“Early in the morning, all of a sudden it was total silence,” said Audrey, who gave a little gasp at the memory. “Everybody said, ‘Now what’s happening?’ because it was sort of frightening. You know, we had gotten used to the thumping of the shells.”
They had just experienced Velp’s longest and most violent, night-long thunderstorm of bombs and rockets. Now, nearing dawn on 16 April, the storm seemed to have passed, but life under occupation had instilled in Dutch minds the discipline to await the next terrible thing, for it would surely come.
Audrey crept to the window, with inky night opposite the pane, and put her ear to the glass: “I could hear the sound of shuffling feet—very strange, because at such an early hour, no one ever went out onto the streets.”
She could make out the sounds of what seemed to be a great number of people moving outside, and she began to catch a whiff of something in the air. “The very first thing I smelled—I didn’t see, because we were in our cellar where we had been for weeks because at that point our area was being liberated practically house to house.”
What she smelled was the aroma of cigarette smoke. They were real cigarettes made of tobacco, no mistaking it. There hadn’t been such an aroma in Velp for most of the war; only ersatz cigarettes made of oak and beech leaves had been available. These smelled awful and did smokers next to no good at all. And now she smelled genuine tobacco.
What happened next became one of her favorite stories to tell in interviews for the remainder of her life. The four van Heemstras tiptoed up the steps from the cellar to the first floor of the Beukenhof and then dared to poke their heads into the morning air. Instead of the jaunty Tommies she remembered from the battle for Arnhem, she ventured out to a horrifying moment facing soldiers pulling back bolts on Sten guns and ready for a fight, “their eyes glittering and their guns pointed straight at me,” she said.
She blurted out some words in elegant English and “the instant they heard me speak their own language, they let out a great yell.”
One of them bellowed, “Not only have we liberated a town—we have liberated an English girl!”
For the first time in five years the men with the guns weren’t German. It was the moment the people of Velp had expected 211 agonizing days earlier on 17 September when British Airborne parachutes had filled the air. “Liberation!” they had shouted expectantly on that bright autumn Sunday, only to have the dream shattered.
This time the soldiers looked like Tommies and wore their uniforms, including some not in helmets but in those lovely red berets. Their shoulder patches did not show a Pegasus in white on a red field. These patches showed a white polar bear. They were in fact Canadian First Army troops, and the vehicles passing slowly by on Rozendaalselaan belonged to the 5th Canadian Armoured Division. Just a day ago German Tigers had been parked there.
“The guns, the tanks, the trucks, the jeeps, and the men came rolling into town,” said Audrey. “Cecil B. DeMille could not surpass the spectacle.”
Street by street they cleared out the Germans and Green Police. “I inhaled their petrol as if it were priceless perfume and demanded a cigarette, even though it made me choke,” said Audrey. For the girl not quite sixteen, smoking suddenly became a delight that connected her to the incredible feeling of liberation and that first cigarette began a lifelong habit, one central to her personality.
Neighbors poured out of every house. Onderduikers who had been in hiding for weeks, months, and in some cases years tumbled outside to breathe free air.
Jews of all ages began to appear for the most unlikely of reunions; people thought to be long dead in concentration camps had gone into hiding, aided by brave Velpenaren who for years had shared risks and rations. Even the closest of friends and neighbors in the next house over were shocked to discover that individual Jews or whole families had been concealed just yards away through the course of the war. Now these people too breathed in the freedom of liberation.
Red, white, and blue armbands imprinted with a single word, ORANJE, designated members of the Resistance. They brought rifles into view and became an impromptu security force. Citizens donned any piece of orange clothing that had survived the war. Red, white, and blue Dutch flags waved proudly, hung here, draped there, tacked to tree trunks and telephone poles. Bottles of wine and brandy and champagne set back with great determination in 1940 were dusted off and uncorked now. The citizens shoved precious bread and cheese into the hands of the soldiers, who handed out cigarettes and candy in return. The euphoria of the moment made everyone in sight drunk, with or without spirits, and before long every single person on the sidewalks and in the streets and gardens, equal parts Canadian soldiers and Velpenaren, had broken out in laughter. Joyous, tension-shattering laughter gripped the village like a sudden spring madness. For all of them, whether from this side of the Atlantic or the other, there was one ultimate realization: I have lived to see this day!
“Oh, God, I could scarcely believe it,” said Audrey.
A block away, Steven Jansen and his fiancée joined the celebration. “From all side streets one runs to Hoofdstraat. A flag! There a flag hangs. We are free! Congratulations! Congratulations! Embracing each other. The traces of the misery still on the face, but also the happiness to experience this moment. We are free! With tears clouding our eyes we see the long-hidden fluttering tricolor flying proudly.”
But yes, the misery did hang on the air. The people let loose even more welled up emotion as they remembered those who could not celebrate this day because they had been shot by the Nazis, or killed in a bombing raid, or carted off to a concentration camp, or felled by typhus, or diphtheria, or starvation in the winter just past.
When the laughter receded, the anger welled. It was time to reckon with the collaborators—those who had been in league with the Germans or too cooperative to the Reich. These people were rounded up and pushed along to the center of town by the Oranje Resistance men with rifles. The accused were forced to run a gauntlet of their neighbors—the great majority of the population who had remained loyal to the queen. At the police bureau on Stationsstraat, women who had fallen in love with German soldiers or otherwise helped them over the long years of occupation were punished by having their heads shaved. Fists of Resistance men clenched the shorn locks of Dutch women who had been sympathizers and held them high on the balcony like Iroquois holding scalps. Below, the crowd cheered.
To Audrey’s shock, a Canadian security officer accompanied by members of the Resistance asked Ella to go with them, and the Baroness van Heemstra was led away. In an instant the most wonderful feeling, breathing free air, became a sensation of not being able to breathe at all.
At Canadian headquarters, Ella sat for questioning by an officer identified only as Captain James, a field security man. During their conversation, Ella claimed she had done work for the Allied intelligence services; James duly noted her assertion. She listed her accomplishments on behalf of the Resistance, most notably her family’s sheltering of a British paratrooper along with work tending the wounded of Velp. There was also the period during which she participated in the zwarte avonden—the secret dance performances—with her daughter.
On this day of retribution from the Oranje Resistance when Dutch women collaborators were being scalped right and left, Ella van Heemstra walked out of headquarters with her hair attached. For Ella it must have been vindication that she had finally been accepted as a supporter of the Allied cause, which she most certainly had been for three years now. Captain James noted that, to him, the baroness was neither dangerous nor suspicious. Instead, he—or perhaps the Resistance men at his shoulder—found her to be onnozel, an old Dutch word meaning “silly.”
To the relief of the Dutch girl, her mother returned unharmed as tanks and armored troop carriers continued to roll down Hoofdstraat, kicking up great clouds of dust, spent gunpowder, and ash that coated every surface, especially the pavement. The fine grit got into mouths and nostrils and eyes and yet it didn’t matter at all: Liberation!
In the afternoon, military bulldozers appeared and swept out of the way the giant felled trees of Velp, which the Germans had believed would keep the Allies at bay for weeks. The mechanical monsters pushed all of the trees aside in just that afternoon.
Men with mine detectors then swept every inch of town for buried explosive devices and booby traps planted by the Germans in previous weeks. There were so many mines along Hoofdstraat in the eastern half of the village that “the Germans had told me where it was safe to walk,” said Ben van Griethuysen. At this stage of the war with defeat likely, they didn’t want their mines blowing up children.
The center of Velp seemed to be the center of the world on this day, with all citizens dressed in their Sunday best and walking about simply because they could. For the first time in five years they were free to be seen out of doors without a purpose, and without an Ausweis. The Canadian soldiers were everywhere, “millions of them,” it seemed to Audrey, and all morning and through the afternoon the military vehicles rolled through, on their way to liberate the next town over.
“I stood there night and day just watching,” said Audrey. “The joy of hearing English, the incredible relief of being free. It’s something you just can’t fathom.”
But for some of these marvelous Polar Bears, it would be a last happy day. “Many would be killed in the battle to free Deventer,” said Dick Mantel, who experienced Liberation Day as a boy of fifteen. Deventer sat twenty-five miles to the northeast, and the Germans fought there to the death, as they had in Velp.
At the intersection of Hoofdstraat and Rozendaalselaan, a military policeman with white sleeves directed the buzzing flow of Canadian Armoured traffic. It was breathtaking, all those tanks clattering past the Beukenhof and on up toward Rozendaal and beyond. The men of each one smiled and waved and gave the V for victory sign. They threw chocolate bars and cigarettes to villagers who applauded and shouted blessings in return. But by now Audrey no longer rejoiced. Soldiers had handed the shy girl chocolate bar after chocolate bar and she ate them all. Soon, a stomach that had not known chocolate for years sent the foreign substance back up. And yet, she said, “Filled with such happiness, I could not stay sick for long.”