The Germans attacked the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, and the Dutch went to war for five days. The Dutch army surrendered after the Rotterdam bombardment, but the Dutch Queen and her government escaped to London, thereby assuring that the sovereignty of the country remained intact in spite of the invasion. The German occupation began on May 15, 1940. Hitler’s dream of annexing the Netherlands—arguing that the Dutch people were of superior Aryan stock—was rendered impossible when the Dutch government refused to return to the country. Infuriated, Hitler retaliated and the Nazi oppression started at once, with rationing of food and firing of Jewish civil servants and university professors by September, growing more and more severe over the years.
Passive resistance soon became popular and widespread, with actions such as walking out or booing during the German newsreels that played in movie theatres before the film. Underground resistance movements also developed for the hiding and transporting of Jews, among other actions intended to resist the Nazi government, and hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens were actively involved, either directly or indirectly by assisting those who were.
Most of us have read Anne Frank’s moving memoir about growing up in a hidden room during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. Elisabeth Hofboer Breslav provides an alternative perspective on coming-of-age in the Netherlands under Nazi Occupation. Her essay tracks the year she was sixteen, the year the Netherlands was liberated from the Germans and World War II came to an end. This was a season of intense famine known later as the Hunger Winter. To punish resistance to German rule, the Nazis set up a blockade that cut off food and fuel supplies from farms to the cities, creating widespread starvation and malnutrition in the Dutch population.
AFTER FOUR YEARS of the brutal Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the announcement of the successful Normandy invasion in June ‘44 gave the Dutch people hope that at long last the war was coming to an end. We scanned the illegal newspapers and at night gathered around our hidden radios, anxious for the latest news from the front. The Allies were heading our way. Paris fell. Brussels followed. Then, on September 4, 1944, the British took Antwerp. We now know that, on that day, a few English patrol vehicles briefly strayed across the Belgian border into the Netherlands and then returned to their base. It was a simple incursion of no military importance, but it set off a chain of events recorded in our history books as Dolle Dinsdag, Crazy Tuesday, September 5, 1944.
Reports of the little border crossing hit the Underground news bulletins under the banner headline THE ALLIES ARE IN HOLLAND and were picked up by Radio Orange, the nightly Dutch language program from the BBC in London, which broadcast it all over the land. Rumors began to fly. Our liberators had arrived!
Nobody apparently checked the facts, not even the German authorities. The top German commander for the Netherlands, the dreaded and despised Dr. Seyss-Inquart, declared a state of siege. To get people off the street, he ordered earlier evening curfew hours and warned that gatherings of more than five people would come under fire without warning. Only four years before, upon taking over command of the country, this same man had solemnly promised, “We want to be protectors and benefactors and always remain friends.”
On that day, some of the German troops looted the contents of the Dutch homes in which they had been housed and, after burning important records, began leaving on convoys. Members of the Dutch Nazi party were shaking in their black boots, and many of them contacted the authorities in hope of getting transportation to the East with the departing soldiers.
Meanwhile, the Dutch Underground fighters, supplied with weapons air-dropped by the Allies on moonless nights or sometimes stolen from the Germans, were waiting for instructions on when and where to begin a rear attack once the Germans were facing the oncoming Allied forces. There was no doubt in our minds that the enemy expected a battle over nearby Amsterdam. For several years, the military commanders had been rounding up Dutch men to clear bomb debris at the airport and to construct bunkers, dugouts and trenches along major roads. While our parents worried how intense the upcoming battle was going to be, we kids were making plans to welcome our liberators in style. We combed the secret corners of our attics and basements for the forbidden national flags and patriotic streamers and hid them under our clothes as we went outside, waiting day after day.
During the weeks that followed, the nervous tension became unbearable. The Germans were putting up a fierce resistance and the Allies, after succeeding in the liberation of the southern part of Holland, suffered a devastating setback in the battle of Arnhem on September 30. Their casualties were enormous, greater than in Normandy. For the Dutch people, it meant the loss of all hope for an end to the war before the arrival of yet another winter.
By this time I was a scrawny, angry and confused sixteen-year-old. I shocked the minister of our Dutch Reformed Church by refusing to be confirmed as a member of the congregation. It seemed quite obvious to me that God, if he existed at all, was neither powerful nor good. Besides, our ministers admonished us from the pulpit that we should continue to pray for our enemy, and I thought that was asking altogether too much.
Since my high school in Amsterdam was used to house German soldiers, my class wound up meeting in the basement of a mental hospital, an environment that was feared and avoided by the Germans except for some of their scientists who used the patients for unspeakable experiments before killing them. I remember that we were studying the philosophy of Plato at the time, and I tried to make sense of the concept of “Western Civilization” that seemed to have no connection with the barbaric world in which I lived.
All around me I was witnessing the gruesome spectacle of the ever-increasing reign of terror. Jewish razzias (raids), started in 1943, continued unabated. Some Jews had fled the country, a number had found a safe haven and were living in hiding, but by far the greater majority was rounded up over time to become part of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Among those were a number of classmates. My closest girlfriend Lilie was deported all by herself. I helped her sew the required yellow Stars of David on her clothing and we exchanged heavily censored letters while she was in transit camp. But then the letters stopped and I knew I had lost her.
Other groups of victims began to take the place of Jews. Sabotage acts by Resistance workers had always been punished with imprisonment, torture and often the death of the accused. Now they resulted not only in the shooting of the suspected culprits, but their entire family and circle of friends might summarily be executed in the street, not infrequently together with incidental bystanders. Mayors of towns were ordered to maintain a list of the ten most anti-German people known in the area. Sometimes, when those responsible for a perceived misdeed could not be found, the authorities would arrest these listed residents in the community where the event had occurred and organize a public execution. Here and there, in Dutch cities and villages throughout the country, a simple plaque in a wall commemorates the place and the time where one of these many senseless massacres took place.
Ironically perhaps, the winter of 1944-1945 was unusually severe. Heavy snowstorms combined with temperatures that were so low that barges in the Amstel River got stuck in the ice. An icebreaker was needed to maintain an open channel. Dutch coal is mined in Limburg, and when that southern province was liberated, even the previously sporadic supplies came to a standstill, leaving us without any coal, gas or electricity as of October. During the past two years of constantly decreasing fuel allotments, we had already burned our trees, our furniture, and the doors of our bedrooms and kitchen cabinets. Now there was little left to keep us from freezing.
Desperate, people took to the streets, searching for anything that would burn. We collected cinders along train tracks. We removed the wooden railings of bridges and then often the bridge itself. We dug up railroad ties and unhinged the stations’ wooden crossing gates. In the cities, people pried pieces of asphalt out of roadbeds and streetcar tracks and dragged what remained of door jambs or window frames from bombed-out houses. In the country, fences disappeared. In order to protect outbuildings, farm hands slept in stables, ready to jump into action at the sound of an axe or a saw.
Preparing what little food we had became a major problem. Most of us used what was called a kookbus, or cooking can, a small contraption that consisted of two metal cans, one fitted inside the other with a space for a draft opening in the bottom. We placed it on top of our idle gas stoves and burned paper, wood scraps or pieces of peat in it, and the fire was hot enough to heat the little pan of food from the soup kitchen that was placed over it. When we were lucky enough to get some beans on one of our treks to the farms, my mother would bring them to a boil on that little burner and then bury the pan in her bed, where the after-heat was enough to finish the cooking process. I asked her once where she had learned this and she told me that her system was really no different from the old-fashioned farmers’ hay box.
From London, the Dutch government in exile appealed to our railroad workers via Radio Orange to go on strike to prevent mass transportation of German troops, material and stolen goods back to Germany. The workers obeyed and immediately became a target for persecution. Countless railroad men were forced to leave their families, increasing the ranks of the thousands of fugitives who were already living in hiding. All of these needed to be supplied with fake ration cards. The Underground took on this added responsibility and also provided money to the families that were left behind without a breadwinner.
The strike was extremely effective. Hardly a train left the stations and, when one did sometimes run, it was manned by German soldiers with the help of Dutch Nazi members or by an unfortunate rail man who had not gotten away and was forced to work with a gun at his back. These occasional trains were almost invariably strafed by Allied planes that had become quite daring towards the end of the war and would attack even in broad daylight, so that on the rare occasion that civilians might be allowed to board one car in the endless line of wagons, they were hesitant to do so.
As a result, public transportation existed only within one’s own town. It was provided by carrier tricycles and an occasional dilapidated cart, drawn by a skeletal horse that was rejected for service by the Germans and deemed too far gone to be butchered. Mail and telephone service had been discontinued since shortly after the Normandy invasion. In occupied territory, every community was now cut off from the rest of the country and the residents suffered in isolation. There is no question that the railroad strike played an important role in the military strategy, but the elimination of public transportation aggravated the civilian hardship because the occasional food supplies from the liberated provinces could no longer get through.
By January 1945, the soup kitchens cut back service to three times per week and the quality of the food was worse than ever before. Matchsticks, pebbles and other less identifiable objects often swam around in the watery substance, and yet we did not dare throw it away. In February the last supplies ran out and the kitchens closed altogether. Our sole weekly rations were reduced to half a loaf of bread and a pound of potatoes, and our diet averaged about 400 calories per day. In the end, ration coupons became meaningless. Stores were empty and remained closed. We lived on sugar beets and tulip bulbs, and we spent our days standing in endless lines at farms in the polders. Our roads were clogged with columns of emaciated people, many covered with open sores and swollen limbs. They slogged through the snow, pulling behind them carts with personal belongings that they hoped to barter for food at country farms. Some of these people never reached their destination or returned home; they could be seen lying by the side of the road.
Fainting from exhaustion and lightheadedness was a common occurrence in the food lines, and I accidentally discovered this could be turned to an advantage. One terribly cold day, I found myself standing between two men who towered over me and whose insides were obviously distressed by the beets, a problem we all shared. Being so much smaller, I received the full force of their combined gas attack and it actually knocked me out. I was lifted onto shoulders and handed over people’s heads to the front of the line, where the farmer gave me an extra measure of grains. My brother absolutely refused to believe that it really was an accident, and he suggested a repeat performance. I agreed to try, and I actually got away with it a few weeks later at a different farm, but I did not want to take the risk of being recognized and kicked off the lines for good, so most of the time I tried to stay on my feet and wait my turn like everybody else.
Photographs taken during the Hunger Winter show the Dutch people looking like concentration camp victims. Our clothes were full of holes, and we smelled because our soap was made of clay that left our skin raw but not clean. We all had fleas, and part of my family’s domestic morning routine consisted of two of us carrying our blankets out in the backyard and holding them up against the light. Fleas could be spotted as little black dots buried in the woolen fibers, and we plucked them out and squashed them between two thumbnails.
Unlike many others, nobody in my family ever had body lice, probably because Mom insisted on airing and brushing our clothes when washing them in cold water and without soap became rather useless. But I did develop a bad case of head lice, and I vividly recall my shame as, night after night, my mother had me bend over a newspaper spread out on the dining room table while she removed the nits and killed the vermin with a fine-tooth comb.
Poor nutrition and lack of vitamins and soap affected anybody who did not have the means to buy on the black market. Hunger oedema, which causes swelling of different body parts, was rampant, as were open festering sores. Infants were having a terrible time and often had to be kept wrapped like mummies, with holes in their facial masks. The elderly also suffered greatly because of their inability to live without heat. The mortality rate among these two groups rose alarmingly. By and large, teenagers managed better than most anyone else because we were not bothered by the moral dilemmas that created so much stress for our parents. Without realizing it, we operated under the natural law of the survival of the fittest. We got around. We learned to hustle. And we felt no compunction about stealing food or firewood or anything else we thought we could use.
Although we were not old enough to join the Resistance, we took part in the war effort in our own small way. For several years, we were messengers. We listened to the BBC on the crystal sets we kept hidden in some of our basements and attics, or we picked up illegal flyers. On our bikes, while we still had them, and later on foot, we helped spread the news from the various fronts. We distributed our messages after school, dropping in on teachers, friends of our parents or other trustworthy adults. We circulated without much trouble. In fact, because we were kids, we were often able to scoot through military checkpoints where older people had to wait in line for hours to have their identity papers scrutinized. Any problems we ran into usually involved drunken off-duty soldiers and the girls were at greater risk than the boys.
One day, when a couple of girls had escaped just in the nick of time and returned with their clothes torn to shreds, our brothers and boyfriends decided to instruct us in some street-defense techniques. I was just thirteen when I learned that fellows “hang” either right or left, and a swift kick to the bulge in an attacker’s pants leg could provide you with enough time to make a getaway. We also practiced rear kicks in the shin, in case we were grabbed from behind and, if a guy was on top of you, you had to press your thumbs very hard into his eyeballs.
The instruction proved quite useful, and I vividly recall the time I had to put it into practice. Attacks of this kind were common throughout the five years of Occupation. Since I still had my bike, this one must have been in the early part of ‘44. I was walking home with a girlfriend, pushing the bike between us, when a small group of roaring-drunk German soldiers came towards us and began to surround us. I took a careful look at the one who approached me, drove the front wheel of my bike between his legs and yanked the handlebars up and to the right. Hard. The result was astonishing. The big guy let out a wail like the soprano on one of my dad’s favorite opera records and fell backwards on the ground, his comrades flocking to his side to find out what had happened. We did not stay to watch. I jumped on my bike, my girlfriend hopped on the back. We took off in a hurry, lucky that the soldiers did not have enough wits about them to use their guns.
Back at our hangout, we celebrated and boasted, with big words like “I got him right in the gones” and “I almost sliced his balls off.” But in bed that night, I had a bad case of the shakes. I did not understand why and wouldn’t have wanted anybody to know about it.
Like my peers, I grew like a spindly bean stalk because of our malnutrition, and I developed a terrible posture. I suffered frequent, very painful spasms in the lower back at which time I was barely able to walk. Our doctor would immobilize the muscles by strapping broad strips of adhesive tape across my back, from below the breasts down to the upper buttocks. They were unceremoniously ripped off four days later, when the pain would be gone. This lower back weakness has remained a life-long problem since that time. Many years later in America, when I had severe back aches during my pregnancy, I asked my obstetrician to strap up my back. He looked appalled. “In this country such treatment is used only by veterinarians and, even then, sparingly,” he informed me.
Of course, I also had my share of sores that would not heal, including a bad case of winterhanden, or chilblains. We had no medication for this condition, and my doctor’s nurse advised me to use an old folk remedy and urinate on my hands every night before going to bed. It stung badly.
Alarmed by the report in late winter that some 400 people were dying of hunger each day in the few provinces of Holland that remained under Nazi control, Queen Wilhelmina from London appealed to the international community for humanitarian aid. The neutral Swedes were the first to respond. In March 1945, Swedish Red Cross trucks arrived with the ingredients for baking the most gorgeous white bread I could remember ever having seen—and a supply of delicious, creamy margarine to go with it. Bakeries were provided with the necessary electricity to run their ovens, and we formed long lines hours before the announced distribution.
It was a treat, and it helped a little, but only for a couple of days. A much bigger effort was urgently needed to prevent mass starvation in Western Holland. Finally, at the end of April, the Allies were able to reach an agreement with the Germans to allow emergency food drops from the air at specified times. I can still summon the excitement my brother and I felt on May 2 as we watched the first drop from our attic window. We listened for the familiar drone of bombers high up in the sky, and we anxiously checked the clock to make sure it was the designated time for the food drop and not another bombing raid. The planes circled over Schiphol Airport and went into a steep dive, the big Red Cross on the fuselage clearly visible against the clouds. “Oh my God, will you look at that,” we yelled at each other as it rained glorious manna from heaven.
Thousands of tons of food were dropped over airports in Rotterdam, Leiden, The Hague and Amsterdam. Farmers came with their horse-drawn wagons, and volunteers worked round the clock to gather the cases and load the wagons. Local stores became the distribution centers, and again, long lines formed hours before opening time. But the meat and butter in the first packets proved too rich for us, and many people became violently ill. For subsequent drops, at the advice of the Red Cross, the Allies for a while switched to Army biscuits and powdered eggs and milk to increase our tolerance.
My mother was among those who could no longer handle food. She had grown terribly thin by this time, and I often caught her supporting her belly with both hands as she was going about the house. When I asked her why she was doing this, she told me that something seemed to be loose inside and was rolling around. By the end of April, she started having fainting spells and began to vomit. My father sent me to the doctor to ask if he could make a house call. Doctors were supplied with enough gasoline rations to fuel a small motor scooter, and Moeder was examined that afternoon. The diagnosis was serious. She had an intestinal obstruction. The doctor explained that the fatty tissues that surround the intestinal tract had apparently been depleted, allowing a twist to develop. Immediate surgery was imperative.
The news was frightening for a couple of reasons. The nearest hospital where surgery could be performed was in Amsterdam, and the German Gestapo had installed its headquarters in the center building of the complex. Even with the Allies’ proud reputation for precision bombing, this was rather close for comfort. Secondly, we had no ambulance service and no public transportation or taxis, and we were fifteen kilometers from that part of the city.
We wound up borrowing a delivery tricycle from the greengrocer on our street who was closed for business anyway, and I made up a bed in the loading compartment. We put Moeder inside, covered her with a blanket and Vader rode off with her, leaving my brother and me with little hope that we would ever see her alive again. At the entrance of Amsterdam, my father was stopped by a German guard who wanted to inspect his cargo and yanked away the blanket. When he saw my deathly ill mother, the soldier jumped back and yelled, “Tod! Abkratzen! Raus!” (Dead! Get lost! Scram!) while wiping his hands on his uniform as if he had been contaminated by some hideous disease.
The events of the following two weeks form a blurred streak in my memory. My mother was operated on by candlelight, and for days the prognosis remained poor because of her extremely weakened condition. Meanwhile, I was taking her place at home, trying to prepare some sort of a meal for the three of us and going through the useless motion of rinsing her soiled bed linens by hand in cold water and, of course, no soap. The sheets dried stiff and dingy looking, and they smelled no better than before I started.
Looking back, life in those days was one continuous nightmare. There was the worry that my mother might not live. There were the continued bombings day and night that might kill her even if the operation was successful. Sabotage actions were increasing, and executions of prisoners and arbitrarily selected bystanders were taking place with appalling regularity. My father and I tried to visit the hospital whenever we could find a bike or were able to hitch a ride on one of the carts. We had to pass the checkpoint before entering Amsterdam, and we always wondered whether the soldiers might be picking up people just at that moment. All this time, according to the Underground newspapers, the Allies and the Germans were negotiating the terms of surrender. Why did it have to take so long?
And then, without warning, at 9 P.M. on May 4, the illegal radio announced the German surrender for 9 A.M. the next morning. Despite the curfew, people burst out of their homes and surged into the streets, laughing, crying and shouting, “The war is over. We’re free!” Somebody began to sing our national anthem, others joined, and soon the chorus swelled and the sound traveled from one neighborhood to the next until, suddenly, shots rang out. “The Moffen,” somebody yelled, using a derogative term for the Germans. “Take cover.” A row of military vehicles sped past, spraying bullets at random and sending us scurrying back inside.
The next morning, newspapers hit the streets carrying huge headlines proclaiming the German surrender. They also cautioned the population to refrain from demonstrations and to be extremely cautious. The war was over, but until the Allied troops arrived in our area, the Germans remained armed and they were very dangerous. The hunger also continued, but so did the food drops. In addition, truck convoys with supplies from the liberated south were beginning to arrive, which meant more frequent distributions of all those good things we had not tasted for years.
At last, on May 8, the Canadians rolled into Amstelveen, tossing chocolate bars and cigarettes to the waving and cheering people lining their route all the way from Amsterdam. But while my friends were out throwing bouquets of flowers and climbing on the tanks of our liberators, I sat fearfully at Moeder’s bedside in the hospital and watched her, ever so slowly, come back to us. Her recuperation would take several more weeks and complete recovery many months. I missed out on the parades and the partying, but I remember the unspeakable joy and gratitude that filled my heart. Unlike so many others, our family had survived.