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Chapter Two  1933-1945

Youth

 

My parents were married on the 14th of August 1929. The parish priest had to give special permission for the entire wedding party to be allowed to eat meat as it was the eve of Our Lady’s Assumption, a day of fasting and abstinence. They moved into a small house in the Vaalriver street, in the so called Transvaal Quarter of the town. They were a happy couple, very much in love with each other.

My father worked in a furniture factory called Pander, handed over his wages to his wife each Friday evening and even bought a wireless set from the small amount of pocket money that she gave him.

They waited patiently for the first pregnancy but nothing happened for more than a year. They went to consult a gynaecologist who bluntly told my mother that she was undernourished and had to eat more.

After a year or so my father remembered that near the town of Roermond a special pilgrims chapel of Our Lady ‘In-The-Sands’ existed, where young women drank water from a sacred source in order to become pregnant. They made the long journey from The Hague to Roermond, and, to save money, walked on a very hot day all the way from the railway station to this famous chapel.

Later on my father told us jokingly that she must have been extremely thirsty and drank far too much. Once she became pregnant, she never stopped and eventually gave birth to fourteen children!

 

The first three children, my older sister ‘Toos’ (Anna Catharina Cornelia), me and my younger brother ‘Jan’ (Johannes Franciscus), were born in that small house in the Vaalrivier street in the South African (Transvaal) Quarter of The Hague.[1]

The first birth was very difficult and my elder sister, Toos, had broken shoulders from being delivered with the help of a pair of forceps. My birth , on the 3rd of April 1933, went smoothly as I was small and thin. When aunt Lena, one of my mother’s older sisters, came to see me she plainly remarked that I was a little ugly worm of a creature. When my father returned that day from work, my mother was in tears and asked him whether I was indeed such an ugly child. He replied very diplomatically that since he left home for work that morning, he had never seen such a beautiful child.

 

I was baptized in ‘The Brand’, a church in the middle of the Brandtstraat dedicated to the Guardian Angels, and was given the name Hugo Franciscus. As the first-born son I should have been given the name Johannes Franciscus but I guess that my mother insisted on calling me after her father and not after my paternal grandfather who was said to have made such a mess of his life. At the same time my parents took out an insurance for my burial. That was the custom in an age when infant mortality was high and even the very poor wanted a decent burial and Masses said for their deceased children. Each week they paid eleven cents for each child until the insurance was ‘redeemed’.   

 My sister Toos was a happy-go-lucky chatterbox. My father loved to put her on the back of his bike and take her for a cycle ride through town. She never stopped talking and asked scores of questions. When I was old enough it was my turn. To his dismay I never said a word, remained very quiet, only looked around very intently. In fact I remember vaguely sitting on the carrier of his bike while licking a small ice cream. When he suddenly turned into a side street, there was a jolt and I lost the ice cream. I saw it slowly disappear on the dirty street but never dared to say anything.

 

As a little boy I was taken to the church and the place where I had been baptized. I remember being greatly overawed by the sacredness of the place and feeling a bit self-righteous when my older sister could not keep still during Mass and asked when it would be over.

This was during the 1930s when the world suffered from mass unemployment. Holland was no exception and one sad day my father was made redundant. To soften the shock the government devised various plans of social assistance on the condition that the unemployed came to a central office each morning to get a stamp in their identity papers. This was to avoid ‘shadow working’.

Together with hundreds of other unfortunates my father was asked to do manual labour in the parks around The Hague. But he was also given the opportunity to attend a vocation school and learn modern ways of techniques in his profession.

 My parents were intent on letting us grow up without any sign of misery. My father left home early each day to go to the ‘stamp office’ and then proceeded to the trade school, from where he came back early evening.  And often he brought us colourful toys, all made of wood.

Meanwhile, and despite an extremely small income, they looked around for better accommodation in an upbeat part of the town. They found it in ‘far away’ Loosduinen, a small market garden village to the south of the City. A progressive Catholic Building Co-operative with the poetic name ‘Improvement Be Our Target’ (Verbetering Zij Ons Streven, V.Z.O.S) was constructing blocks of apartments. Each apartment contained a douche, an electric geyser and gas conduits for cooking.

And it is to one of these four roomed dwellings, in the Kokosnootstraat 58 (Coconutstreet) that my memories go back. I see myself running together with my elder sister through an empty house from one room to another and falling headlong in a heap of building lime, while my parents were handed the keys by a representative of the Building Co-operative. It was late summer 1935 when we finally moved in. I was two and a half years old.

From then onwards until the beginning of World War II, I have happy memories. Before the building of our ‘New Block’, as it soon was called, there had been a row of small and cheaply built houses, called the ‘Red Tiles’ (Rode Pannen) which were pulled down. One of its inhabitants, simply called ‘Opa’ was given a house next to us. This was quite unusual as he was a devout Protestant and the block in which we were accommodated was only destined for Catholic families.

Later I learned that politically, socially and economically The Netherlands were neatly divided in Zuilen (Columns). Further on there was another block of houses called ‘Patrimonium’ where the Protestants lived. It was flanked by a block of houses rented by the socialists, members of the S.D.A.P, the Social Democrats. These apartments were soon called the ‘Red Block’. Some of its inhabitants were, according to me, a bit aggressive and looked down on the Catholics with their huge families. The greengrocer on the corner of the street was a Catholic and when the quality of the vegetables was not up to the standards of the house wives of the Red Block, they would shout at him: “You must have sold your best vegetables to your fellow Roman Papists!”  The apartments opposite could be bought and were offered to more liberal people who were better off.

When we moved from the inner city to this new suburban area, a lot of building was still going on. I remember sitting in front of the window looking at the wheelbarrows being hoisted up and down the scaffolding. My father made me a small wheelbarrow and I pottered around in heaps of sand, carrying it to the builders. They would laugh and ask my name. When I said that I was called ‘Hugo’ they always asked “Did you hide yourself in a chest of books?” At that time, I had no clue what they were talking about. Only later I learned that they compared me with a famous Dutchman Hugo de Groot and I became very proud of this.[2]

All around us lived young couples, some of them recently married and full of life. During the winter we joined these young men in their snowball fights and helped them to make snow-men. There was also a great deal of singing by the women, once the men were off to work. On the third floor lived ‘Aunt Oeti’ who sang beautifully in German. Then there was my mother who could sing long narratives about some miracle that happened in the past. On Sundays, our beloved Opa, next door, sang psalms and hymns after he had come back from his long church service. He was a keen gardener who had transplanted the gooseberries from his former home into his new garden. Soon the first fruits appeared, very near the little fence of our garden, which was still a wilderness. The temptation to nick a few was too much for us children and we ate the fruits one after the other. He complained to my mother and asked her why these Roman children were not better educated. Later he invited us, my sister and me to visit him and presented us with a plate full of all kind of succulent berries and currents. When we were eating away, he asked us whether they did not taste much better when not stolen. My quick-witted sister replied innocently: “Yes, because you put plenty of sugar over them.”

Life always seemed sunny and there was plenty of space to play with the other children of the street. The rooms were very light and airy. This was a reaction on the dark and musty rooms and alcoves of the past that had caused so many young children to die from tuberculosis. The bedrooms had French windows that were always wide open even during the winter and we slept with temperatures near freezing point. 

In April 1937 I joined my sister on her way to the nursery and infant schools in Loosduinen, the parish we belonged to. By then the ‘New Block’, as our houses were called by then, was completed but there were no schools for catholic children nearby. We had to walk all the way to the village along a road that connected The Hague with Loosduinen, a distance of almost two kilometers. It was a cobbled main road with regular traffic of horse-drawn carts and an occasional motorcar. On the far side was a canal where men pushed barges to and from the fruit and vegetables market with the help of a ‘boom’, a heavy pole. The parents were so afraid that one of the children would dash out and get trampled, run over or fall in the canal that they had knitted squares in a roped net in which we were placed and so we were guided to school in a long chain. We left home in the late morning and came back in the early afternoon in good and bad weather. When it was wet and the little kids became tired and miserable, the older children and the girl in charge would pull them forward and made them sing:

 

 Onze Lieve Heertje, geef mooi weertje

Geef een mooie dag, dat het zonnetje weer schijnen mag.

 

Our dear Lord, please, give us nice weather,

 Give us a lovely day, that the sun may shine again.    

 

The small nursery for the toddlers was a poor affair, housed in a canteen of the local Catholic Football Club. When we arrived on Monday morning the place smelled of stale beer, tobacco smoke and sweaty jerseys. Behind the wooden building was a place where barges and small train wagons arrived, all day laden with vegetables and fruit. The products were auctioned and transported as quickly as possible to towns in and even outside the country.[3]

Later I graduated from the nursery school to the well-built and reasonably equipped Infant school, run by the Sisters of the Holy Providence of Amsterdam. These were the years before World War II. with Hitler’s power growing day by day. The Netherlands hoped to remain neutral, as it had been during World War I. All the same, to prepare itself for the worst, Holland was made ready for an eventual war.

To our plays of Robbers, Red Indians and Sea Pirates we added those of Soldiers. We fought each other with wooden sables and sticks. One day, when I had been in a fight and was bleeding profusely from a head wound, my mother happened to arrive on the playground of the kindergarten. She was furious with the sister in charge who complained that I was “an uncontrollable and wild little boy” whom she “could not bind permanently to her legs!“ I was surprised about the fuss they made about my bleeding head wound. According to me, this belonged to our games.

Next day I was punished by being put in the corner of the class, facing the wall and with my arms outstretched above my head.  “If you continue behaving like that, “ the young nun said, “You will certainly not go straight  to heaven, but will have to spend a few hours burning in purgatory !” I looked at the arms of the clock and wondered how long that would be.

 

Meanwhile my mother had given us a pair of sisters, two little girls, one called ‘Riet’ (Maria) born 14 April 1936 and the other called ‘Fiet’ (Sophia), born 7 September 1937. They looked very pretty and vulnerable to me, little creatures that I thought needed my protection. After the birth of each child she got help from a nun, who belonged to a congregation popularly called ‘Juliaantjes. They were practical young women who ran the household for my mother and would made a lovely cake on the day of their departure.

 On the 11^th of February 1939 Stef was born, named after my father. I remember his birth as we were sent out of the house to play in the bitterly cold weather until the midwife, Sr Tholen, called us in. It took ages as it was a difficult birth but finally we heard a sharp cry. After a short time we were allowed in to see and touch the baby but I was so starved and cold that I paid little attention and wanted my supper.

The months passed and I longed to go the Primary School where one could learn to read and write. My elder sister, Toos, had previously gone and now felt infinitely superior to me. She read a page from a picture book and repeated that so often in front of me that I came to know the sentences by heart and people thought I could read.

Of all the things I really longed for was to receive the Eucharist, ‘Jesus in my heart’. It seemed to me something very rich and empowering. The nuns let us repeat a simplified narrative of the Passion of Jesus Christ until I could recite it, from the beginning to the end, in front of my father. I remember him being very moved and he came back next evening with a little present. He made me wring his fingers open one by one until I found the present in his big hands. It was a small iron toy tank.

I felt that the war was very near.

 

In September 1939 I was finally admitted to the Primary School for Boys. The mobilization of The Netherlands had begun and to my dismay our first class was accommodated in the Girls’ School. The school for the boys, dedicated to ‘St Petrus,’ was occupied by Dutch soldiers, who were digging trenches all along the main road to The Hague. Most of the men had been called up, so from the first class up to the fifth I would have only women to teach me.

I loved to go to school and took to it like a little duck to water. I still remember writing my name, the day, and month of the year (10 November 1939), for the first time and copying a small verse of good wishes for my parents. A custom was that children recite these verses on New Year’s morning in front of  their parents. On New Year’s  Eve we were allowed to stay awake until midnight. To keep us from falling asleep my father ‘played the lion’ and chased us all over the house. When finally the bells rung and the boats hooted at 12.00 p.m., he knelt down and prayed with us.

In January 1940 the schoolmistress, Juffrouw Heres, and, later, the parish priest, Pastoor Bangert, started to prepare us for the first reception of the sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion.     

We felt that we became special, children to whom a great deal of attention was paid. Toos, my older sister, who had gone through this rite of initiation a year before, began to check on my progress. She told me solemnly that I had to offer a lot of little sacrifices in order to prepare myself properly for the occasion. Whenever I was given a sweet, she reminded me of this sacrificial duty and made me give her my sweet, which she swallowed herself. She also was so kind as to give me her lists of sins for Confession. She had a different one for summer and for winter time!

The great day finally came on the 14^th of April 1940, the fourth birthday of my little sister Riet. That day I did not need to walk all the way to the church in Loosduinen. To my delight my parents hired a taxi and we arrived in front of the church in grand style.

Receiving ‘Jesus in my heart’ was a bit of an anticlimax, as I had expected something wondrous and angelic to happen to me, but the rest of the day was wonderful. Besides a little cross, a rosary and other ‘holy objects’ I got heaps of chocolate and lots of money from my aunts and uncles. They said that soon the money would lose all its value as was the case in Germany. Later my practical mother  opened a savings account for me in which to deposit all the given money, “For the time you go for further studies” she stipulated. She had indeed high expectations.

 

On a sunny morning, the 10^th of May 1940, the blue sky was suddenly filled with scores of white parachutes and the noise of planes and artillery. Dutch soldiers stood on top of the roofs trying to hit the German planes and the slowly descending men, hanging from the parachutes. One plane, a Junker, was hit and came down on its back near the old fruit and vegetables auction place on the corner of the Leyweg.[4] We were told that the plan of the attackers was to surround The Hague and to get hold of Queen Wilhelmina and the members of the Dutch Parliament. But the Residence of Royalty and State was well defended by the ‘Grenadiers” the elite troops of the Dutch Army. They fought like lions and were able to hold the attackers at bay until the Queen and the Parliament had sailed overseas to Great Britain.[5]  By then the important port of Rotterdam had been bombed so severely that a treaty of surrender was signed ‘to avoid more bloodshed.’

We lost our freedom and waited patiently for what the occupying forces had in store for us. One of the first steps was to clean the rubble and collect the corpses in Rotterdam where the port and the inner city had been completely destroyed. My father was recruited to do this and left home each morning to come back late in the evening. He never told us in detail what he saw. One evening he gave me a pair of beautiful roller skates, found among the debris of a manor house. It took me a long time before I dared to use them and skate along on them on the tarmac roads nearby as I knew that these roller skates had belonged to a child now dead.

The officers of the Dutch army were taken hostage, the trenches were filled in, and we could return to our own school. Some of the signposts were written in German but for the rest things had to just go ahead. As a matter of fact things did brighten up a bit as my father was re-employed again by the furniture factory Pander of The Hague in July 1940, and a system of children allowances was introduced. Another little brother was born on the second of July, called Franciscus, ‘Frans”. During the war my mother contributed to the war effort by giving birth to two more boys, Wilhelmus ‘Wim’ 13 May 1942 and Andreas ‘André’ 3 December 1943!

I continued going to the village school and made sure I belonged to the first ten of the class. A good number of the children came from market garden families whose sons dreamed at an early age of taking over the businesses of their parents. They came to school almost reluctantly and only seem to come alive during sums and simple bookkeeping. They often came to school chewing a big carrot given by their mothers as part of their breakfast. I was told that this was the reason the inhabitants of  Loosduinen were called Peenbuikers, ‘Carrot bellies”, a title in which they took pride.

I remember the first years of the war as a time of mischief, of playing from morning till evening in the ‘low’ and the ‘high’ dunes, skating on the ponds, ditches, and canals, climbing on roofs, and hanging from numerous wooden bridges that spanned the main canal, called de Haagvaart, the waterway to The Hague. We played endlessly in the market gardens of my classmates, Aad Vink, André Hendriks and Koos Steyn.[6]

On a hot summer day, my younger brother, Jan, who by then had become my faithful companion, dived joyfully from a barge into the bottom of a muddy ditch.  He hit a piece of broken panel glass, discarded from the hothouses nearby and cut his knee and legs so badly, that he had to be carried on a long wheelbarrow to the children’s hospital nearby, the Rema clinic in ‘Rozenburg.’ He had to stay in quarantine for three weeks and I missed him dearly.

Later he fell in the canal on his way to being confirmed and had to wait another year, as he was too wet and bedraggled to appear in front of the bishop. Along the main road to The Hague and in the middle of the market gardens stood a smelly rubber factory called ‘Vredestein’. One of my uncles, the husband of my mothers’ sister, Aunt Cor, worked there. Each morning on his way to work he would meet us on his racing bike and greeted us loudly on our way to church. We exchanged cucumbers for tennis balls with him and his mates during lunch hour.

In 1942, we were driven out of our school again, This time it was by German soldiers preparing themselves for an attack from Great Britain. They were busy constructing the so called ‘Atlantic Wall’ and to our dismay the whole shore line, with its adventurous dunes and beaches became forbidden area (Sperrgebiet), riddled with land mines and pillar boxes.

This time we were accommodated by the Protestant school, the ‘School with the Bible” in the Juliana street, near the centre of the village. The dividing line between Roman Catholics and the Protestants ran historically very deep and at times we fought running battles with them. The village had a Catholic football club, called G.D.A and a Protestant one, the Postduiven (the Mail pigeons)[7]. When the two teams met, the police had to come from The Hague to keep order.

 

After I had received the sacrament of confirmation  I decided that the time had come for me to convert someone to the right faith. I started with an easy target, a Protestant girl with whom I walked to school each morning. She listened intently to my many arguments but when I proposed that I would re-baptize her, she groaned  “Oh don’t do that. If my dad hears that I had become a roman papist, he will break my legs!” I was too fond of her to let her go through the rest of life with broken legs and decided that her baptism of desire would be enough for her conversion!

The first years of the war passed relatively peacefully. I graduated from the first grade to the second and then to the third class (grade) without much difficulty. There were a few kids at school who wore the badge of the National Socialist Movement (NSB) on their jackets and who seemed to have special privileges but, cruel as children can be, we ignored them totally and called them ‘Dirty Betrayers’ behind their backs.

During the year 1941-42  my younger brother Jan and I were admitted to the team of mass-servants by the local curate, chaplain Beukering. He was a jovial man who played football with us on the main church square. We had to learn by heart the answers of the Mass in Latin and perform certain liturgical movements. It was hard going but being a mass servant was such an honour to our parents that we slugged on and finally passed the test. My brother Jan passed at the same time as I did but he was still so small that he could not carry the big missal from one side to the other and toppled over, to great hilarity of the worshippers, especially the giggling girls behind us.

We loved to throw heaps of incense on the glowing embers and to sway the thuribles up and down so fiercely that the embers exploded in a ball of fire. We managed to divide our duties as mass servants with being members of the church choir. My younger brother, Jan, combined a pleasant soprano voice with a sweet face. I was jealous of him when he attracted the motherly attention of the ladies of the parish. In that time we sang in many first masses of newly ordained priests. Next to vegetables and fruit the parish of Loosduinen produced a regular crop of priests, brothers and nuns.[8] 

In many aspects our life was centred around the church and the school with all the various liturgical feast days throughout the year. The Dutch, Catholics and Protestants alike, had been a missionary nation from the previous century onwards. However, during the war no newly ordained missionary could leave the country for apostolic work overseas. Many of them were temporarily appointed to work in their parishes of origin and to take the catechism classes in the schools. That existed mainly in learning the penny catechism by heart without much explanation.

But one day after the lady teacher had announced that a missionary, called Fr Nico Hendriks, would assist her in this task, the door opened and in came a bearded young man, dressed in an exotic white garb and cape with a red fez on his head. After the strict and elderly lady teacher had made sure that we behaved in front of ‘the priest’, she left the class and left us to him.

And then the fun would start. He combined his teaching not only with exciting stories about wild animals in Africa but could conjure and played tricks on us. He would walk towards a not too attentive pupil and draw a coin out of his ear or nose. He turned his fez upside down in his hand and laughingly pulled coloured handkerchiefs out of it. At the same time he construed simple moral dilemma’s and helped us to find the right solution. At the end of the lesson he would get us quiet and well-behaved again, managed to say a small prayer and give us a blessing at the very moment the surprised lady teacher would come back to resume her lessons. He changed a boring subject into a lesson we all looked forward to and managed, in some of us, to sow the first seeds of a missionary vocation.[9]

Next to the adventure of ‘going to wild and exotic Africa’ there were other motivations for a budding missionary career. There was, for example, the story my father told over and over again in the evening. I do not know whether it is historical but it seems to have occurred at a time in which slavery had been officially abolished but was secretly continued by some pirates as a lucrative business. To make a long story short the slave ship was intercepted in mid sea but the slaves were so well hidden that the crew of the controlling ship failed to find anything until the very last moment when they were on the point of leaving. Suddenly the captain saw a piece of a rosary on the deck, became suspicious and ordered another more thorough search. They ended up finding and liberating men, women and children from an area in Africa where the missionaries had been and had distributed medals and rosaries to the people.

A visit at Pentecost 1942 to my maternal aunt Marie, now Sister Hugolina in Den Bosch, where she taught handicapped children, made also a deep impression on me. As was the custom in that period of  Het Rijke Roomsche Leven, ‘The Rich Roman Catholic Life’, she gave me a small mass kit, complete with a chasuble and a small chalice to “play Mass with”. Once home I managed to get some of my little brothers and sisters to attend my service with the promise that I gave them a sweet at the end of  it.

Before her marriage my mother had been a member of the Dutch Grail Movement. It was a youth movement, founded by a Jesuit  J. van Ginneken, to motivate catholic lay girls to become more independent and to contribute to the Church community by active mission work.

Until then for a catholic young woman the only way to ‘become  independent and liberated’ was to join a religious congregation and become a nun. Van Ginneken used the modern means of the media and attractive mass gatherings to draw the adolescent girls on a higher plane. The aim was to create an active image of femininity and emancipation. [10]

As a young boy I noticed that my mother always spoke about the Grail with fondness and joy. It seemed to have been a short period for her during her life in which she could be herself as a person and not just a future mother of an ever growing number of children. Later, whenever the pressure of rearing all her children became too much, she had learned to ‘get away from it all’, disappear with her nose in a book, or go away to a religious retreat or ceremony. She left it to my father and some of us to take over and would come back again refreshed and happy. She also had a veneration for, and pictures of two of her contemporaries:  Margaret Sinclair and Edel Quinn.[11]

It must have been in class four that we had a male teacher for some time, whose name I remember as Meester Bos. He came from the village and knew its history. He gave me a love for local history that stayed with me for life. He taught us that Loosduinen, originally called Losdun was older than The Hague. There Count Floris IV had first built a chapel and later founded a convent for Cistercian nuns to which his wife Machteld, the daughter of Hendrik IV, the duke of Brabant,  retired after the death of her husband.[12] She died there in 1267. The convent became famous, was given numerous privileges and became an abbey for women of nobility in the centuries that followed.

Its fame spread through Europe because of a myth that was attached to the place. One day a noble lady, called Margaret of Henneberg, ridiculed a poor woman who had given birth to twins. The young Margaret exclaimed that these children must have been products of two men. The woman was so upset that she prophesied that one day the noble lady would give birth to as many children as there were days in a year, that is a total of 365, half of them male and the other female. And so it allegedly happened but all of them, including the mother, died and were buried in the same abbey convent.

 

In 1568 the abbey was attacked by the Protestant ‘Geuzen’ and the nuns left the place forever. In 1574 the Spaniards demolished the abbey so that the Geuzen would not use it as a fortress. After the Reformation, in 1587, the ruins were donated to the Dutch Reformed Church whose rectors and parsons restored parts of the church.

As late as 1660, this myth was interesting enough for the diplomat Sir Samuel  Pepys to walk from the British Embassy in The Hague to Loosduinen and to mention it in his famous diary.[13]

 

All this history teaching made us very nationalistic and it became strangely intertwined with the National Socialistic propaganda around us. Clad in scanty shorts and barefooted we were forced to take part in mass demonstrations on the football pitch and shout Germanic slogans. We were so reluctant and made such a mess of it that the leader gave up. Via the media and on the posters it was said that the Dutch who belonged to the tribe of the Bataves had nothing to fear from the Nazis because all of them were Arians, with blue eyes and blond hair. [14]

One day a group of the ‘Hitler Jugend’ in blue shorts and orange caps marched by and, as children love to do, we joined them at the end of the group and marched with them all the way to their clubhouse. When I told this to my father that same evening he said nothing but looked so sadly at me with his brown eyes that I realized I had done something very wrong.

 

During the war the third child of Princess Juliana was born in Canada. Her name was Margriet, which in Dutch is also the name given to the (ox-eyed) daisy. From then onwards we were forbidden to carry this flower on our jackets as this flower became a symbol of one of the children of the Royal House of Orange.

My parents wanted us to know everything about Dutch culture and during holidays they bought cards for us with which we obtained free entry to almost all the museums and famous places of The Hague. We saw the old Masters in the Mauritshuis near the houses of Parliament, Panorama Mesdag and the modern painters, like Mondriaan in the Municipal Museum. We were also taken on a guided tour through the Vredespaleis, Peace Palace. It was built in 1899 by a wealthy industrialist, called Andrew Carnegie, originally from Scotland.[15]

My father still played the bugle in the Catholic wood and brass band, called St. Gregory. We not only listened to him on Sunday afternoons or during his performances, but were also given our own musical instruments. My sister Toos tried the flute, I was given a clarinet and Jan started with a trumpet. That instrument was too heavy for him and he changed it for a piccolo. On our free Wednesday afternoons we were each given 6 cents for the tram to a music teacher who lived in one of the more colonial type of houses in The Hague. His reputation was not good as he had allegedly joined the ‘Kultuurkamer” the Culture chamber of the occupying power in order to make a living.

We soon discovered that each one of us could save one cent by ordering in the tram a ticket, called ‘Short Traject’ and then walk the remaining distance. With the one cent gained we bought a pickled cucumber, or a lace of liquorice or a small sour herring. The lessons themselves were excellent and, especially my sister Toos learned to play quite well. In retrospect I now wonder what our neighbours thought of us when we all practiced our musical instruments on the same Sunday afternoons in that small house in the Kokosnootstaat.  

The Dutch love family feasts and birthdays. Around February 1942 we celebrated the 12½ ‘Copper’ wedding anniversary of our mum and dad. As we were still very young Uncle Frans and his wife Aunt Cor took it upon themselves to organize the feast and get us involved. Each Sunday afternoon we walked all the way to their home in the Joubertstreet to learn verses and small plays by heart, in honour of our parents.

During these hours we experienced the easy happy-go-lucky life of people in the ‘inner city’, so different from the high demand of our mother who always wanted us ‘to make a small step ahead’ to make us climb the social ladder. It was great fun. We acquired a few words of  The Hague ‘plat’ dialect and enjoyed the free life style of some of the adults.

On our way back home in the evening we had to pass along a dark and small alley that had a sinister looking building called ‘Het Klooster ,The Cloistre’. We never really knew the origin of the name as the building seemed empty, desolate and even haunted. We whispered when passing that cluster of buildings. Later I learned that since 1688 it had been a hidden place of worship for a small but increasing number of Catholics. The parish community flourished until 1701 when the parish priest joined the schismatic ‘Old Catholic Church’ against the will of a great number of the parishioners and the community disappeared.[16]

 

It became winter 1942-43. Until then we noticed very little of the war raging around us. My parents tried their utmost to give us a normal youth. The house had steadily been filled with the arrivals of new brothers and sisters, all trying to get their measure of attention. The happiest moment of the day was the evening meal, when we all sat squeezed around the table and were invited to report about the day. Some of us were talkative, others were shy, inclined to be reticent and taciturn. To avoid one dominating the conversation, my father insisted that each child, from the eldest to the youngest, was given his or her turn to report about the day. We delayed the end of the meal as long as possible and quarreled endlessly about whose turn it was to do the washing up and peal the bucket of potatoes for next day. The food was simple but healthy with lots of vegetables but not always enough for a lively troupe of growing children. Aunt Käthe, the German wife of one of my maternal uncles, Willem, invited us now and then for a meal at her home. She had no children of her own and made great efforts to give us a special meal. On our way to her home my mother would warn us not to eat too much and disgrace her “as if you are not fed enough by me”. But once there, we forgot her admonition and had a wonderful time, devouring her exotic dishes.

It must have been a cold winter because I remember skating to school on the deeply frozen Haagvaart and pushing a sleigh on the pond in front of the Rozenburg Clinic. By then it had become an Institute for the mentally ill and a hospital for children.[17]. My father never mentioned his mother but one day we were told that she had become mentally ill and now stayed nearby in one of the wards.  We visited her on Sunday afternoons. She looked unkempt and emaciated. She must have been in her ‘second childhood’ as she thought that we were her children.

One day she took me alone to a corner of the hall and whispered in my ear:

 “Remember, Hugo, everybody here is mad except me”.

I acknowledged the secret message dutifully but on the way home I told myself that if ever, in later life, I would say that everybody was mad except me, I would be insane myself. During the starvation winter she and other patients were suddenly moved away and my parents feared the worst. But after the war she re-appeared in a poor house in The Hague. There she, who had given her husband and her children such a poor deal, died all alone in 1946 and was buried before my father heard of her death.

 

Now and then there were ominous signs of the presence of the occupying authorities. Long lists were published in the newspapers with names of those to be executed summarily as members of the Dutch Underground Movement. Our only male schoolmaster, the above mentioned Master Bos, was taken away as a hostage because he had been an officer in the Dutch army.[18] A seventh class (grade) was introduced at school. The pupils seemed mostly kept busy by the singing of German songs, learning the German language and culture.

Some members of the village community were seen to walk around dejectedly with a yellow star of David on their dress. One of them, an unmarried young woman who worked as a secretary in the office where my dad worked, came and visited us. She had the same yellow star on her worn out coat. She was good hearted, loved children and entertained us with all kind of stories. One day my father told us that she was transferred to Germany and that she would like to place her little dog, called Bobby in a home that cared for the animal. Until then we had never had a pet in our house, except the rabbits in a pen which were being fattened for a Feast day or Christmas. I begged and begged my parents to allow her to leave Bobby with me and promised to feed him regularly. They finally agreed on the condition that I paid with my pocket money for the leash and the food dish. When she left the little dog with me, and embraced me, I vaguely felt that her farewell was for ever. She disappeared out of our life, never came back and I never knew her name.

The little dog became a disaster. The crowded house was too small and he had to stay outside in the garden. There he joyfully dug up the vegetables and the flowers and drove us and the rabbits up the wall with his incessant barking. I was told to donate Bobby to one of my friends, a son of a market gardener where there was more space in and around the house. There he started to dig for and eat worms and one day he was found dead. I looked at the still corpse and wondered what had happened to the original owner, that warm-hearted secretary somewhere in Germany.

Our class mistress of that year was a Miss Koot who previously had taught the children of the gypsies and tinkers nearby until their camp was removed by the Gestapo. She maintained that these children were more clever and polite than we were before they were taken away. She was young and in love with our music teacher, a Master Jacobs, who taught in the higher grades. She sent me up and down to him with little letters and called me postillion d’amour. One day my curiosity got the better of me. I opened one of these missives and read : “The children are an absolute nuisance today and I look forward to the end of the day. I love you!”

On the 27^th of June 1943 ‘Opoe Vermeulen’, my maternal grandmother died. Together with her well to do husband, she had come from Oudewater to The Hague for a new and bright future as greengrocers. She had had a hard life and died in a small house in the Schilderswijk of which the foundations leaned backwards into the peat soil and where the toilet was still outside. She had remained a kind rural woman all her life and kept a turtle dove in a small cage. There always seemed to be a litter of kittens in the cupboard below the kitchen sink and a couple of chickens in the little garden. I was allowed to see her pale body, lying in a coffin with flowers and candles. When I gazed at her with wonder, another old lady came in, obviously very deaf, who shouted at me: “What a beautiful corpse your grandma has become!”  ‘That is one good way of looking at death’ I thought.

The burial was fantastic. We drove in black chaises through the town  to the cemetery, after which we were given as many buns and glasses of lemonade as we wished.

Much later, in 1947, her husband, Hugo Vermeulen died but I do not remember much of this event as by then I had left home and gone to the seminary.

 

The war effort intensified and my father was told to make wooden structures for glider planes during alternating day and night shifts. We, the children, knew that he and his fellow workers were sabotaging their work by making weak and defective frames but we were not supposed to know anything.

Working during the night and sleeping during the day was impossible for him. We made a terrible din and he helped my mother with the chores instead of taking a nap. He became thin and haggard looking but never complained. One day he did not come back from work. We were told that he had been caught by a couple of Waffen SS soldiers and was being interrogated. Later that day he returned and put us quickly at ease. With his crooked nose and his swarthy countenance they suspected him of being a Jew and had asked him for his stamkaart (Tribal Identity Card). When he duly produced it, they noticed that he had tried to falsify it by changing the year of his birth from 1906 to 1900. He had done this to avoid being taken for work in the arms factories of Germany. After a few hours of interrogation they let him off the hook when he showed them a picture of his nine children.

The allied armies obtained superiority in the sky and hundreds of planes passed us overhead in the high sky on their way to Germany. For us it meant the beginning of victory but for the people in Germany itself it must have been a nightmare. For me personally the drone of planes on a hot afternoon will always remain a sign of imminent liberation. I imagined England to be a country of plenty where exotic, ‘colonial ‘ food was still for sale and people were free. Little did I know how much its population had to sacrifice in order to gain victory.

In June 1944 the allied armies landed in Normandy in France and after heavy and protected fighting they held on and pushed further inland. My father had given an old broken wireless set to the authorities but had kept a new one illegally which was kept in a small cupboard next to my bed. Late in the evening, when I was supposed to be asleep, he and the neighbours came to listen to the BBC and radio Free Nederland. I heard everything and was old enough to realize that the German army posed stiff resistance and that our liberation was not going to be an easy and quick affair.

 

The Atlantic wall along the beach became useless and the line of war moved from the south to the north. At school we were given copper bracelets with our names and other particulars on them. My parents followed courses on First Aid and other emergency matters. Each evening we recited the rosary during which my mother had to keep my father awake and we had to come up with special intentions. My sister Toos insisted on praying for the conversion of Hitler and his accomplices, a word she had found in the dictionary. I found her intentions absolutely useless and was of the opinion that the whole lot of  Nazis should burn in hell several times over again.

One evening they went to one of these First Aid courses and told us not to forget to say the rosary before going to bed. All evening we, ‘the three elders’ Toos, Hugo and Jan, had been quarrelling and fighting but finally we knelt down for prayers. At that moment our parents came back, looked through the front window and congratulated themselves on our exemplary behaviour. Unfortunately after a few ‘Hail Mary’s, we started fighting again and when they entered the room via the front door, they found us on top of each other pummeling away. My mother saw the humour of it and said: “You looked so holy, all three together on your knees when we looked through the window and look at you now!”

 

Both on the east front by the Russians and on the west front by the allied forces the Germans were slowly pushed back towards their own Heimat, their own home country. In September1944 the allied armies suddenly pushed through Belgium, reached the Dutch border and from there spearheaded towards the major rivers in The Netherlands, towards Arnhem and Nijmegen. We were so excited by the prospect of being free again that we brought out the Dutch flag, pictures of the Royal Family and orange decorations and nailed these on the wall of the house. The German soldiers were in disarray, looked bewildered and were ready to march back  home.

It was not to be. The battle around Arnhem ended tragically and the liberating army got stuck in the South ‘under the big rivers’ for the rest of the winter. [19] I remember that in that time I was not allowed to listen to the news on the radio because of the horrific bloodshed and the high casualties[20].

The German army returned with a vengeance and from then on not much love was lost between them and the Dutch population. Even the young learned to hate, to sabotage and to destroy. I was supposed to have started class six, the last year of my primary education, back in our own ‘St Petrus’school  but that year we hardly received any regular lessons. Our headmaster Master Van Velzen was in charge and tried to keep us away from mischief and from vandalism but he only partially succeeded. One day I met a woman and her son waiting in the corridor of the school for an appointment with the headmaster. She wore the badge of the NSB, the National Socialist Movement, whose members were by now despised and deeply hated. Suddenly I shouted “You dirty betrayer!”, after which I ran into the classroom.  A few minutes later the door opened and in came the Headmaster with that woman. She pointed me out as the culprit. In his office he asked me whether it was me who had reviled her and called her a traitor. I calmly agreed and the next moment he gave me such a wallop that I ended up on top of his desk. The dear lady seemed satisfied and I was allowed to return to my class. That evening he called me alone to his office and told me quietly that calling names never was of any use in life. He added humbly that he had to give me a beating to avoid himself being in great trouble. I understood this and left the school a bit subdued.

I do not know whether we were actually encouraged to sabotage and to pester the German occupying powers but we did it all the same all through that winter of 1944-45. We removed the cobbles from the side of the main road, the Haagweg, and threw them to the passing army lorries. One day an army motorcycle slipped on the icy surface and the rider was thrown onto the towing path along the canal. We all cheered and had no pity for the groaning and bleeding young man lying there, waiting for help. He put his hand in his pocket and to my utter surprise he took out a rosary and started to pray.

It was at that very moment that I started to suspect that there was something very, very wrong with us all. Here was someone of my own religion, bleeding and in great pain whom we hated and loved to see suffer.

Things were getting worse by the day. In October 1944 my father lost his employment. I had seen it coming because in a small way he had become part of the underground movement, supported ongoing sabotage in the factory and helped the labourers on the Dutch Railways who planned a national strike. He went ‘underground’, stayed at home most of the time, but also went out to the rural areas in order to find food and fuel for us.

The Church community in Loosduinen tried to support our family. Each Monday I was sent to the Parish Priest to collect rows of cents, that were collected ‘for the poor’ on the previous Sunday. He and his parish team were very close to the people and stood by their flock as much as possible. A few years before they had not hesitated to read the famous pastoral letter of the Dutch Bishops that denounced in clear terms the massive deportation of the Jews. As retaliation the Gestapo had ordered to deport also those Jews who were Catholics and send a number of secular priests and religious to the concentration camps.[21] The young priests and some of the leaders of the parish community also send barges to the rural areas in order to buy food for the poor. This made a great impression on me and I talked with the parish priest about becoming a missionary. He laughed, tried me out by asking whether I understood what I was talking about. He told me to get on with my lessons at school and to get prepared for the renewal of my baptism vows by learning the penny catechism by heart.

 

To supplement the meager income given by the parish my father decided to go into business, like some of his brothers-in-law. He went to the Westland by bike, bought a few crates of grapes and asked us, Toos and me, to help and sell them along the road. He was no businessman and we were always hungry. Standing along the main road with our one kilo bags of grapes, we could not help nipping a few of them to assuage our hunger. When we returned at the end of the day we came home with little money and only a few bunches left. He never said much and understood.

Winter came early that year. One misty morning when on my way to serving an early Mass I saw heavily armed soldiers surrounding our block of houses and sealing off all the ways of escape. One of the passersby showed me a paper of Befehl (Command) and told me that the soldiers planned a razzia, a raid. All men from 17 until 40 years of age were ordered to stand in front of their homes and offer themselves for work in the war factories of Germany. There would be a search in all the houses of the estate.

I ran back, told my father and helped him to hide himself in a very small hole behind the gas(meter) and toilet  I pushed a darkly painted wooden shutter in front of him so that he became invisible, even to the beam of a torch. When I did all this, a rusty nail pierced my upper arm very severely but I was too anxious to pay attention. Once back on ground level all nine of us sat around the table and my pregnant mother told us to cry and weep loudly as soon as the soldiers entered. It became dead silent in the street while the search went on, house after house. When two of them came in the room and addressed my mother with Fraulein, she lit a candle in front of the statue of Mary while we bellowed away as loud as we could. My mother told them in broken German that her husband had gone away for work in the Westland.  One of them, with a glimpse of goodness and compassion on his face, wanted to leave immediately but the smaller guy was suspicious and started a search. He went to the back of the house and to our consternation he discovered a hammer, fresh nails and a saw with which my father had made a box the previous day. He became suspicious and was of the opinion that there must be an adult man in the house somewhere. His older comrade, obviously ashamed of my pregnant mother and the weeping children pulled him outside and they went on with their horrible task in the other houses. Towards the afternoon they seemed to have rounded up a sufficient number of men who stood there on the bridge, so desperate and lost that we all had pity. They had to bring a blanket, a winter coat, another pair of shoes, a plate and cutlery, a mug and enough sandwiches to keep them alive for one day. After that they were heaped in a lorry and they disappeared in the eastern direction to Germany. Later we heard that a couple of chaplains of the parish of a similar age had insisted not to be exempted but to accompany the men on their doleful journey as spiritual companions. This made such a deep impression that after the war a few roads were called after them.[22] 

 

My father remained hidden in his hide-out on and off.  But life went on and soon he was about trying to get food, fuel and clothing for us. The deep wound in my upper arm did not heal, in fact it became inflamed and I was in constant pain. The doctor sent me to the children hospital in Rozenburg where I was admitted almost immediately as they diagnosed tetanus. Like my younger brother before, I went into quarantine for a week and saw the hands of my mother and sister waving to me from behind a small window. I never felt so lonely in my life, counted the hours and could not sleep. Finally a surgeon came, sucked the puss from my inflamed upper arm after which things became better. I was admitted to the common children’s ward where we were lovingly cared for by the nurses and had a great time. My father could not visit me as he was afraid of being caught up by de Polizei and send to the work camps. One day my mother told me that he would come, dressed as a woman. That evening he appeared, his face hidden by a scarf, in my mother’s dress and with a stuffed bust. The nurses screamed with laughter as his disguise was not a great success. During his visit he told me that he was to cut the trees that lined the road in front of the hospital and, sure enough, next morning, the trees had been cut away for firewood

They must have kept me until after the feast of St. Nicolaas, 5-6 December as I remember being given a present by the Saint, the friend of all children, in the hospital. After I was discharged I had to get used again to the harsh ‘starvation’ winter. With my father we cut all the trees in halves and laid them to dry out in the garden. He did well because we would have fuel for cooking and heating until the end of the war.

He went away for weeks on a peddle driven handcart to buy food for us in faraway places. We never knew when he would come back. One day his haggard, worn out face suddenly appeared in front of the window. It looked to me like the face of Jesus on the Cross and we were very happy that he had come back alive with a bit of food.

My parents tried to make the feast of Christmas as pleasant as they could. My father had fixed a few  candleholders on the wall. One day he came too near and his hair went on fire without himself noticing it immediately. We all extinguished it quickly and my mother said humourously: “There goes the last of your beautiful hair you had when you met me.”  Aunt Fie and Aunt Jo walked all the way to the farmers to get a bit of food but they were not too successful and came back with bleeding feet.

January and February 1945 passed in misery and we had started to eat flower bulbs and sugar beets to keep alive. We learned to prize the poisonous kernel of the bulb out of its shell and not to drink the syrup of the sugar beets. Gradually my mother lost heart and had to be comforted by my father who kept saying that the mixture of cooked bulbs and beet pulp was not bad at all.

By then the Nazis had invented new weapons of war, called V1 and V2. They were huge rockets which were shot from Ockenburg, an estate nearby, into the direction of the British Isles. For us the sending of these missiles seemed the last kicks of a dying horse. Little did we guess that this invention was the beginning of the space age when humankind would reach the moon and would explore space.  These rockets were fuelled by what we called liquid gas which was transported from The Hague to the launching pad by lorries. One day members of the Underground Movement attacked and shot at these lorries. As a reprisal a number of men were picked up from the street and summarily executed ‘as an example’[23]    

My father and I continued cutting trees for heating and cooking. I became quite handy with the span saw and could cut a small tree in manageable pieces within a very short time. One day after we had ventured deep in the wood, we suddenly heard a tremendous explosion and were thrown to the ground by sheer air pressure. A couple of German soldiers passed us and shouted to move away as quickly as possible as we happened to be very near the launching pad. These missiles must have been a primitive affair at the beginning and not all launching was a success. There would be a loud explosion followed by the hum of the rocket going straight up into the air. Then there were some seconds of silence during which the V2 turned on its side and pointed its nose towards the sea. But only too often the silence was longer and we knew that the launching had been a failure and the rocket would fall in the dunes or the sea. One day the rocket doubled backward on itself and fell with a loud crash on a couple of houses near the cemetery, killing all inhabitants and destroying many window panes nearby.

In their search for wood the people became frantic and started to cut the wooden electricity poles, re- move the wooden sleepers from the tramways and pull down the houses left empty in the Sperr gebiet, the forbidden territory near the coast. Some even pulled out the spiked poles that were installed in the polders and meadows to avoid a proper landing of the allied paratroops. They were shot at without much ado.

Near us, in the same street, lived a manager of a transport company who owned a lorry. He was a kind, young man with a couple of children. However it was rumoured that he was a ‘collaborator’ and transported goods for the Nazi’s. One early morning before he went off to work a couple of men, members of the Underground, rang the bell and shot him on the spot. I will never forget the cries of the little children and the eyes of his wife in utter shock. Later it was said that she committed suicide.

The planes of the R.A.F had absolute hegemony in the air. In February the incessant drone of hundreds of planes was heard day and night. They flew over The Netherlands to bomb the towns of Germany,[24]  and its pilots searched for the places from where the V2 were being launched and to thus to protect the people in London. It was not easy, if not impossible as these launching pads could be moved at short notice. During the first week of March 1945 the British planes bombarded a huge quarter of The Hague, Het Bezuidenhout, and also some streets in Loosduinen. We knew them to be utterly wrong and wondered why they pinpointed such inhabited areas. But during a war not many questions were asked.

 

Many children of poor families were near starvation. It was decided to evacuate them and send as many of them to kind people in the north of Holland via the Afsluitdijk, a huge dyke that connects the North of Holland with Friesland and Groningen. My elder sister, Toos was chosen to climb on the lorry with lots of other silent children and to be driven off to the North in the dark evening. We did not hear from her for weeks.

As the eldest boy I had to stay and be a support for my parents. This proved to have been a wise choice because on the 17^th of March my father went out to collect a couple of rotten planks from the first floor of a deserted, old house near the low dunes, which had been declared forbidden territory. Suddenly the entire structure collapsed and he ended on the ground, bleeding, with his head on his stomach and a broken back. They carried him on a plank to our home, and pushed him into our sitting room via a window. After a couple of hours the ambulance came, pulled by a span of horses as there was no petrol and they took him to the Westend hospital in The Hague. When the ambulance drove up, my mother looked at me and said “ At least, I have got you!”

 

My father was put into heavy plaster and we were told that he might be paralyzed for the rest of his life. Later the doctor said that the transport on a plank from the place of the accident to our home saved him. He remained unconscious for a week but finally came by with a heavenly smile. I asked him how he felt and he answered: “Don’t’ worry, Hugo, onkruid vergaat niet, ill weed does not die!!” I was a bit startled, as I had never regarded my dad as ill-weed.

On 19 March, a few days after my father’s accident the parish decided to send my brother, Jan, and my sister Fiet, to Friesland too. I remember pushing her between two older children on the back of the lorry. My sister Riet stayed behind. She owned a little step scooter with which she went to the hospital almost each day to bring food to our father, while I went on my roller skates along the deserted main road. By then my mother was heavily pregnant with Nelty, and a neighbour from the other side of the street lent her a new bicycle. In the ward of my father we saw many crippled and wounded patients.

One of our neigbours, Mr Van Rijn, a kind tram conductor who sometimes gave us free rides also searched for wood near the dunes. He went too far and stepped onto a landmine. The explosion ripped off both his legs. As there was nobody to help him, he slowly bled to death. When his best friend heard this, he came, and without apparent fear retraced the footsteps of the deceased. He dragged the body to the road, so that he could be buried properly.

That day, after the bad news of the violent death of our neighbour, we also received  good news. The curate of our parish handed us a letter, written by Toos, my eldest sister. All three had arrived safely in Friesland and had been very well received by kind families in a place called Wolvega.

 

On  the 3^rd of April 1945 I became 12 years old and, as the ‘head of the family’ I felt quite old and responsible. The school had been closed and my main task was to cut enough wood for the big Dutch  stove in the sitting room and the little stove, called mayo, on which my mother prepared the food.  Fortunately my father had prepared sufficient branches and slices of the trunks of trees in the garden. It was my task to cut them in very small pieces and carry them inside before the end of the day.  Eventually I became quite an expert in wielding the axe!

At the end of the month big, low flying planes appeared overhead and threw huge parcels of bread, butter, tinned food and other comestibles into the nearby polders and meadows. We were told this ‘manna from heaven’ was a gift from Sweden. We ate butter, mixed with grass, pure white bread and corn beef from dented tins. We knew then that the end of the war was very near.

 

And so it was. We reached the month of May 1945, a month our generation would never forget. There had been bombardments and on quiet evenings one could hear the rumble of the war. Suddenly everything became quiet and peaceful and we saw the German soldiers marching away with desperate and emaciated faces. They had always been excellent male singers while on the march but this time they were silent and confused. Finally on the 4^th of May the glad tiding came through on the radio. The generals had signed an armistice, ‘fortress Holland’ would be liberated by the Allied army of British, American, Canadian and even Polish soldiers.

My little sister, Riet, just nine years old and small for her age, ran out of the house and joined the dancing people in the streets. She then followed a brass band, lost her way and was later brought back on the shoulders of a young man. We went to visit my father in hospital. He wept with frustration as he was still bound to his bed in plaster and could not take part in the festivities.

Most probably my mother had been very excited that day. In the evening I was told to go and call the midwife Zuster Van Tholen. That night I slept deeply but early morning I was woken up by the cries of a baby, born prematurely, a month too early. She looked thin, but seemed lively enough to step into that turbulent world of ours with joy. Later she was called after my mother and christened Petronella (Nelty).

Zuster Van  Tholen left in a hurry for a next delivery and  told me, as the man of the house, to bury the placenta in the garden. It had been deposited in a white bucket and stood in the kitchen.  I looked horrified at the mess and learned for the first time of my life that for women giving birth was a bloody affair.

When in hospital my father was told about the birth of Nelty, the nun in charge of the ward asked him innocently whether it was his first child.

 “No” my father replied laconically “ It is my tenth child!”

My dad must have looked very young for his age!

When we visited him again on the next day we found the emergency ward chock-a-block with patients, who had had accidents on ‘liberation day’. One person had taken his hidden motorcycle out of the cellar and subsequently crashed against a lantern pole, another had lost his legs when he stepped on a landmine. One had been shot at by a lone German soldier and another had part of his face blown away when he tried to pump gas out of a conduit.

I will never forget the moment when our favourite and jolly Aunt Fie, an elder sister of my father, rang the bell next morning carrying a bag of coals and some extra food for my mother. She was like an angel out of heaven. She suggested to add two names to our newborn little sister Petronella: Irene for peace and Maria to thank Our Lady in this month of May. Petronella Irene Maria was soon shortened by her to Pim.[25]

The liberating army of Canadian, and, later, British soldiers arrived a few days later. They were gentle, easy going and relaxed. [26] They gave us chocolates and exchanged their Lucky Strike cigarettes with our silver guilders and daalders, money that we regarded as having no value. Our school was occupied again but this did not last long as most of them were billeted in the manor houses and offices of the village. Every evening there were festivities and dancing until deep in the night. The young men were very approachable and the young women tried their best English. One of my cousins fell in love with a John Kelly from Birmingham. When she told her mother that he had proposed to her, the mother exclaimed “But why do you want to marry a foreigner?” She replied that John Kelly was of Irish descent and a good Catholic. “But how can he be a good Catholic” the mother retorted, “when he is not even a Dutchman!”

John Kelly had great linguistic abilities and soon spoke Dutch almost perfectly. After the wedding, he wanted to stay and work in Holland but was not allowed to do so. The couple settled in Birmingham, in the U.K.

Some of the young ladies of the village were not so lucky. They were known to have hobnobbed with the German soldiers during the occupation. Their heads were shaved bare and they were dragged onto a cart to be jeered at by all and sundry. This shameful ‘revenge’ made a deep impression on me as some of them were obviously pregnant. In fact one of them was delivered of a son a few weeks after this event. Later, at school with my young sister Nelly, the fatherless boy proved to be one of the most intelligent pupils and became a highly qualified engineer.

I also remember vividly a huge parade of the liberating armies that was staged along the Laan van Meerdervoort, a long main road that lead from the small seaside resort Kijkduin near Loosduinen to  the Peace Palace in the centre of The Hague. [27] The row of tanks moved very slowly and I jumped from a tree branch on top of one of them. The soldier driver became upset and nervous and shouted at me: “Get off my flipping tank!” These were the first English words I learned. 

Due to having been starved for such a long time, our stomachs were not accustomed to solid foods.  The liberating army gave us dry rusks to eat that came out of green tins. Once empty, we roped four of them together, made a raft and played sea-battles on the canal. The schoolmaster taught us a liberation song the refrain of which said:

Liever dood dan slaaf  (Rather dead than slave),

 but we changed the words into:        Liever brood dan kaak, (Rather bread than rusks).

 

We even returned to our play haunts in the dunes despite the danger of landmines. By then an interim Dutch Government had taken charge of the country, assisted by the Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten ( The National Military Forces of the Interior). Some of these Dutch soldiers went hunting rabbits in the dunes. A stray bullet hit one of my bosom friends, Koos Steyn, who died soon afterwards in the same children hospital where my brother and I had been.

When school opened again at the end of May I was weighed and searched for vermin and lice. I came out clean but weighed only 24 kg, a paltry 4 stones.

We continued visiting my father regularly. The doctors took the first plaster away and to their and our delight they diagnosed that the spine had recovered well. They attributed it to their professional treatment, while we thanked the Dear Lord for a miraculous recovery

At home we had, as yet, no newspaper but, with time on hand, I walked one day from the West End hospital to the centre of the town, to the church square of the Jacobus kerk. St James the Major, where the news of the day was displayed.

These newssheets showed the first pictures of the concentration camps. I looked at the corpses, the emaciated bodies of the prisoners behind high fences, the chimneys and the gas chambers, stared at them for ages. I read the reports on the various experiments on human beings that had gone on inside these camps and felt sick.

‘How could people do this to one another.’ I asked myself over and over again.

When I cycled home that day I became vaguely convinced that something very special had to be done in order to make up for such a cruel war from which we had just emerged.

A few weeks later the first newspapers were published and distributed again. To my disappointment they were based on the denominational differences, the zuilen, the columns of Dutch pre-war society. During the war people had come together and had united in face of a common enemy. They got to know each other, even appreciated each other’s differences.

Why had all this to fall apart? Were no lessons learned from the war? Why could we as human beings not work together for a better world ? 

 

On 12 July 1945, after the first euphoria of the liberation, my two sisters and my brother returned from Friesland. My elder sister had fallen in calf love with one of the sons of the family she stayed with, Jan had learned to sail on the Frisian lakes and Fiet came back as a little wise girl.

After the school had re-opened its doors the teachers tried to make up for lost time, an almost impossible task. All together we had had only a few months at school and the end exams were near. But the headmaster did his utmost to prepare a group of us in the sixth class for further secondary studies.

My father came back, still in plaster, hobbling around with a stick. Around that time we heard that in Great Britain the great war leader, Winston Churchill, was not in charge any longer, due to a landslide victory of the Labour Party. We found this very strange, difficult to understand, and felt a sense of  loss as we had become so used to his booming voice on the illegal Radio Nederland.

 

Some of my play mates had been accepted for the minor seminary of the White Fathers, the society my hero Fr. Nico Hendriks belonged to. They were older than me as they had to wait for one year during that winter of starvation, the war and the months of final liberation.

Despite my poor education I was determined to go to the seminary. I was questioned both by the parish priest and the headmaster who said that I had no chance whatsoever to pass the entrance examination and that I would do better by ‘doubling’ the last year of primary education.

I had no intention to do so and finally prevailed upon them to write and apply for the entrance papers from the Rector in charge of the White Fathers seminary in Sterksel, a small hamlet somewhere in Brabant. His reply was disappointing. The entrance examination was included in the letter but he gave me little chance as there were no vacant places left. Also the exam itself proved to be very difficult and dealt with subject matters I had never heard off. Fortunately our headmaster, Master van Velsen, admired my determination and, as he wanted to see a few of his pupils go on for secondary studies, explained the questions to me.

 

Weeks past and at the end of July 1945 I received the glorious letter that more places had become available, that the replies of my exam had been poor but sufficient and that they expected me to arrive in ‘Sterksel’ before the 12^th of September. From then on things moved quickly. With the help of my parents and the parish priest I managed to learn almost all the answers of the penny catechism by heart and, according to Catholic custom, I renewed my baptismal vows and received a solemn Communion on the 2^nd of September.

The reconstruction of The Netherlands had started. I said farewell to my classmates of the primary school with whom I had been moved from one school building to another since 1939. A good number of them would emigrate and we would never see each other again. My sister, Toos, was accepted by the nuns of the Domestic Science School in The Hague. She learned to embroider her name on her apron and was surprised then that everybody knew her!

 

My parents tried to give us a bit of a holiday in August as they had done before, but in the end they were too busy renewing the house and saving every penny. Moreover the bursar of the seminary sent them a long list of requirements for my outfit and my mother was at her wits end to get these various items together. I needed a new suit. My brother Jan, who had been given a new suit by his foster family in Friesland was asked to forego it and donate it to me. He did it very reluctantly and would remember this for the rest of his life.

To help my parents with the expenses and get a bit of pocket money I arranged to distribute a daily ‘Protestant’ newspaper called Trouw (Troth). As it was a more discerning evening newspaper, the addresses where it had to be delivered were few and far between and it took ages to get them all in the letter boxes. Moreover I lost time by reading the articles and I remember hearing about the dropping of the atom bombs in Japan. Some evenings, when I was late for supper, my father and Jan, my younger brother, came to help me.

 

Finally the month of September came. The day after my sister Fiet’s birthday I said goodbye to my mother and my sisters and brothers and took the tram to the railway station together with my father, still in plaster. I had no clue where that hamlet called Sterksel was and left the buying of the tickets and other arrangements to my father who said that it was not very far from where he had been educated as a young man.

The railway connections were still in terrible disarray as most, if not all of the bridges over the estuary of the main rivers were destroyed. We were told that the only connection to Brabant in the South was via a pontoon near Nijmegen in the East. We traveled eastwards in cattle wagons and took turns sitting on my only suitcase. [28]

In Nijmegen we left the train and we walked over the pontoon of flat boats that the conquering army had constructed. From there we boarded another, more comfortable train and finally reached Eindhoven. We were told to use a slow train next to reach Heeze. By then we had traveled all day and there was no connection to the hamlet of Sterksel. A jovial driver, on his way to Leende, gave us a lift and dropped us at a lonely lane in the middle of the fields.

 “Sterksel is at the end of it” he said and drove off.

 

Silently and exhausted we walked along that beautiful lane amidst flowering heather and dark trees. Suddenly the enormity of leaving home, my parents and my brothers and sisters dawned upon me. My dear father became biblical and compared me with the boy Samuel being taken by his mother to the High Priest Eli (1 Samuel, 1:26). I was so tired that I lent only half an ear to his story and let him carry my suitcase.

At the end of that lane we saw a building, surrounded by a high fence and a gate. We entered and met grown up people walking around, a bit dazed.

‘I do not think I will leave you here:” my father said.

A Brother in a black garb came to greet us and told us that we had entered the grounds of an Institute for the mentally ill, called Providentia.[29] He showed us the way to the seminary of the White Fathers. It was dark when we finally arrived.

 

The reception was lovely. The white robed and bearded priests were of the same age, or even younger than my father and he got on with them like a house on fire. I was shown my bed in a ‘chambrette’ (a little cubicle made of wooden panels) and was introduced to the other boys who had arrived before me. There were my friends Jan Velthuizen, Jan Steyn and also someone from The Hague itself, Oscar Holleman. Next day we bought apples from the farms nearby and explored the surroundings. The place seemed far from home and smelled like pine wood. But I was ready to start and looked eagerly at the long schedule that determined your days from the first minute of the early morning until the late evening.

It became time for my father to return to the home that seemed now so far away. He had ascertained that I was in good hands and waved goodbye to me laughingly from behind the glass separation, still in his plaster. I felt the first pain of home sickness but was determined not to lose face.

 

When finally the year started on the 12^th of September, I entered the first year of the gymnasium (grammar school,) called the Kleine Figuur,( Tiny Figure) and wondered what I had begun and what it was all about. About one thing I was sure: They were going to teach me how to conjure and amuse people, like my hero Nico Hendriks had done, and I was never going to give up!

 

                                                                     

 

[1] This quarter was built after the disastrous Boer War when the imperial troops of Victorian Britain forcefully overrun and appropriated the lands and the emerging goldmines of South Africa. Paul Kruger, the leader of the Boers, had visited Holland, from where his compatriots originated a few centuries before. He had unsuccessfully implored Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch Parliament to give some support. Possibly as a consolation price the streets and avenues of entire quarters of the towns in The Netherlands were called after the rivers, statesmen, military leaders, etc. of South Africa.

 [2]  Hugo de Groot  Grotius, a free-thinking Protestant of the Remonstrant Brotherhood , founded in 1619, was accused of high treason by Prince Maurits and  imprisoned in the Castle of Loevestein. He escaped in 1621 by hiding in his book chest. He was a jurist, poet, historian, theologian and one of the founding fathers of the Right of Nations as the author of De iure belli et pacis. 

[3] Brak,P. 1990. Loosduinen rond 1840,  S.O.L. Haagse Drukkerij en Uitgeversmaatschappij, The Hague, Holland 

[4] A road due East, that ran on a dyke, made long ago for the exploitation of peat.

[5] Van Rijn, D, 2002, Ooggetuige Verslag in Beeld. Germomy Br. Maarsen, NL.

[6] After the war many of my contemporaries emigrated with their parents to Canada, Australia, and the U.K.

[7] Named by the local parish priest after a saint called Gabriel Dell Adorolata! The letters were interpreted by the opponents as meaning ‘Gekken Doen Alles’ Lunatics do everything!

[8] o.a. Fr Jan Van Putten of Mill Hill, who, after years as a missionary,  served the parish until his death in 2003. 

[9] One of his contemporaries, Fr Nico Borst, cycled all the way to free Spain and from there he reached Africa during the war. (Interview, Heythuysen, June 2003). Father Nico Hendriks left for Tanganyika (Tanzania) after the war and did sterling work, especially in the Tabora Printing Press. He  retired to France at the age of 65 and died there in 2005.  Letter  N. Hendriks to author, December 2004.

[10] Van Vliet, Pauline,1922,  ‘Innerlijke Getuigenis door Uiterlijk Vertoon. De Graal’ . Doctoral Thesis, Un. Amsterdam. The political dimension disappeared in the 1930s once it became incorporated in the parishes.

[11] Margaret Sinclair came from a working class family in Edinburgh. Scotland.  Born in 1900, went to Mass each morning, worked in a biscuit factory and was a trade union member until she went to London and became a Poor Clare in 1922. There she died of tuberculosis and was buried in the Kensal Green Cemetery.

Edel Quinn born 14 September 1907 on County Cork, Ireland, joined the Legion of Mary when she was 20 years old.  In 1936 she became an Envoy and was sent to East and Central Africa. She died in Nairobi, Kenya on the 14^th of May 1944, also of tuberculosis.

[12] It was Machteld of Brabant’s second marriage and she was 10 years older than Floris.

[13] Insert quotation from Pepys diary and other books.

[14] The films were old propaganda films of the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg and the Olympic games, held in Berlin in 1938 and made by Ms Leni Riefenstahl. 

[15] Its Charter was International Law, Disarmament and Human Rights. It houses a Permanent Court of Arbitration and a Permanent Court of International Justice.

[16] It remained empty for a long time, used as a barn, and later changed into a dwelling. It was broken down in the 1960s , to make place for high rise apartments.  Brak 1990, p165.

[17] The estate had originally belonged to a Baron, called Louis Quarles van Ufford.

[18] Later he was reported to have been killed during a bombardment in Germany and our school attended a memorial Mass for him. He suddenly returned, alive and healthy, a few months after the war!

[19] Check details in the book A Bridge Too Far’

[20]  (Mention the Polish and British nuns who had lost family during that battle). Later I was taken to the military airfields, near Burford (Oxford) where the airborne division of the RAF had been trained for this battle

[21] In s’Heerenberg, a village near the German border, the parish priest and the curate were arrested immediately after the Mass, sent to a concentration camp from which they never returned.

[22] (More details : e.g. Kapelaan Meereboer weg etc)

[23] Check details. Also V 2.

[24] Later we heard that on the 13^th of Feb  they ‘carpet-bombed’ the German town of Dresden and 35.000 people were killed!

[25] The name did not catch on but, later, in October 1967, she called her first son Pim.

[26] Check for accuracy

[27] Picture Oscar H.

[28] Later I guessed that these wagons must have been similar to the ones in which the Jews and other prisoners were taken to their final destination. Young women like Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum, Edith Steyn and perhaps even the anonymous secretary who had given me her little dog, had gone into the same direction, never to come back.

 [29] The Brothers of St Joseph of Heerlen had established the Institute Providentia for epileptic patients in 1920 and left the management to lay people in 1990.

 

 

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