大象传媒

Every year my mother rented a house at the seaside(Nortseacoast)for the month of August.:All friends were welcome if they wanted to come.A wonderfull time
August '39:We were playing tennis when we were called home.:"What's up mam?"Mobilisation."That did not mean much to us.But we found out pretty soon what that was all about.
We lived in the very South of Holland-near Maastricht-:a long trainride!Our poor dog was not very happy in his travelcage.As soon as we got home my mother told us to get our bikes out;we all got a lot of cash and were told to get""Sunlightsoap" for the laundry,all the soap we could get for showers,personal hygiene,toothpast,toothbrushes wool to darn our wintersocks,needles, matches . As far as food was concerned:Coffee,tea, eggs,and other things.We hit the stores where we could buy food and the drugstores for the soap etc..We came home with big balls of soap smelling like roses and lilacs.We had races who had the most stuff and who was home first.
Holland was neutral in WW1 but my mother remembered the shortages.The eggs were put in containers filled with"waterglass" a glycerine type substance that was supposed to preserve them.It did but we could use those eggs only in cooking.Vacation over we returned to Boarding school,a 3 hr. train ride from home.We discussed with our friends what th茅y had bought;would it be enough if war started.?"War" was something we did not know much about.We did not read any newspapers,but the lay teachers kept us informed about what was going on.
Life at school was in suspension: What was going to happen?;What was war like?Who was going to fight our troops who were concentrated in an army camp close by as were pilots and their airplanes-the G-1's as they were called,On May 10 we found out:Holland was attacked by the Germans.This time it was our turn after Poland,Denmark,Norway.The Dutch army had flooded part of Holland,hoping to keep the Germans at bay for some time.But we forgot their paratroopers,their Stuka's,dive bombing with screaming sirens.We heard canon fire close by.We heard about Rotterdam and our Queen just getting out of Holland just in time.
The boarding school was close to where the fighting was.So we were told that we had to evacuate.We were only allowed what we could carry.So we decided to wear as many clothes as possible:3 sets of underwear ,our summer uniform,our winter uniform over that one, a wintercoat and a raincoat over that one and of all things we were told to wear a.....hat,just in case we had to go to church.I don't know what the nuns thought.We went in a train loaded with refugees,hot and miserable we were.We looked like Michelin Men with all these clothes on and a HAT on top. We wore only one pair of shoes,but we tied our baseball shoes on our book bag.The train ride was long and ended in the northernmost part of Holland.We got out at a tiny railway station and were herded into the only hotel in town.When we came inside we saw wooden cribs.We had to sleep on those?You bet!Our cribs were in the public seating area; the nuns slept on the stage.They lighted candles and those produced shadows on the curtain. THEY did not know that, but we howled with laughter seeing the activity that went on.Punishment next day.I forgot what it was.The following day we went out to inspect the surroundings:Meadows and lots of cows..Well,we made best of that:We laid out a baseball diamond,cow dung patches that looked dry but were not if you slid into one of those "bases'.But, we did not bring our baseball shoes for nothing,they helped to break our slide in the wet grass and "patches".We had a jolly good time those weeks of "vacation":Not much study.No church going either:so the hats were not used.When we went back to boarding school we learned more about war.And the following 5 years were horrible indeed.A good thing one cannot look into the future.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.