeks later, Jaap made the same appeal on Facebook. “Then someone responded with: ‘I did some digging and that butcher who lived here was a fan of a kind of Hebrew crossword puzzles’. So it could well be that there is some kind of code in this note,” he thinks.
He still has many unanswered questions about the text. He hopes to one day be able to decipher the note. He also hopes that his story will inspire people with an old house to look beyond the retaining walls that have often been installed over the years: “That’s for sure.”
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