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Re Second World War.

I was only 8 when war broke out and this fact impinges on memories. However I have some.

We lived in Amsterdam. In those huge blocks of flats, which form squares with a big centre in the middle where people who lived on the ground floor had gardens and where there sometimes were amenities, like bicycle storage. All the higher flats had balconies.

It was early in the war. A nice, late spring day. We were alerted by angry air plane noises and most of the people came out in their gardens and on their balconies to look what was going on.
I explained the layout a little, because you will realise that our views were restricted by the flats across, to the left and to the right. However it so happened that we could see what was obviously an allied — and at that juncture of the war an English — plane and one or more German hunters. We only saw part of it, just as well I suppose, but we did see the English plane fatally hit. A piece came off, smoke billowed and it lost control. It is very distressing to see something like this in the first place and your heart goes out to the poor individual who is involved, but we were also conscious that he had been there for our benefit.
There were by then a lot of people watching, but it had gone very, very quiet.
And then from the midst of the melee appeared a parachute and a figure hanging from it. There was such a cheer. Relief, happiness and also one up against the Germans.
For not a very long moment this was all that was visible to us. Then a German plane came into view. It took a direction toward the parachutist and there was the remote rattle of a gun.
Even at that distance we could see the figure shake and then noticeably the attitude became limp and lifeless.
The noises around ceased as if in a joint choke. The figure just drifted below the line of the roofs. I do not know where it may have landed.
Nobody spoke. Some cried. We just all went inside.

After some time, when the German grip tightened, I began to notice people with yellow stars on their clothes. I did not truly know why. I do not know how old I must have been, but my school was still the junior school and we had to walk a fair distance. We then crossed a major road leading into town. There was next to no traffic of course. There was little enough sixty years ago and the war affected that which there had been.
One morning however there was a line of German trucks along the pavement and when we appeared on the scene from a side street a number of them were already filled with people standing up and all wearing yellow stars. German soldiers, relaxed, but with rifles at the ready stood all around and more people were being marched up and helped on to the trucks. There was very little commotion. Very little change to daily life. We, people in general, were naïve and trusting and we could not possibly imagine what we were to learn much later. The Germans were our enemy, but we did not think they were capable of evil. No amount of fantasy would have produced the particular scenario of evil depravity, which was to be revealed later.
At worst we understood that those people were being re-housed. And so did they. I believe words like ‘labour camps’ were used. But that was as bad as it got. It was all very orderly and peaceful. On one occasion, on the flat roof tops of one building I saw people running up and down to find places where they could descend down other people’s stair cases to escape. The block was of course surrounded.
But on the occasion I am talking about we just went on to school with hardly a moment’s wait and not much of a look. True, we were waved on by the soldiers, but we were little worried about it in any case. It was not good, but we did not imagine it as bad as all that.
After school the trucks were gone and there were no traces of what had occurred.
I wonder how many of those people ever came back.

I assume they carefully locked their flats as they left. Possibly they left some keys with the neighbours. I just do not know, but not long after there were long freight trains in the sidings which had enormous banners on them ‘Liebesgaben aus Holland’.
Literally Love Gifts from Holland. That’s where everything went that had belonged to the Jews. I wonder what the German population thought of these gifts. Did they realise ..?
In the canal there was a lighter full of small items. We did not know any better and on one occasion I and some of my pals played in one. I took some giro transfer slips home in the name of an individual I have long forgotten, which I wanted to use as scrap paper. My parents forbade me going again.

And then, very uncharacteristically, we suddenly had a dog. It was not a puppy. Older than that. It was one of my tasks to take it out. It was a horrendous job, because it would pull and pull at its lead. If you let it have its way it would only ever go to one place. I would need to run as fast as I could to keep up with it, pulled by the lead, for some 8 streets. Sometimes if you opened the flat door unthinking, it would escape, run down the stairs and possibly out of the street door. I soon learnt where I had to go to find it. It would always be at that place. Internal open stone stairs led to a first floor where it would sit frightened and shivering pressed against a door. I would put the lead on it and drag it back. Nobody ever explained to me. I had to work out for myself that its people had been deported and we had taken the poor thing in.
It eventually became a lovely dog for us and was unfortunately run over when after the war vehicles returned to our roads.

We call the winter of 44/45 ‘the hungerwinter’.
There was no electricity, no gas, no coal or any other fuel. Rations were minimal. We ate what we could find. A lot of sugar beet, which was also rationed, but more liberally and not surprisingly so if you tasted them once, and even flower bulbs. You cooked on a strange contraption placed on top of the stove and so designed that you could stoke bits of stick and branches in it, which I was sent out to collect in the street. The Jews empty flats were progressively destroyed. First doors, cupboards, kitchens. Then floors, rafters and roof trusses. Eventually the stairs and the beams which ran between one stack of flats and another. It is a wonder there was no major collapse.
There was no transport. Even I, a townie had to wear wooden shoes for a while. If you still had a bike, and more importantly still had tyres for it, you did not dare to come out with it, because the Germans made organised efforts to collect them for raw materials for the war effort just like in this country the railings were cut down and re-used.
It was not a mild winter.
Curfew was early. I do not suppose that would have made much difference, because there was nowhere to go and no transport to go with. No lights to show the way and no sounds outside except for an occasional column of Germans soldiers stamping their way or an odd army vehicle.
We, father, mother, brother, sister, would huddle together in the small kitchen around the tiny table on which there would be a single candle or, if we were lucky enough to have some carbide, a hissing carbide lamp.
My mother would darn or try to make something to wear out of something old. If you were reading you would nearly have to turn the paper over to catch enough light on it.
There was not much to say. It all had been already. Rumours and hearsay was repeated endlessly and hopefully. Radios had been confiscated when there was still power.
And then, each night, there always came that moment.
The moment when one of us would look up and say: ‘They’re on the go again’ (or some such). We were not having much fun in the first place, but this always inaugurated a moment of sombreness, a moment of reflection.
A sound had crept up on us. There was no beginning. When first heard it was already there. It was the combined, faint drone of aeroplanes. Tens? Hundreds? Too faint, too distant to hear singly. Still faint now and probably inaudible had it not been for the total stillness around. The German search lights had mainly stopped searching, the guns had stopped their futile shooting. The aeroplanes seemed to have the skies to themselves. Once the sound was there it permeated everything. It came from above and below, out of the cupboards and up the stairs. It was like one enormous, powerful mythical creature that was everywhere around us. We did not see the planes. We did not know their destination. We did not know their purpose. But there was a menace we could feel. Necessary as it might be we pitied those who were going to be at the end of their journey. We knew we were safe from them, yet we shared the fear. The weight, the power, the force was irresistible.
Much later the sounds would come from the other way. They would be more random. Often louder. Sometimes very loud when a stricken plane desperately fought losing height in an effort to get back, but that was rare. Even if none of that happened people would still talk about it the next day: ‘did you hear them again last night?’ Always earnestly, never flippantly, not even with Schadenfreude.

At first rumour had it that the war was over. There was no announcement. There were no means for it. Those who may have known, the Germans, had no interest in telling us. It came as a rumour, but it stuck. Eventually it had to be believed. There was such rejoicing. And then came the other planes.
Suddenly out of nowhere there was this window rattling, wall-shaking roar of Lancasters and Wellingtons clearing the roofs within feet. Again everybody was on the balconies. To wave and to cry. It was the moment when for many people it at last came true. Yes, we were liberated. People spread out the Dutch flag on the flat roof tops for the crews to see, then danced and waved on it so that it must have been totally obliterated. They shouted themselves hoarse at the planes thinking they could be heard and perhaps there were enough of us to make it real. When they had roared over and dropped the flour and egg powder and sea biscuits somewhere many of us collapsed in tears.

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