大象传媒

I was 14yrs old when the war started and I lived in Haarlem. We were under German occupation and they came into our houses looking for young boys for labour. They took my nephew and my brother-in-law, but he managed to escape from the train. My mother and I used to have to walk for four days to get to a farm to get food which we put in a wheelbarrow to get home - another four days walk. We saw some German soldiers watching as we, and other people, were taking this food home and some of those people had their food taken by the soldiers and they were left with nothing. I remember telling my mother not to look back, and luckily we were left alone and we kept our food. By the end of the war we were having to eat tulip bulbs and sugar beet to avoid starvation.
In 1945 we saw the RAF planes flying overhead dropping food parcels for the starving people. They were so low that we could see the pilots waving to us. It was a wonderful moment. We also had a lot of bread sent over from Sweden.
The liberation was marvelous, I was only 18yrs old. The tanks came in and I jumped on one for a ride. My sister and I took two soldiers home because we had been asked to make them feel at home as they had been away from their own families for so long. I started courting one of these soldiers and we were married five months later, in Holland, with the ceremony in both English and Dutch. We moved to London four months afterwards and we had been married for 48yrs.

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