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This story was submitted to the People’ War by a volunteer from The Chepstow Society on behalf ofGerdien Versteeg and has been added to the site with her permission. Gerdien Versteeg fully understands the site.s terms and conditions

Many of you must have heard of what happened to people in England during and after the war.

What I want to do is tell you about what happened in the Netherlands or Holland as you might better know it.

As you might have guessed, I am Dutch and I was born when the war had just started. So in 1945 I was 5 years old but I can still remember quite a lot of things.

I lived near the Hague and the Hague was bombed by the Germans. I can still remember the sky completely filled with large aeroplanes and bombers. This was very frightening and the noise was awesome. You must hear the aeroplanes come over Chepstow sometimes - can you imagine 50 or more all at once?!

My mother, my older and younger brother and myself were in our garden when the planes came over. I thing they were English or American going to bomb Germany.

Holland wasn't all liberated when D Day hapened and the soldiers or troops had to stop before they came to free us. We were completely cut off. That year the winter came and we called it the Hungerwinter. There was nothing in the shops. There were no big Tesco shops then, only little corner shops and you could only get basic things like sugar, flour, tea, and everything was measured into brown paper bags. But all that had run out and there was nothing you could buy. My mum had a pram with a secret compartment under the mattress and she would go to see farmers with anything she had in the house like sheets or plates or clothes to pay the farmers for milk or eggs. She would have to pass German soldiers with guns. People ate tulip bulbs and sugarbeets or anything they could find.

There was no coal or wood, so neighbours used to go to the local park at night to cut trees. Germans were stationed in a big house thre, but at night they were asleep. They carried the trees home to light the fire. All our furniture went into the fire.

We had a large built-in cupboard between two rooms and mother made them into beds. My brother slept on the top shelf, I on the middle shelf and my little brother on the bottom shelf. Anyway this was the safest place if the ceiling collapsed.

I remember a German soldier coming to look for my father to take him to Germany to work. They used the men of countries they conquered to work in the factories to make weapons. We had a secret hideaway under the stairs where he could hide, he also sometimes dressed as an old woman to escape detection and of course we didn't know, because we might have given away that he was our dad, because we were only small. I remember being very cross one day because a soldier looking for my dad had stood on my doll. They never found my father.

Lots and lots of planes came over. I have seen skies full of parachutes, some with soldier also some with with boxes. These were tins of biscuits. We called them ships biscuits. They were very hard to et, but we were very happy to have a tin of our own.

When we were finally freed I remember a huge tank coming through our street.

To celebrate our first year of freedom on the 5th May 1946 there was a big parade with children all dressing up. Mother made us costumes and we paraded as three little dwarfs with saw and axe. We carried a placard saying "The winter caught us without coal, the Park fortunately was very big". My mum made this wallhanging which hung in our living room for many years to remind us of the war.

She also kept some of my school drawing books and a photo of me and my brothers in the parade. The drawing shows the planes, the boxes being thrown out of the planes and me in the parades.

Years later I went to oneof the big war cemeteries near Arnhem. As far as you could see there were graves of English and American soldiers. This made me very thoughtful and sad that so many young boys and men died because of the war. I hope it will never happen again.

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