Jack Kooistra
Jack Kooistra, Nazi hunter from northeast Friesland: 'I cannot stand injustice. I fight against that. Always.'
The 'Hunting Jack'
I was born on March 24, 1930 in Zwaagwesteinde.
My grandparents and my uncle Elke, who was a teacher, thought I was a precocious boy. Nowadays it is called gifted.
Shortly after I was born, my parents moved to Dantumawoude. At the age of five, Uncle Eelke taught me to read and write. I was interested in everything, except politics and religion.
Every Friday for years, a certain fishmonger Jan Hendriks Venema from Hardegarijp came by to sell fish. I asked him the whole question. I always received a piece of fish from this friendly man. From September 1939 Venema suddenly stopped coming. I asked my mother about this and she told me that he had been drafted into military service. Then war broke out on Friday, May 10, 1940. After the capitulation on May 15, 1940, I never saw Venema again. Mother announced that he would never return because he had been killed. I wrote down his name in a notebook. At the same time as names from De Telegraaf, which my Beppe Griet read out.
Shortly after the liberation we moved from Dantumawoude to Zwaagwesteinde.
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And so the battle began
It was the impetus for building my extensive war archive. I obtained publications about executed resistance fighters from the then Telegraaf. I got the information about killed SS members from the NSB newspaper Volk en Vaderland,
At the time of liberation I had about 3000 names. Because I was sure that many more people had died, as a 15/16-year-old teenager I wrote to almost all Dutch municipalities. At my request, please provide a list of good and bad Dutch people. Back then you didn't have privacy legislation, which stopped me.
"Go play football"
I was called to account at the police station, as if I had nothing to do as an adolescent. "I'm going to play football," I was told. I also had to appear at the Dantumadeel town hall. There they came up with a fun solution. I had to deliver the invoiced mail to the town hall, where they included a statement from the mayor before sending that there was no objection to providing me with information.
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In the sixties, seventies and eighties of the last century I started looking for people who could be held responsible for executions, robberies and the like of innocent citizens and institutions. At home and abroad, this yielded approximately a hundred names of people who had seriously misbehaved during WWII.
It gave me all kinds of nicknames, such as the Dutch Wiesenthal, the Frisian Wiesenthal, Friesenthal, Hunting Jack and Wiesenthal Zwo.
My handwritten cards, measuring 13.5 meters in length, contain approximately 180,000 war victims from all over the world. In addition, approximately 50,000 fallen German soldiers and more than 6,000 fallen SS men. All this information has been typed onto cards.
Updating the archive was interrupted from roughly 1950-1954 by my military service. Among other things, I was deployed to New Guinea for more than a year and a half. I have been working on this for the rest of my life.
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The search continued
Documentary
Jack Kooistra married Froukje Kuik in 1956, with whom he lived in Leeuwarden. The family had two children, Edith (1956) and Jacques (1958). Until recently, Jack still lived in Leeuwarden, but due to an unfortunate accident in January 2023, he was admitted to the Bennema State care center for further care after extensive treatment. Every day he answers questions from relatives about the war. Kooistra's tickets have now been transferred to the Military Mobile Depot in Loosrecht. The archive is being digitized and his son Jacques Kooistra has set up the Hunting Jack foundation, among other things to safeguard the message of the film. "Unfortunately it is still relevant."
The documentary 'Hunting Jack' will be shown in several countries. Omrop Fryslân and the NPO will also broadcast the documentary made by Hidde de Vries. (source de westereen )
Onderscheidingen
Over de jaren heeft Jack Kooistra meerdere onderscheidingen ontvangen. Op de foto ziet u zijn baret uit Nieuw Guinea, zijn koninklijke onderscheiding (officier in de orde van Oranje Nassau).
Ook ziet u het herinneringskruis Nieuw Guinea en het Friese pompebledje wat de verbinding is met zowel de afdeling van de KVNRO afdeling Friesland als de verbinding met het regiment infanterie JWF (Johan Willem Friso).