大象传媒

It was 15 April 1945. The Germans had been the occupying force in the Netherlands for four years, but since June 1944 we knew that Allied forces had landed in France and were fighting their way into Europe.

On 17 September 1944, a call had gone out from the Dutch government in exile in England, to the railwaymen/women not to report for work and remain hidden. At the same time, Allied airborne landings took place near Arnhem. People thought it would all be over in about a week.

Very little information was available, because from 1942 all radios had to be handed in to the German forces, and anyone caught listening to a foreign radio station was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. Nevertheless, there were still people who had hidden their radios and were listening to the Dutch radio station Oranje, which broadcast via the 大象传媒 from England a few times every day. The 8am news broadcast was especially popular.

These people passed on any news, and so it travelled from mouth to mouth. Yes, of course something was added on, and something was deleted, but the main news did go around. In about seven days it became clear that something had gone wrong in Arnhem, and the war would not be over that soon.

The German forces became a bit stricter. My father (a stationmaster on the railways at Sneek) was advised to leave home and go into hiding, and with the assistance of the resistance movement he found a place with a farming family in the province.

Little did my mother and I realise that within a week we would also be told to leave the house and go into hiding. The resistance also found a place for us. We went to a farm near Bolsward, a very small town about 20km from where we lived. We stayed on that farm until 5 December 1944, when we went back to our own house again. The resistance movements had indicated that it was pretty safe for the wives and children of striking railwaymen to return home.

When we got home our house was totally empty, and all the windows had been blown out by bombardments. Unknown to us at that time, the resistance had moved all the furniture for safekeeping when we left, and over the next few days they arranged for it all to be brought back.

During the time that my father was in hiding, I only saw him once. From the time that my mother and I returned to the house in Sneek until 15 April 1945, things went its own way. You just had to be careful, but the German army soldiers did not bother us, and the German police force/Gestapo did not bother the railway families either.

And so we come to 15 April 1945. That Sunday morning was a very quiet day, there were not many people around, but then again every Sunday was usually a day on which a lot of people had a lie-in. What we had noticed over the previous two days was that a lot of German soldiers had left, and the schools, which over the last three months had been used by the Germans, were now all empty - doors were wide open, windows were open and the guards had gone, so we had an idea that things were about to change.

That Sunday morning we were outside in the street, playing and fooling around, and some of us started to stroll around, slowly making our way towards the town centre, about a ten minute walk away. Now and again we met someone walking around, the odd woman or elderly man. Going past the local grammar school we saw a few men going inside, and one of them, a teacher from our own school, turned around and told us to go home. We of course promised to do this, but as soon as he went inside the school, we carried on our way.

Slowly we made our way past the fire brigade's headquarters and through the narrow shopping street. We came out near the town's only cinema, which had been closed for the civil population for the previous six months. Again we wondered about the silence. Two younger men came past us and one of them told us to go home. We told them that we were on our way home and they carried on. It was actually a bit strange to see these young men, because the town's young men had left months ago to go into hiding, in case they would be deported to Germany for forced labour.

Suddenly, without any warning, a German armed carrier came up behind us. Inside were about ten German soldiers in camouflage and very heavily armed. We saw straight away that they were not the usual German soldiers we knew, but a different group. They stopped their car outside the old weigh house building, which we knew had always been used by the Germans to store things. While a few of them went inside, one of them walked over to us and told us that we should make tracks and run home as fast as we could and stay at home, because there was going to be a lot of shooting in the street.

At that time the few soldiers who had gone inside the building came out again, shouted to us and to the soldier with us, who now left us after again telling us to go home. A split second later we heard a small explosion coming from the building. Flames shot out of the roof and the whole building caught fire.

The Germans waved to us, again shouting at us to go home, and left via the street leading to the west and to the afsluitdijk (causeway) on the way to the west of Holland. We now made our way home. Running away from the fiercely burning Waag Gebouw, we came across a policeman named Brouwer, a family friend of ours. He told me to go home as soon as possible, and he mentioned to me that my father had just come home as well. It was quite a few days later that I learned that this policeman was in fact a leading member of the resistance forces (codenamed Bontje), an ex-marine who had fought the German army near Rotterdam on the invasion of the Netherlands in 1940.

We realised that things could get serious, and I now had a very good reason to go home. On the way we came across a lot of men wearing blue overalls with an armband around the right arm, imprinted with the letters NBS. Later in the day we found out that the three letters stood for 'Netherlands Interior Forces', the Dutch underground army. They all had firearms. One of these, strange to us, later became known to us as a Sten gun. Our schoolmaster was one of these people, and it now became clear to us why all these men went into the school earlier on.

On coming home - great relief - my dad was there waiting for me, also heavily armed and ready to go with some other members of the underground to the railway station and make it safe. During the afternoon various rumours went around, but at about 4pm we could hear a lot of noise of people shouting, and someone came running through the street shouting: 'The Canadians are here!'

Nothing could have kept me at home, so out of the house I ran, turned the corner and all I could see were hundreds of people shouting and clapping hands. I squeezed through them to the front and suddenly, there I saw them, a few military vehicles and men in strange uniforms, totally overwhelmed by the people around them. The first Canadians had arrived and after four years and 11 months we had been liberated from the German occupation. The next few days was a time in my life which I will never forget. I grew up during the occupation, saw a lot of things and yet I still say that I had a happy boyhood.

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