SEVEN

Sunday
MARCH 1945

THE FIRST WEEKS OF SPRING were gruelling for the Allied armies. The Germans resisted at the Rhine River, where craggy hills and thick forest lined the banks, and the river itself was treacherous, its currents swift. Montgomery and the American generals, George Patton and Omar Bradley, argued over strategy and who should lead which divisions. Almost childlike in their competitiveness, neither the British nor the Americans wanted the other to capture Berlin first, but nor did they want the Russians, making rapid progress from the east, to beat them to the prize. For the infantrymen fighting through the tangle of coniferous trees, the immediate concern was living long enough to see Berlin, never mind who got there first. The frightened inhabitants of the German towns and cities in the armies’ path buried their valuables in their gardens, just as the Dutch had done as the Germans advanced.

Retreating Germans left an obstacle course of blown bridges and breached dams, but by mid-March, the Allies were in control of the east banks of the Rhine. The Canadians, fighting in the northernmost sector, turned north, back to the Netherlands, minus several infantry divisions and a parachute battalion that crossed the river and pressed farther east with the Americans and British into Germany.

By this time, Wilhelmina – who had been urged to put off such a dangerous excursion – could wait no longer to visit her liberated provinces. She flew from England accompanied by twelve Spitfires, and touched down in Belgium, where a motorcade transported her to the border town of Eede. Once there, she directed her driver to stop the car before the white chalk-line separating Belgium and the Netherlands. She stepped out, a stout figure in a fox stole and woollen jacket, and walked slowly across the border. In a photograph taken that day, Wilhelmina’s smile beneath her black hat is wide, betraying a poignant moment for the queen and the dignitaries behind her and the orange-clad crowd. The celebrations continued as she wound her way slowly through this small stretch of home, liberated only a few short months ago by the Canadian Water Rats. She made frequent stops in her limousine, sharing her army rations with her hosts, shaking hands with resistance fighters wearing BS armbands, taking the marguerite flower from her coat and laying it on the spot where four Dutchmen had been executed. She listened to the stories: this woman lost her husband to a firing squad; this man’s son was taken in a razzia; another lost all his children when the occupiers blew up a town hall filled with people seeking shelter from an air raid. Boys and girls climbed onto rooftops to get a look at the queen, and the smallest children, who saw her as a stranger, stared up at her from below.

For Wilhelmina, it was a moving, difficult week, permeated by the stench of drowned cattle in flooded polders, by the sight of shelled villages and people who’d lost everything waving and smiling at her from all sides. At a church in Breda, just south of Dordrecht where Gerrit had fought, she settled into a pew and lowered her head in prayer while across the Maas River, the bombs continued to fall. It was Sunday, March 18.

The men piloting the Spitfires that took off that morning from their bases in England reported some light haze and cloud cover, but by the time the afternoon flights departed from Belgium, the skies were clear and the visibility good, perfect weather for bombing. The planes glinted in the sunlight, and as they approached their targets – railways that carted the rockets, suspected V2 launch sites, factories making fuel – the commander ordered the planes into formation. One by one they began their dives, plummeting from about 2,500 metres, and the ground seemed to race towards them at a dizzying speed. Flak came too, little fireballs shot from the anti-aircraft guns below. At about 900 metres, just before they pulled out of their dives, the pilots released their bombs and climbed again. Before returning to base, they circled, making note of the success or failure of their mission for later recording in the squadron’s Operations Record Book: bombed NW to SE … one bomb seen to burst on track … bursts seen to N of line 75 yards away … crossed out at Katwijk.

Today, as on every Sunday, Rige attended the afternoon church service with Cor. Her brothers, having gone to the morning service, stayed home with Gerrit. Lately the house on the Tedingerstraat was full, with Tante Bep visiting from The Hague, and Oma and Opa den Hartog living temporarily on the main floor, as Oma had fallen ill after a difficult winter. Until yesterday, one of Tante Mar’s daughters had been with them as well, filling the role of mother’s helper, and Rige was sorry to see her go. She liked having her girl cousins around, and sometimes pretended they were her sisters. At two-thirty on this sunny afternoon, Rige and Cor began the walk to the Damlaan, slipping into their pew on the balcony shortly before three o’clock. Rige barely noticed that Rie and Henk Batelaan hadn’t arrived yet, because she knew her friend Ineke wouldn’t be with them; she was away in Zoetermeer, where there was more food. Jaap Quartel took his place at the organ as the congregation settled, but there was no music yet, only the shuffling of feet and creak of the wooden benches. Minutes before the service began, Rige heard the moan of air raid sirens in the near distance, and the sound of bombs falling: first the high-pitched whine and then the boom of impact. As always, Rige counted: one, two, three, four, five, six. But these were not uncommon sounds – they heard bombs every day. Last week, one had fallen on the tram-rails beside the Parkweg, the route to Emmaschool. The railway beams had flown up and landed on the housetops, and the sidewalk tiles and manhole covers were upturned and strewn about. Now, as then, the raid was noticed, but the day’s events continued.

The service began, and the room flooded with Jaap’s music. Reverend Feenstra stepped behind the pulpit, in place of Reverend Rietveld, who was still in hiding but sent messages to the congregation through the church bulletin. Rige read one now as the paper lay in her mother’s lap: Not one bicycle tire has been donated for those who have worn theirs out in the service of Mutual Assistance. The congregation is not going to disappoint us in this, is it? R. The bulletin, called the “Kerkkrant,” had been her mother’s favourite piece of reading in earlier days, but lately it had shrivelled, like other papers, to a single flimsy sheet, printed front and back.

The sermon began, but soon the sexton appeared at the end of their pew. He leaned in with a grave expression, tapped Cor’s shoulder, and whispered in her ear. Rige watched the back of her mother’s head as she listened to the sexton – the swirl of her pinned-up hair, her dark blue Sunday hat. The sexton stepped away quietly, and Cor took Rige’s arm, urging her out of the pew and into the one behind, where Jaap Quartel’s mother and sister sat. Cor murmured to Jaap’s sister Paulien, but said nothing to Rige. Her shoes made barely a sound on the floor as she left the church without her daughter. Rige blinked. She faced forward, and watched the reverend’s mouth open and close.

Minutes before three and almost late for the service, Rie and Henk Batelaan were rushing to church when they felt the ground shudder from the impact of the bombs. They knew the hits had come from the direction of their own home, and they turned back, Rie holding onto her hat as they ran. They found their house spared, their family safe with the onderduikers, a burgeoning group that now included three generations. Today the Reverend Rietveld was with them too, but as Rie and Henk arrived home he pulled on his coat and hat. From the balcony at the back of the Batelaan home he had seen where the bombs landed, and now he sped on his bicycle to the Tedingerstraat, though he was meant to be keeping a low profile. By the time Rie got to the church, hoping to hear the last half of the sermon, Reverend Rietveld was there too, breathing hard, waiting at the door while the sexton alerted Cor. Rie watched Cor come through the door and climb onto the back of the reverend’s bicycle. The next day she’d write in her diary, “I just can’t forget the face of that mother as she left the church fearing the worst.”

Next door to the den Hartogs, Piet Blom was in the kitchen, thinking about the pot of soup made that morning. He took the lid off, and the aroma made his mouth water. He, his mother, and his sister Corrie had savoured one bowl at lunch so that the rest could be saved for supper, but already his belly rumbled. His father had been away for several days now, looking for food, and Piet hoped for a good haul, and that it would come soon. The squeal of children’s laughter drew his attention, and he looked out the window at the clear afternoon. In the neighbour’s yard he could see little Gert on a swing, pumping his legs to make himself go higher. Koos was there too, and the Meulenbroek boys from 59. Yesterday the den Hartogs’ cousin had gone back to Rijswijk, to Piet’s disappointment – she was a pretty girl with long shiny braids. The sudden wail of an air raid siren interrupted his thoughts and sent the Meulenbroeks racing home. He called to his sister Corrie, standing just outside the door to the backyard, but his voice was lost under the siren and the screaming planes. The impact of the first bomb moved the stove at his side, and in the split second before the glass in the kitchen window blew in on him, he saw Gert fly from his swing.

At Tedingerstraat 57, on the other side of the Meulenbroeks, sixty-three-year-old Gerritje Poldervaart turned towards the window when she heard the planes. Seconds after the bomb hit, she was wounded in the temple and died of an arterial hemorrhage. An official report still exists, and details the investigation of her death – giving time, date, and the eyewitness account of her daughter – but there is no document to explain what happened at the den Hartog house, just two doors down.

The family version has Niek, almost three, napping at the time of the explosion. The blast woke him in a crib littered with glass. He climbed out of it and walked over the shards downstairs to the devastated rooms below. But he himself has no recollection of this, and pictures it differently. The scene in his mind is brief but specific, and because it is so fleeting, and at odds with the accepted version, he doesn’t like to call it a memory. But it persists. He sees himself sitting downstairs with Rokus, playing a board game. A shadowy figure – a woman whose name and face he can’t recall – stands in a doorway nearby. Rokus holds a game piece and accidentally drops it on the floor, and when he stoops to retrieve it, a jagged slice of glass soars through the space where he was, and here, as Rokus pops back up before him, Niek’s version fades. Rokus cannot deny or corroborate Niek’s account. He remembers nothing from the day, and the family version says only that he was reading the children’s Bible at the time of the blast – and it’s true that as a boy he loved looking at the pictures of Moses and the tables of stone, the angel visiting Mary, and David overwhelming Goliath.

In the backyard, four-year-old Gert on his swing saw his father in the doorway, yelling, “Run! Come now!” He looked up and saw the flash of a plane in the clear blue sky. Then there was dust, and nothing. He didn’t see the woman who rushed towards him, the same shadowy figure who, moments before, appeared in Niek’s periphery, but she was surely Tante Bep. A bomb shard had pierced her abdomen, but her nurse’s training helped her focus on the wounded boys. With a twist of hot metal inside her, she leaned over the two limp bodies on the ground, pressing her fingers against the slowing pulses.

Koos was steps from the door when he heard the whistle of the bomb dropping, and the whoosh as it neared the ground. He turned his head, looked over his shoulder, and saw the ground erupt in a spray. Dust and debris ballooned beyond the wire-mesh fence of the yard, the force of it blowing him backwards. He felt no pain, but something caused him to look down before he fell. The skin of his leg gaped open, and he saw blood, flesh, and his shinbone. One foot was planted on the patio tile, the other on the bright green grass.

Somehow he found himself on a cart, bumping over the brick roads. Who pushed him Koos didn’t know – it seemed he was flying in a dream. But the pain now was excruciating, and the air raid siren played over and over in his mind. He could picture Gert’s pale face and the whites of his eyes, though he wasn’t sure he’d seen him. Still, he had heard somewhere that when your eyes roll back in your head, it means you’re dying.

Across the way, at 86, the house where the German soldiers had been billeted, Mevrouw van Kampen had sprung into action when she heard the bombs falling – five, perhaps six of them in the immediate neighbourhood. She looked through her shattered window and then ran over the broken glass to pull her old beige stroller out of the upstairs closet. Her daughter was an adolescent now, and there was no reason to keep a stroller, but she was glad she had. She filled it with towels, and hauled it back downstairs and across the street, and through the narrow space between the blocks of houses to where the boys lay, tended by Bep, who held a hand over her own wound. She and Bep tried to get both boys into the stroller, but they didn’t fit, and there was blood everywhere, so Mevrouw van Kampen had to choose. She took Gert, who had lost consciousness. She laid him in the carriage and pressed towels over his wounds, and then she ran, not stopping to think where the boys’ father was, or what had happened to the Red Cross men who lived at 72. Later she told her daughter Jeanne that she’d only done what was necessary. “The people who counted,” she said, “panicked.”

Down the street at number 15, the milkman Piet Rehling had been in the backyard with his son Jan – a boy about Koos’s age – when the planes came over. Just as the boy’s face turned skyward, his father grabbed him and yelled, “Hurry!” and pushed him through the kitchen door. The blast threw them both into the hallway beyond the kitchen, and they lay listening to the sound of glass falling out of window frames. But the milkman was up again soon. He could hear screaming and hollers for help. He placed an old door over the bed of his milkcart and wheeled it to 61, veering around bricks and smashed tiles. And it was he who pushed Koos to Saint Antonius on this unwieldy invention, though when Koos learned this, more than sixty years had passed.

As Rige walked from church with the Quartels, no one spoke. They hurried along the Damlaan, and Rige saw her mother’s hat lying in the street – an impossibility that meant something she couldn’t find words for. When they turned into the Tedingerstraat, they stopped at number 9 where the Quartels lived, and Rige was told to come inside. She looked farther down to number 61, but couldn’t see through the crowd of people. Jaap urged her through the front door. Once in the Quartels’ house, she noticed that there were too many places set at the table, but she didn’t dwell on the reason; her thoughts were of her own family. She sat silently, hands pressed between her knees, having no knowledge of Louis or his sister Flora, the onderduikers who lived here and who hid somewhere in the small house for the duration of her stay.

How the rest of the day passed escapes her now, but at some point, Rokus arrived. She wondered about Niek, Koos, Gert, and their father, and about Tante Bep, her grandparents, and the house itself, but when her parents finally arrived late that night and spoke to the Quartels, she was still told nothing. She watched them – the two people in the world most dear to her – wearing the expressions of strangers. Her father’s face was covered in tiny red cuts, which must have stung from the salt of his tears. The skin around her mother’s eyes looked pink and swollen, and she couldn’t stop sobbing. Her face twisted with grief as she asked, “Why didn’t God make this happen to me instead of my children?” Rige looked away. She had never heard her mother question God’s will.

Piet Blom must have lifted his hands in defence, for his palms and his arms were wounded. The pain throbbed in the cut nerves and tendons, but he was not among the first load taken to Saint Antonius Hospital in an array of makeshift ambulances. As his gravely injured sister was wheeled away in a cart pushed by a bicycle, Piet was placed on the divan in his living room and watched the Red Cross workers in their blue coveralls move through the house. His mother had gone with Corrie, his father had been away for days looking for food, and because of Piet’s pain and shock he had difficulty telling the workers how to find what they needed. Do you have bandages? they asked him. Yes, he answered. Where are the bandages? they asked. In the cupboard, he managed. Which cupboard? And on it went. It seemed a long time before he went to hospital. Outside, with crowds still hovering, neighbours placed him in a horse-drawn wagon, and just as it began to move along the Tedingerstraat, Gerrit den Hartog climbed aboard with him – he’d been to the hospital already, but had come home to check on the rest of his family, and now headed back to be with his sons. Piet grimaced as the wagon moved over the uneven road. He remembered the boys playing in the yard as the bomb hit, and Gert flying through the air like a tossed doll. He thought of the look on his own mother’s face when she found him and Corrie, and moved from one to the other, trying to decide which child to help first. “How are your sons, neighbour?” Piet asked. But Gerrit – face bloody, eyes glazed – didn’t answer. As he stared ahead, a look of confusion came over him, and he turned and jumped off the wagon. Piet, propped up with pillows, watched Gerrit, who stood unmoving in the middle of the street, looking towards his house.

The hospital in Voorburg, with its cache of onderduikers, was twenty minutes away, a chaotic place that smelled of blood, decay, ether, and burned skin. With the recent bombing of the Bezuidenhout district and a glut of patients suffering from diphtheria and oedema, the already challenged staff members were overworked and had scant supplies, including light, heat, and even fresh blood. The bomb shards embedded in Piet’s hands and arms were difficult to remove, but afterwards he was given a piece to keep. The souvenir sat in his pocket as he rode home that night, prone on a stretcher pulled by a bicycle. The sky that had been so blue earlier in the day had turned black, studded with stars, and Piet felt oddly peaceful beneath it, even when a German soldier stopped the bike’s driver and asked, “What have you got there?” He peered down at Piet, who lay with his arms bandaged, and motioned them on. As he continued his journey, Piet remembered the soup made earlier that day – plain but delicious – and hoped for a warm bowl upon arriving home. But the soup, he soon discovered, had been ruined by glass and debris. He lay down on his bed, trying to ignore the chill night air that wafted through the gashes where the windows used to be.

Somewhere in the hospital, both Gert and Koos moved in and out of consciousness. Each boy sensed a breathing body lying beside him, a rush of warm blood that must have been a person-to-person transfusion, though the donors remain unknown.

The next morning, Rige woke up in her grandparents’ house on the Broekweg, as though magically transported. She was in the backroom in her own bed with her red and white blanket, and the beds of the others were there too. Opa was in the kitchen, and Oma – lately so unwell – must still have been in bed, as the door to her room was pulled closed. Either that day or the next, Rige was taken to the hospital, and she looked through a window at a figure she was told was Gert. His tiny body was cocooned in white bandages; he lay so still she could not see him breathing.

The days passed in a fog. With the intuition of someone beyond her years, Rige remained quietly in the background, filled with unspoken questions yet not daring to beg the attention answers would require. Only from the snippets of overheard adult conversation did she piece together the enormity of the tragedy that had befallen her brothers, and then, with an eight-year-old’s logic, guilt and fear nudged her. Perhaps if she’d been at home that day, things might have turned out differently.

People visited and offered words meant to comfort, but if they helped her parents, Rige couldn’t tell. When Reverend Rietveld came by with a church elder – not the annual family visit but an extra for these special circumstances – he reminded Cor and Gerrit that whatever happened to them – to anyone – was in God’s hands. And somehow, sooner than expected, Cor had composed herself. There was a steeliness but no tears in her eyes when she told the Batelaans that Gert would lose his right arm at the shoulder and Koos his left leg below the knee. “We know,” she said in a firm voice, “that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him.”

For weeks, Tedingerstraat 61 stood empty. The three eldest Batelaan boys had nailed boards over the holes where the windows used to be, so that the inner rooms, when Cor finally went there with Rige to retrieve a sewing kit and some clothes, were dim. Light slanting between the planks fell on clots of dried mud, splintered wood, and furniture shifted by the blast. Glass crunched underfoot. Until now, there had been no time to think of the house. Gert and Koos needed all the energy the family could muster, though Cor had already felt tired for two years. She spent most of her waking moments at the hospital, relying on Gerrit and his parents to look after everything else. Lines that would become permanent etched her face, though she was only thirty-six years old. Her devotion was fierce, and when the pain in Koos’s leg became extreme, she told him to bite her hand, to bite as hard as possible, as if she could take on his suffering. He only did it once, and after that said “No” when she asked him, and looked away from her. She studied his face – the freckles that sprinkled his nose and the stubborn cowlick – and sat at his side saying nothing.

When she was gone, Koos lifted the covers and looked at his bandaged half-leg, soaked in blood. All his life he’d been told that God was listening, that God loved him and would protect him. That if only he believed – truly believed – then God could work miracles. So night after night, while he breathed in the metallic smell of blood, he closed his eyes and prayed to have his leg back. But as the days and then the weeks passed and nothing happened, he came to a new understanding. God didn’t care about him, or perhaps wasn’t there at all. From that moment on, he never prayed again.

His quiet decision would have hurt Gerrit, who felt guilty enough for what had happened to his sons. With spring, only the hard work of the tuin – digging beds, spading manure, turning compost piles, hauling the glass of the hotbeds out of storage – helped keep his mind off Koos and Gert, the sight of bloody bedding, and the choking smell of ether. His own grunts of exertion muffled the groans of the sick and dying he could hear in his head, though worse, perhaps, was the complete silence of his sons, small in their hospital beds. He pushed those images away, but saw the boys anyway in all the corners of the tuin, once their playground. Over the noise of his spade he heard their voices and running feet, their shouts of protest as someone broke a rule of the game. Rinsing the muck from his spade in the narrow stream, Gerrit thought of the day Gert had returned home dripping with muddy water. He’d fallen into the stream and his chaperone Koos had hauled him out and sent him sloshing home alone. Gerrit recalled with a smile the baffled indignation on Koos’s face when he’d been scolded rather than lauded as a hero for rescuing his brother. But good memories made Gerrit want to cry, and took him back to the blue afternoon of March 18.

He was glad his sister Mar’s daughter had gone back to Rijswijk the day before, and that he’d not had to bear the responsibility for her injuries as well. Too clearly he recalled how he had made it as far as the door when he heard the sirens – he’d hollered both their names, shocked that his voice had come up past his fear. Koos had seemed close enough to grab, but in the end Gerrit had failed to do so. The rest was a blur – his old mother wailing, his father’s voice in his ear. And then there’d been Cor at the hospital, running towards him, holding him, looking into his face for an explanation. That awful silence. Her whole expression a question he couldn’t answer. “I’m sorry,” he’d said. Every day he remembered that moment.

In the early evening, before he returned to his parents’ house, Gerrit detoured to Tedingerstraat 61 and let himself in the front door. Fine grit – dust from the wreck of the bombs – had settled on every surface. Still, he removed the klompen he wore in the tuin and soundlessly climbed the stairs in sock feet, feeling his way through the dimness and pausing below the flight to the attic. He lit a match and looked around. Glass covered the floor, and the rooms were empty of their beds. A torn curtain hung, stirring in the breeze that sneaked between the boards tacked over the window frames. Soon the workers would come and begin repairs that would make the house habitable again, though glass and other necessary materials were hard to come by. There was a heavy demand for the workmen’s services, and because of the razzias, few men available. The legal newspapers stressed who was at fault: that due to the Anglo-American “terror attacks,” there’d been heavy losses in the region between March 18 and 24. Gerrit knew the wording showed bias, but he couldn’t deny that he had felt terror as the bombs dropped.

He climbed the last set of stairs, lifted the loose board in the attic floor and reached into the dark hole to reassure himself that the radio was still there. Because there was no electricity, he couldn’t listen, but news travelled without it. If one resistance paper got shut down, another was started soon after. The new Vlietstreek – a paper that raised money for Reverend Slomp’s LO through subscription prices – even had a temporary, secret office in the town hall, directly above the new mayor, until a safer location could be found on the Damlaan. A few clandestine radio sets were still operating – not at Gerrit’s house, but elsewhere, rigged up through an ingenious splicing of telephone wires – and he’d already heard from Jaap that on the day the bombs fell, Queen Wilhelmina had been home, but had since gone again. The entire German defence in the west was crumbling, Jaap had told him. Gerrit knew it was good news, and meant to cheer him, but nothing could do that these days. He sat for a long time in the dark attic.