Eli Asser (1922–2019)

Eli (Elias) Asser was born to an impoverished Jewish family in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He was the youngest son of Isaäc Asser, a market stall worker, and his wife Johanna van West. He attended the Barlaeus Gymnasium, which was unusual for a child from a poor family. In secondary school, he met his future wife Eva (Eefje) Croiset. In 1941, after passing his final exam cum laude, Asser wanted to study law, but this was already forbidden to Jews. He got a job in the mailroom of the Amsterdam Jewish Council.

In April 1942, he received a summons to report to one of the Dutch forced labor camps. He managed to escape by legally working as a student nurse in the Jewish psychiatric institution Het Apeldoornsche Bosch. A few months later, Eva Croiset also got a job there. In January 1943, the night before patients and staff were to be deported by the Nazis, Asser and Croiset fled back to Amsterdam. Both spent the rest of the war in hiding, in different places. Asser's parents, his younger sister Rebecca, and his older half-brother Jacques all perished in the Nazi death camps. Asser and Croiset married shortly after the end of the war and had three children. Asser became a journalist and worked for the Haagsch Dagblad. He also wrote pieces under the pseudonyms Kris Krasser, Herman van Harmelen, and Lapsus. From 1948 to 1952, he was a journalist for the weekly magazine Vrij Nederland (VN). His column "Vaselientje Diary of a Baby" was collected into a book under the title Vaselientje's Toddler Talk, with illustrations by the painter Jan Sluijters. Asser's breakthrough as a writer came in 1953 at VARA, where he wrote the popular weekly comedy radio play series Mimosa. Asser also worked on the 1955 comedy film The Wonderful Life of Willem Parel.

He achieved national fame writing two television comedy series that were broadcast from 1969 to 1972: 't Schaep met die 5 pooten and Citroentje met suiker.
Asser also wrote the lyrics for songs for these two series. He also worked on theater shows, and in 1979, created a musical version of the classic Jewish comedy Potasch and Perlmutter.
For a long time, Asser could not talk about his experiences in World War II. He described them later in life in the television drama The Last Glass of Milk (1995) and in the plays Rembrandt Was My Neighbor (1995) and Aan de eve (2000). In 1996, he told his life story to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute's Visual History Archive. In 2004, two years after the death of Eva Croiset, he published the book Everything Is Taken, which largely consists of letters the couple wrote to each other from their hiding places during the war. In 2014, Asser appeared in the documentary Don't Lose Courage made by his daughter Hella de Jonge, and in 2016 he contributed to the documentary Echoes of a War by In-Soo Radstake.

In 1980, Asser received the Edmond Hustinx Prize for playwrights for his entire body of work. In 1997, he was made a Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion.