Only forty miles separate the Dutch city of Breda from The Hague. Nijmegen lies just fifty-five miles from Amsterdam. Yet in late 1944 and early 1945, those cities, despite the short distances between them, might as well have been on opposite sides of the moon.
Breda and Nijmegen were located in two of the three freed southern provinces of the Netherlands. The Hague, Amsterdam, and the country’s other large population centers were all in the northwest, which was still occupied by the Germans. The area would remain under German control until May 4, 1945, only four days before the official end of the war in Europe. Once Market Garden failed, the Allies had no immediate interest in liberating the rest of Holland, and the Nazis were free to take their revenge on the Dutch for the pre-Arnhem railway strike and myriad other acts of resistance.
In the days immediately after their victory at Arnhem, the Germans blew up the ports of Rotterdam and other cities and flooded thousands of acres of farmland. The leaders of the railway strike were imprisoned, and several were killed. From then on, every act of Dutch rebellion, however small, was met with mass executions. When resistance fighters ambushed and severely wounded General Hanns Rauter, the ruthless head of the SS in Holland, more than three hundred Dutch citizens lost their lives in retaliation. In Amsterdam, twenty-nine young Dutchmen were executed on a garbage dump in the center of the city, and several buildings were set afire.
SS murder squads kept busy through the last months of the war, shooting hostages on street corners and in the central squares of Holland’s major cities. “You saw them lying everywhere in groups of twenty—and they left them there as a warning,” one Dutchman observed. Another wrote of the sprawled bodies he witnessed, “You look and feel punch drunk, shattered, and you don’t know what is stirring in your soul.”
Terror came to the Dutch countryside, too. After a skirmish between four German soldiers and a group of resistance fighters near the small town of Putten in central Holland, hundreds of German troops surrounded the village. Its male residents, more than six hundred in all, were dispatched to German concentration camps; fewer than fifty survived the war. The women and children were sent away, and most of Putten’s houses were burned to the ground. When a young Dutchman traveled to the village to look for his parents, all he found was “smoking ruins and deadly silence.”
As horrific as their terror tactics were, the Nazis tended to be selective in applying them. No one, however, escaped the extreme hunger caused by the German food embargo that was imposed after the railway strike. Before the embargo, a Dutch citizen’s average daily calorie intake was 1,300, less than half of what constituted a normal diet. A month later, the average number of calories consumed per day had fallen to 900.
In this once prosperous country, communal kitchens were set up to feed millions of people with whatever food remained. City dwellers roamed the countryside by the thousands, begging or bartering with farmers. The misery, one observer wrote, was heartbreaking: “People with their feet torn, blood in their shoes. Some had no shoes and wrapped their feet in rags.”
In one of the coldest and wettest winters of the century, there was almost no coal, gas, or electricity. To cook and warm themselves, the Dutch had to scavenge wood from anywhere they could find it. Trees in parks, woods, and along once leafy city avenues were cut down; in just three months, Amsterdam lost more than half of its estimated 42,000 trees. Bridge railings disappeared, as did wooden cross ties from tram lines. Abandoned houses were raided for their joists, beams, and staircases.
By the end of 1944, Holland’s main cities were landscapes of desolation—their gardens bare; their parks, streets, and canals filled with mountains of garbage; their entry roads barricaded with heavy concrete walls. Dark and deathly silent, they were pervaded, one Rotterdam resident wrote, by “a quiet, oppressive apathy.” There was no traffic, no industrial or commercial activity. Schools were closed because of the lack of heating. People took refuge in their homes, huddling together for warmth and avoiding any unnecessary activity so they could conserve their rapidly flagging energy. On New Year’s Eve 1944, one Dutchman wondered whether 1945 was going to be “the year of liberation or the year of our death.” Another observed in his diary, “For the first time in my life, I went to bed before midnight, glad that this black, disastrous year was over.” Early 1945, however, proved even bleaker than the year before. In January, the daily food ration fell to 460 calories, then to 350 in February.
An emaciated boy in Amsterdam during Holland’s Hunger Winter.
Outside Holland, the war was drawing to a close. On February 4, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta. The Russians were less than fifty miles from Berlin. None of that mattered to the Dutch, whose only thought revolved around finding something to eat. People fought over anything remotely edible: when a bin full of gruel was accidentally spilled at a central kitchen in Rotterdam, bystanders scraped it off the street. Sugar beets and dried tulip bulbs became diet staples. Although they tasted dreadful and had no nutritional value, they filled the stomach and lessened to a small degree the always gnawing hunger. “By March, our faces were pale green, like imitation van Goghs,” a Dutch painter recalled.
Near Arnhem, fifteen-year-old Audrey Hepburn and her mother subsisted on turnips, tulip bulbs, and nettles. “Everyone tried to cook grass,” Hepburn later recalled, “[but] I couldn’t stand it.” In early 1945, she was five feet, six inches tall and weighed less than ninety pounds. The lack of food had made her so weak that she could barely walk, much less dance. Like many other Dutch citizens, she suffered from jaundice, anemia, edema, and other health problems stemming from her severe malnutrition.
But at least she was still alive. By March, thousands of her countrymen had died of starvation. The death rate climbed so swiftly that undertakers could not supply enough coffins for the dead or find enough men to bury them. Emaciated corpses were piled high in hospitals and churches throughout the country. A visitor to a cemetery in Rotterdam noted a row of “shrunken bodies lying next to each other. No flesh on their thighs or calves. Most had bent arms and legs, the hands clenched as if the poor devil was still asking for food.”
In Amsterdam, a resident wrote, “My old, beautiful, and noble city is in a death struggle.” So, too, was much of the rest of the country. But with a few prominent exceptions, no one outside seemed to care.
IN LATE DECEMBER 1944, Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema was summoned to a meeting with Queen Wilhelmina in London. Two years earlier, he had joined a Dutch RAF squadron and was now flying bombing missions to Germany, but he remained close to the queen. When he was shown into the sitting room of her house in Chester Square, Wilhelmina looked up from the small armchair in which she was sitting. The young Dutchman knew immediately that something was wrong: “For the first time, in my experience, she did not rise to greet me.” With great emotion, she exclaimed, “Have you heard? They’re dropping dead in the streets!” Roelfzema, having no idea what she was talking about, stared at her in bewilderment. Gesturing impatiently, the queen repeated, “The people are dropping dead in the streets!” Her visitor shook his head; he was, as he wrote later, “living my self-satisfied life in the RAF,” completely unaware that the Netherlands had become a “hell of hunger, terror, and death.” The queen refused to accept his ignorance. “Don’t you know?” she kept insisting. “Haven’t you heard?” Shocked by her “horror and grief,” Roelfzema “thanked God when our meeting ended.”
His obliviousness to his country’s plight was not unusual. Most people in London, not to mention the rest of the world, had no idea of the starvation ravaging Holland. Determined to focus international attention on what was happening in their nation, Wilhelmina and her prime minister, Pieter Gerbrandy, embarked on a campaign to persuade the Allies to liberate all of Holland immediately or, failing that, to provide direct aid to their starving people.
Gerbrandy, for his part, was responsible for what one historian called “one of the most impressive exercises in public relations in the history of World War II. The Netherlands was put on the map by him.” In October 1944, Gerbrandy sought out dozens of British and foreign journalists in London to inform them of Holland’s suffering. His efforts resulted in a stream of sympathetic stories, including one in Newsweek that began “ ‘Famine, floods, cold, and darkness…a people starved, frozen, and drowned.’ Pieter Gerbrandy said these were the winter prospects unless the Dutch are liberated this fall.”
Having begun to alert the world, the diminutive prime minister now faced a far greater challenge: persuading the Allied commanders to change their strategy in order to save his country. His difficulty was compounded by the enormous psychological and cultural gulf that existed between the high-ranking Allied military commanders and the Dutch and other peoples of occupied Europe.
Allied officers working at General Eisenhower’s headquarters in France seemed totally unaware of what the Europeans had to endure. They were ensconced in the five-star Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles, a wooded area near Paris that had been the apex of French royal indulgence in the seventeenth century and was now transformed into an emblem of Allied privilege. They lived in a world of luxury and comfort, supplied with seemingly endless quantities of U.S. cigarettes and steaks, Scotch whisky, and French champagne. At the Trianon Palace, waiters in black tie served them meals on white linen tablecloths set with crystal stemware and gold-rimmed plates. One American general described hunting partridge near Versailles, with “all the farm hands for miles around acting as beaters.”
It was at Versailles that Gerbrandy met with Eisenhower, having written the supreme Allied commander in December about a potential “calamity as has not been seen in Europe for centuries, if at all….It is literally a matter of life and death.” Eisenhower listened sympathetically to what Gerbrandy had to say, but he rejected the prime minister’s appeal to change the Allied plans and liberate the rest of Holland. He explained that “military considerations and not political considerations” must dictate the Allied strategy. The best service the Allies could render to Holland, Eisenhower insisted, was to defeat Germany as soon as possible. It was the same rationale that had been given to those who, earlier in the war, had wanted help for Poland or assistance to save the remaining Jews of Europe from annihilation.
Perhaps Eisenhower was right. Certainly, many if not most military historians have agreed with his assessment. But it’s not surprising that leading Jewish figures and Dutch and Polish officials, among others, were skeptical, believing that the “Defeat Germany first” mantra was a convenient excuse to avoid doing anything that U.S. and British leaders—political and military—had decided would not be to their own or their countries’ advantage. In this case, the primary aim of the English-speaking allies was to appease the Soviets, who had been pressing hard for an advance from the west into Germany to relieve the pressure on the Red Army, which had swept across eastern Europe and was already deep into German territory. SHAEF’s rationale was particularly hard for the Dutch to stomach, considering that the Allied fiasco at Arnhem had directly led to their country’s calamitous situation.
In a letter smuggled out to the Dutch government in exile, a resident of Amsterdam declared that he and other citizens of Holland felt they were being needlessly and selfishly sacrificed. “The Allies are admired,” he observed, “but they are also regarded as callous egotists.” An Anglophile friend, he added, had exclaimed to him, “To let an ancient and civilized people like ours die without lifting a finger—my God, how can they do it?”
Queen Wilhelmina made exactly that point in personal appeals to Churchill and Roosevelt, who was of Dutch descent himself and who had welcomed Wilhelmina to the White House and his home in Hyde Park in 1942. “I felt as if I was addressing an old friend, so cordial were his feelings for the Netherlands,” she noted about her visits with the president. Cordial they might have been—FDR assured her in 1944 that “I shall not forget the country of my origin”—but he also said there was nothing he could do, except to urge Eisenhower to “save food in Germany and keep it for use in Holland.”
Churchill, for his part, was stricken by the tragedy taking place in Holland but told the queen he was no longer able to influence the Allied high command, adding “I must leave this to the generals.” Earlier, he had told a friend that he was trying “to have Holland cleared up” but “it is not so easy as it used to be for me to get things done.”
AS WRETCHED AS THEIR LIVES already were in early 1945, the Dutch were about to experience another jolt of suffering and death, this one directly inflicted by their allies. On the night of March 3, the RAF, alerted by the Dutch resistance, sent more than fifty aircraft over The Hague to bomb V2 launching sites in a forest not far from the city. On their first bombing run, the planes missed their targets and dropped incendiary and high-explosive bombs on several residential areas more than a mile away. Oblivious to their error, they returned for two more attacks on the same locations.
The raids caused the deaths of five hundred people and severe injuries to thousands more, as well as the destruction of more than three thousand houses, one of them the home of the Dutch resistance leader responsible for the tip about the launching sites. More than twelve thousand people were left homeless. Thanks to the bombardment, said a report smuggled out of Holland, “the temper of the civilian population has become violently anti-Ally.”
In London, Dutch officials reacted with astonishment, then outrage. No one was more furious than Wilhelmina, who aimed her formidable temper at the British military leaders and Churchill himself. This time the prime minister offered no excuses; he was as angry as the queen about what he called “this slaughter of the Dutch.” In a scorching memo to the RAF and the Air Ministry, Churchill demanded a “thorough explanation” of the botched raid. “Instead of attacking these points with precision and regularity,” he said, “all that has been done is to scatter bombs about this unfortunate city without the slightest effect on their rocket sites, but much on innocent human lives and the sentiments of a friendly people.”
To the Dutch, the British government expressed “deep regrets.” According to an investigation, the officer who had briefed the aircrews on the mission had mixed up the vertical and horizontal coordinates of the target. The Foreign Office assured Dutch officials that the guilty officer had been court-martialed, although there is no evidence that anyone was actually punished.
The vehemence of Churchill’s remarks reflected a boiling over of his long-simmering indignation at the huge civilian casualties caused over the previous two years by the RAF and U.S. Army Air Forces bombing campaigns in western Europe, particularly in France and the Low Countries. The raids had primarily been aimed at factories turning out German war matériel, V1 and V2 launching sites, and, as D-Day approached, the destruction of much of the French railway network, in order to prevent the transport of German troops to the Normandy beaches. The necessity of those raids was self-evident. In the case of the railways, by seriously damaging rail lines, repair yards, and bridges, the bombing reduced French rail traffic to 30 percent of its normal level, greatly impeding enemy movements. Clearly, collateral damage was inevitable.
What was not so easily understandable was the conspicuous lack of care that the Allied air forces took to limit that damage, often strewing bombs over city centers from high altitudes—bombs that fell nowhere near their military targets. As the raids intensified, so did the civilian casualties. In March and April 1945, four bombing runs on railway yards in Paris left more than 1,100 Frenchmen dead. On May 26, raids on railway facilities in ten French cities caused almost six thousand casualties. To many Frenchmen, “the Anglo-Americans seemed more capable of bombing France than liberating her,” the historian Julian Jackson observed.
Not infrequently, the raids focused on targets of no real military value. When the U.S. Army Air Forces bombed the railway passenger station in the southern French town of Avignon, Francis Cammaerts “wanted to shriek out loud—how many of us are you going to kill before it’s over!!! They simply didn’t know a German troop train carrying tanks would never go through a passenger station!! Or anywhere near it.”
In Belgium, the bombing runs were directed mostly at urban factories, with considerable collateral damage in nearby working-class neighborhoods. The killing of 209 children and 727 other civilians in an April 1943 raid on a factory complex in Antwerp prompted especially vigorous protests by the Belgian government in exile and resistance leaders.
Churchill had long complained to Allied military leaders about what he saw as their lack of concern in limiting civilian casualties. “Terrible things are being done,” he wrote in May 1944. “This thing is getting much worse.” The prime minister disputed the claim of SHAEF officials that they had chosen the best targets and warned that “you are piling up an awful load of hatred.” He told his War Cabinet that he “had not fully realized that our use of air power would assume so cruel and remorseless a form.” But his objections found no favor with SHAEF or Roosevelt, who wrote the prime minister that although he certainly hated the idea of inflicting severe casualties, he was “not prepared to impose any restriction on military action by responsible commanders.”
WHILE THE DUTCH CONTINUED to suffer in late 1944, the Allies made several fruitless attempts to penetrate deep into Germany. Although Allied troops had first crossed the German border in October, every successive effort that year to advance more than a few miles into enemy territory ended in failure. In late December, the Germans, in a desperate attempt to regain the offensive, launched a massive assault against U.S. forces through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. Known as the Battle of the Bulge, the German thrust resulted in the largest and most savage fight on the western front. The attack ultimately failed, but before it did, it claimed more than 100,000 U.S. casualties.
As costly as it was for the Allies, the Battle of the Bulge marked the beginning of the end for the Reich. In early 1945, the Allied armies resumed their march eastward and, by early March, began crossing the Rhine and pouring into the German heartland. Once again, their slog had become a gallop. In the words of Rick Atkinson, “The inner door to Germany had swung wide, never to be shut again.”
Yet as Germany’s war effort disintegrated, Hitler’s recalcitrance increased. He not only refused to stop the fighting in his own country; he also threatened the wholesale destruction of western Holland, one of the last areas of western Europe the Germans still held. (The others were Norway, several French ports near the English Channel, and the Channel Islands.)
Under a Hitler directive, the Reich prepared for a final stand in what was now called “Fortress Holland,” with German troops instructed to “fight to the last man and the last bullet.” Orders were given to ready the demolition of all electrical plants, gasworks, bridges, railways, and, most deadly of all for Holland, its dikes. If the dikes were blown, the nation would be inundated by water within three weeks, resulting in a calamity of unimaginable proportions.
On April 17, the Germans gave the Dutch a glimpse of the frightful future in store for them when they destroyed a dike protecting a huge swath of fertile agricultural land in the north of the country. More than 50,000 acres were flooded, with dozens of farms and roads wiped out. More than twenty residents were shot as they tried to escape the floods.
In other parts of western Holland, the death toll from starvation continued to mount. At the same time, new life emerged in the form of the spring flowers that were blooming everywhere. “One has nothing to eat, misery has hit rock bottom, and one approaches the stage of indifference,” an Amsterdam resident wrote. Yet “we buy flowers and we put them in our rooms, on the window sill. We salute them as they grow festively among the swollen bodies of edema victims, among the emaciated children and the garbage heaps in the parks.”
With Holland’s very existence threatened and thousands of its people dying, Churchill had finally had enough of SHAEF’s excuses for not coming to the country’s aid. In his efforts to force the Allied military to intervene, he received assistance from an unlikely source: Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi chief of the Netherlands. Realizing that the end of Nazi rule was near and hoping to save himself, Seyss-Inquart told Allied authorities in late March that he would allow them to provide aid to the Dutch.
Even so, it took four weeks for the Allies to prepare a relief operation. Before his sudden death on April 12 in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt had agreed to the plan but insisted that the Soviets must approve any negotiations with the Germans to allow emergency food supplies to be sent. Subsequent talks with the Soviets and then with Seyss-Inquart dragged on for days.
Finally Eisenhower himself balked at the delay. Having changed his mind about helping the Dutch, the supreme commander urged the Combined Chiefs of Staff to forget the red tape and allow him to launch the relief effort. At long last, they gave in, telling him in an April 24 cable that they had “decided to leave the matter in your hands.”
ON APRIL 27, ELEVEN DAYS before the official end of the war in Europe and after more than twenty thousand Dutchmen had died of starvation, the Allies launched what the British called Operation Manna, a massive airlift of food to Holland. The initial drops were carried out by the RAF, whose pilots had been pressuring their superiors for days to speed up the process. At one airfield, RAF crews marched to their commander’s office, chanting “The Dutch must get this food—the Dutch will get this food.”
On the night of April 26, volunteers braved hail and rain to load more than six hundred tons of food—flour, corned beef, powdered eggs, coffee, tea, and chocolate, among other items—into 263 bombers based at various British airfields. The workers included crews just returned from bombing missions over Germany. One of them, a pilot, put a note in a food pack that read, “To the Dutch people. Don’t worry about the war with Germany. It is nearly over. These trips for us are a change from bombing. We will often be bringing new food supplies. Keep your chins up. All the best. A RAF man.” The following morning, the bombers set off on what, for them, was a unique mission: saving lives rather than ending them.
Thanks to thousands of posters tacked up all over Holland, the Dutch had been alerted to the food drop. As bombers swooped low over cities, towns, and the countryside, their astonished crews saw masses of cheering, waving people everywhere they looked—on red-tiled roofs, in fields, on country roads, and in city streets. “An old man on a bike waved so passionately that he almost fell off,” recalled a British journalist aboard one of the planes.
In The Hague, a resident reported that he and his neighbors “ran outside with hats, shawls, flags, sheets, or anything else that we could wave at the planes which were thundering over our streets in an interminable stream. In a flash, our whole quiet street was filled with a cheering, crying, waving crowd, and the elated people were even dancing on their roofs.” A Dutch official later observed, “The emotion and enthusiasm were so tremendous that one forgot one’s hunger.” Another declared, “If any emotions could still stir our blunted feelings, it was these generous gifts of those who were recognized as our friends in the moment of our greatest distress.”
The airlift continued for more than a week, with some five hundred British and three hundred American aircraft dropping almost eight thousand tons of food. Dutch resistance fighters and former members of the Dutch army took charge of its distribution. For the most part, the Germans lived up to their agreement not to interfere with the dropping and collection of supplies. Even more important, they ceased all military operations in Holland. For the Dutch, the war—finally if unofficially—had come to an end. “Fear was finished, and death has fled,” an Amsterdam resident wrote in his diary. Another noted, “We are no longer isolated from the world. The Dutch prison door has been rammed open.”
On May 4, a little over a week after the airlift began, German commanders in Holland, northwest Germany, and Denmark officially surrendered to General Montgomery at his new forward headquarters near the German city of Hamburg. Shortly before nine o’clock that night, a stammering announcer on a Dutch resistance radio network broke into regular programming to announce that Holland was now officially free. “Long live the queen!” he exclaimed. “Long live victory!”
For the second time in ten days, the country went mad with joy. “I saw people dancing in the street; they were jumping up and down,” a man in Rotterdam recalled. “Honorable burghers who would never lose their composure, and certainly would never run, were now racing around like boys, hugging each other, throwing their hats in the air.” In The Hague, a teacher who had spent the last two years in hiding ventured outdoors for the first time to join his neighbors in their celebration. “It gives me a shock to see them,” he wrote in his diary. “Some are so thin that I hardly recognize them….It is terrible—their pale, emaciated faces—but the joy shines in all their eyes, the happiness for our newborn freedom.”
In another Hague neighborhood, residents abruptly stopped their merrymaking when they heard over a radio in a nearby window the strains of the “Wilhelmus,” the Dutch national anthem, whose playing had been forbidden by the Germans. Their voices trembling, a few people began to sing, with others joining in: “Wilhelmus of Orange am I, of Dutch blood; true to the fatherland am I till death.” Composed in the sixteenth century during Holland’s eighty-year fight for freedom against the Spanish, the anthem, in the words of the Dutch writer Henri van der Zee, “expressed the longing for freedom that our forefathers had felt.” The solemnity was shattered a few minutes later, however, when a gramophone down the street started playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Van der Zee, who as an eleven-year-old boy took part in the celebration, noted that the title of the jaunty American jazz tune reflected how the Dutch “felt about the Allies. I, who had never heard it before, listened spellbound while some people began to dance.”
Dutch crowds greet their Canadian liberators with flowers in May 1944.
All over the country, there was dancing that spring, mostly to the music that the Canadian and British troops who now marched through the Dutch streets brought with them. Loudspeakers on street corners played “Moonlight Serenade,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “The White Cliffs of Dover,” and “Don’t Fence Me In.” The soldiers taught Dutch teenagers to dance the swing and handed out gum and candy to the children. In return, a British war correspondent wrote, “We have been kissed, cried on, hugged, thumped, screamed, and shouted at until we are bruised and exhausted. The Dutch have ransacked their gardens, and the rain of flowers which falls on the Allied vehicles is endless.”
All the festivities, however, couldn’t mask the fact that Holland was a terribly blighted country and thousands of its people were still dying. General Alexander Galloway, the head of the British military’s relief effort, saw this for himself during a nationwide tour. “On first appearance,” he reported to his government, “the condition of the people has proved unfortunately very deceptive. Allied soldiers were greeted with cheers and bunting, and made their progress through a smiling countryside. But it was deceptive because men and women who are slowly dying of starvation in their beds cannot walk gaily about the streets waving flags.” He went on, “It is an empty country, inhabited by a hungry, and in the towns, a semi-starved population.”
Two journalists who had just arrived in Amsterdam were besieged at their hotel by dozens of emaciated people begging for food. A doctor they interviewed told them that at least thirty thousand Amsterdam residents were close to death. In The Hague, the wife of the British ambassador to Holland, who had returned to his post after five years of war, reported to Winston Churchill about her visit to one of the hospitals there: “The babies were tragic. They looked like old men—or else they lay in a semiconscious state….Most of the cases we saw had very distended stomachs, but no fat at all on their arms and legs. Many of them were bleeding at the feet.” Her husband, Sir Nevile Bland, added his own postscript: “There is no possible doubt that undernourishment is universal and starvation and semi-starvation lamentably widespread.”
Yet bad as the situation was, the worst was over. Thanks to a massive infusion of medical aid and food from Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, and other countries, hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens were nursed back to health over the next weeks and months. One of them was Audrey Hepburn, who would live with the aftereffects of the war for the rest of her life. Never weighing more than 110 pounds, she continued to suffer from some of the health problems she had developed during the “hunger winter.”
That, however, was all in the future: for now, she lost herself in the euphoria of the moment. Her older brother, Alexander, emerged from hiding as an underdiver, and her other brother, Ian, who had been forced into slave labor in Germany, walked 325 miles to return home to Arnhem. “We had almost given up when the doorbell rang, and it was Ian,” she recalled. “We lost everything, of course—our houses, our possessions, our money. But we didn’t give a hoot. We got through with our lives, which was all that mattered.”
EVER SINCE SHAN HACKETT had returned to England in early February 1945, he had kept an anxious eye on the events unfolding in Holland. During that period, he had spent much of his time briefing the War Office and other government ministries about the events at Arnhem and the contributions of Dutch resistance fighters and other civilians in saving his life and those of other British soldiers. But his main focus was on seeking aid for the Dutch. In doing so, he was greatly troubled by what he saw as Whitehall’s remoteness, its seeming unconcern, and its lack of understanding about what the Netherlands was enduring.
In late April, the British brigadier received the news for which he had been waiting: Ede and the area around it had been liberated. He arranged to hitch a ride on the next RAF cargo plane to Holland and hurried home to gather the bundles of goods he had collected for the de Nooij sisters and their family: “packets of tea (real tea!), coffee, sugar…tinned goods, clothes and other presents—and the precious letters from my family at home to my other family in Holland.”
When he landed the next day at a military airfield in central Holland, a British Army car was waiting for him. In less than an hour, Hackett was back in Ede, his joyous mood matched by the weather. When he had left three months before, it had been gray and cold; now the sun shone, the trees were leafing out, and flowers were everywhere. But, as he noted, the changes went far deeper than the passing of winter: “A leaden pall of mourning had lain over this town when last I saw it. Now everything was as gay as a village wedding.” Dutch flags were intertwined with Union Jacks in store windows. Streets he remembered as mostly deserted were now thronged with people of all ages, “looking about them as though they had never seen the place before, smiling, laughing, shouting to each other.” Along the way, he recognized familiar landmarks: the church with its high steeple, the houses he had passed on his strolls with the aunts, and, most memorable, the post office where he and Aunt Ann had pushed past German soldiers to post her potentially deadly letters.
“With the certainty of a sleep walker,” he directed the army driver down Ede’s high street and into the narrow roadway where the de Nooij sisters lived. He got out with his packages and stared for a moment. Before him was the white fence “whose gate I had opened so often, the shape of whose latch I can still feel in my fingers. There was the little house, with the tidy curtains to the sitting room below.” And there was Aunt Mien, standing in the doorway and smiling broadly. “There was no surprise upon her face as she came to meet me, only shining happiness, but she was in tears and laughter at the same time as I embraced her.” Then the others crowded around—Aunt Ann, Aunt Cor, Marie, Johan—“everybody laughing and crying and talking at once.”*
Rummaging among his packages, Hackett retrieved the coffee, and Aunt Mien whisked it away. Soon they were all sitting around the big kitchen table, savoring it—Hackett drank from the mug that had been his months before—and the little cakes he had also brought.
“Did you get my message?” he asked. “Did you hear about the gray goose?”
“Three times,” Aunt Ann said. “We were so pleased and thankful.” With a laugh, Aunt Mien chimed in, “We danced a jig around the table, every time! I do wish you could have seen us. Oh, dear!”
For Hackett, the rest of the day passed in a happy blur. Like a small boy, he embarked on a thorough exploration of the house. Everything was neat and spotless, just as before; the only difference he noticed was the location of the radio. Once hidden behind a cupboard, it now stood boldly on a table in the sitting room. On the upstairs landing, he lifted the carpet and trap door beneath, then climbed into the hiding place the family had created to protect him from the Germans. In the barn, he picked up the ax and saws he had used to cut wood, feeling again “the sharp cold on my hands and smelling the fresh pine sawdust.”
Within minutes, word of Hackett’s return had spread through Ede, and a stream of visitors began to arrive: the pastor of the church where the family worshipped, the Dutch doctor who had treated his wounds, members of the resistance who had helped him escape. Later that evening, Hackett remembered, “we sat down together to supper again as one family and read the Bible again together after it. Everything was just as it had been before—but somehow a hundred times better.”
At one point, he noticed Aunt Mien gazing intently at his smart paratrooper’s uniform. “What is it?” he asked. “I had a wish,” she answered, “and it came out all right. I couldn’t tell you, of course. It wouldn’t have come true then.”
Hackett remembered how, during the family’s modest little New Year’s Eve celebration four months before, Aunt Mien had told everyone that they should wish “for what we wanted most in the New Year.” As she had said that, she had stared intently at Hackett and the darned black jacket he was wearing. At that moment, “she looked up and our eyes met,” he recalled. “With a tiny flash of an almost guilty smile, as though she had been found out, she looked away.”
Now, on that lovely spring evening, he took her hand. “I think I knew what it was even then,” he said. “It was to see me back here in uniform, with all that would mean.”
“Yes, that was it.” She smiled. “And here you are.”
That night, Hackett slept soundly in the familiar little bedroom upstairs, with its treasured emblems of the love and security he had found in this house: the lace curtains, the neat white counterpane on the bed, and Sleeping Beauty on the wall.