Adelena Böhm-Janssen

**Adelena Rosalinde Böhm** (May 15th, 1910 - March 29th, 1981), later Adelena Böhm-Janssen, was the German-born mother of Jorma Janssen. She was born in Bremen; her mother, Frieda Klein, had fled there in 1898 to escape a vengeful Russian ex-lover.

While in Bremen, Frieda took up work as a maid at the estate of a wealthy Prussian aristocrat. She lost her job with the outbreak of World War 1, and soon found herself having no choice but to travel with her young daughter back to Berlin, finding work in the *Allgemeine Elektritzitats Gesellschaft* aircraft factory. Not long after the war, she returned to Bremen, returning to work for the Prussian aristocrat’s family(the patriarch had died in the war, and his family was forced to move to smaller accommodations). She took a far smaller salary.

Freida witnessed the defeat of the Bremen Soviet by the Freikorps, developing an intense passion for the revolutionary atmosphere in the country. She remained with the Patriarch’s family until the outbreak of National Socialism. The eldest daughter was married to a prominent Jewish businessman, who had fallen under scrutiny by the increasingly-powerful Nazis. Torn at first by this, Freida soon found herself writing to local friends that *“the Jews have brought all of this upon themselves, whatever Herr Hitler does is just.“*  Adelena came across one of these letters one day, and became extremely alienated by her mother. She kept it to herself as best she could, however when Hitler was voted to dictatorial power, she fled the country. She moved to southern Ghent in Belgium, to live with the family of a childhood friend. It was here, while at a library, that she met a young engineer named Coen Janssen. They fell in love after only a handful of outings, moving in together less than a year later.

Weeks before the two had met, Coen had ended a brief fling with a “fiery Russian factory worker-turned-seamstress“. In his and Adalena’s first year together in Coen's house, the Russian woman broke in in the night to rob him. Adelena, who happened to be in the next room, had a knife put to her temple, and was forced to open Coen’s safe. The woman proceeded to knock Adelena unconscious, and stole the safe's entire contents, nearly ten thousand dollars in the marks/bills of multiple nations.

When the Germans invaded and occupied Belgium in 1940, Coen and Adelena(and a small circle of like-minded friends, many of whom would later be arrested) opted to help Jews who had not fled earlier. In 1942, Adelena gave birth to their son, Jorma. She would recall that period later in a journal as *“the single most horrific and surreal time of my life, there was no solace, almost no joy to be had with my newborn child as every moment was devoted to keeping his existence a secret.”* They were forced to hide the child, because he had remote Jewish heritage. With the aid of a loyal family friend, Coen designed and constructed a special capsule that Jorma could be kept in safely, that would serve to silence his cries from the outside world. This capsule was hidden in the wall, and is probably the only thing that kept the boy from being discovered and snatched by the Nazis when Coen was finally caught.

Coen had paid a great amount of money to disguise his own lineage, but having lost so much to the Russian seamstress, he could no longer afford to maintain the faux persona. In 1943, he was arrested. Adelena never saw him again, though she would later discover that he’d been sent to Auschwitz and perished. She was present in the city when the British 7th Armoured Division, the *“Desert Rats”*, liberated the city in ‘44.

Adelena and a four-year-old Jorma traveled to East Berlin in 1946 to see Frieda(now 71), who was living in near-poverty conditions. Old and bitter, Frieda barely let her daughter and grandson into her house, with the rest of the short visit spent denouncing Adelena and her *“Jew lover and Jew offspring”* Frieda refused to look at or speak directly to Jorma, who gave it little thought. Adelena, disgusted by what her mother had become, left with Jorma after less than an hours time. They would never see Frieda again, although Adelena would later learn that she died less than six months after the visit.

Ironically enough, despite Frieda’s bitterness and apparent-poverty, she had stored in a West German bank a nest-egg for her daughter(saved up over many years during her service to the Prussian family), which was left to her following her death. It was to the tune of 700,000 dollars; Adelena used it, albeit with much contention at first, to better their living conditions, and to provide Jorma with the best education possible.

As Jorma began to profit from various patents, Adelena managed his finances, something she would do until he founded Lavistar Industries with Serj Eteyas. She lived quite luxuriously for the remainder of her life, supplemented by her son who, aside from numerous charities and investments, did little with his fortune.

In March of 1981, Adelena and her daughter-in-law, Camille, were in Oslo preparing to fly to Paris to watch Jorma give a public lecture, his first time before a crowd in such a setting. The plane made a stop at Antwerp International in Belgium, before taking off again shortly thereafter. Less than two hours before Jorma was set to go on stage, he learned that the plane carrying them had suffered an engine failure, and had crashed somewhere in the mountains in northern France, killing everyone on board. Jorma would not give that night's lecture; he would never speak publicly, nor would he ever recover from the incident.

Adelena is interred at the cemetery at the Harbo Church in Harbo, Sweden, right beside Coen.