Memories of a war-torn childhood

Sixty million people died as a direct result of the Second World War.

I was seven-and-a-half years old when Germany invaded Holland in May 1940.

I was born in Rotterdam, the city that was bombed flat by the Germans because Holland would not capitulate.

The place where I was born does not exist anymore.

It was turned into a pile of rubble that was not accessible for more than a month after the bombardment due to the intense heat.

After the bombardment, we lived in a small village just outside Rotterdam for a while and from there moved to the Hague.

When I think back, the whole war period seems like a sickening bad dream where fear and hunger are absorbed in a numbness that is hard to describe.

The fear, hunger and numbness are gone but it is still painful to think or talk about it.

When the first Gulf War started in 1990 our kids came home very impressed that an American plane could send a rocket or bomb through a small window in a bunker where Saddam Hussein’s family and other people were said to be hiding.

I lost it because from the little that I had seen on T.V. that war was treated as if it was a Nintendo game and that was nowhere close to the reality I remember.

After I had calmed down they said “but dad how do we know what it is like when you never talk about it?”

It left me speechless because they were right, how would anybody know if it is never talked about. I understand veterans do not talk about it either, one only has to look at the thousands and thousands of white crosses of Canadians that are buried in Holland alone.

Five or six years of steady fighting, witnessing the horror of war and losing friends is something you want to forget and not talk about.

I was 13 years old when I was sitting on a Canadian tank in total admiration for the Canadians who freed the little town of Steenwijk in the northern part of Holland.

My younger sister and brother were living there as well.

We were smuggled across the big rivers to where there was still a little bit of food because it was farming country.

All three of us were skin over bone when we got there in mid 1944. It is because of the people in the northern part of Holland who were willing to share the little food they had with kids from the big cities that I survived.

When still in the Hague I remember standing in a line in the freezing cold, with the toes of my shoes cut off , waiting sometimes for hours for a couple of ladles of soup.

The soup was nothing but some cabbage leaves and small pieces of potato.

The toes of my shoes were cut off because I had outgrown them and clothing of any kind was not available anymore.

My dad had gone underground and that meant no ration card for him and only five ladles of soup for the six of us.

From the beginning of 1942 we had no radios anymore they were taken during a razzia so we could not listen to the B.B.C. When unexpectedly machine guns were placed at the four corners of a housing block and soldiers entered your house and took what they were ordered to take was called a razzia.

All brass or copper items were taken for the ammunition factories. Towards the end of the war they also took blankets and bicycles and often they just came to find people who went underground.

By 1943 there was no electricity, no gas to cook on, nothing to heat the house with. There was a curfew from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m.

Anybody seen on the street between these hours was shot. There was not a living dog or cat in the city that I know of and wooden railings, park benches etc were gone.

People were burning their front doors and furniture. We lived in the kitchen that was barely heated by a little wood stove the size of

a small microwave.

We sat there huddled in our blankets one time when a soldier entered the house during a razzia, looked at us, threw his helmet and rifle on the floor and was crying.

He said he did not want the war, had a wife and three children he had not seen for years.

My mom gave him a hug, which was pretty big for her because a couple of days prior she was almost put in a truck loaded with Jews.

Being of French origin, she had dark hair, brown eyes and a rather large somewhat hooked nose. Jews were made to wear a big yellow star very early in the war and were picked up off the streets like stray dogs, put in a truck with high slatted wooden sides like cattle.

When the truck was packed it

was followed by

a motorcycle with a side car on which a machine gun was mounted.

Seeing that, we knew they were not going to a happy place.

My hatred for anything German was so intense that when I saw a German soldier trying to get out of his truck after it was strafed by an English fighter plane, I stood there laughing while he burned alive.

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Living with that kind of a deep hatred made me more indifferent to danger. I had become an expert tire deflater which was not without danger, but very satisfying when the Germans lost their cool when they saw their flat tires.

The launching place for the V1 and later V2’s, the unmanned rockets that were sent to England, was only about 10 km from where we lived and quite a few went up, sputtered and moved around like a deflating balloon.

Since it was unpredictable where they would land, one was totally defenseless.

In early 1943 just before all the schools were permanently closed, a V1 landed a couple of blocks from where we lived and flattened a whole city block.

Two children from my school and one from my class lost their lives. It was not the regular German army that was mostly feared, but the Waffen SS and the Grune Polizei.

They were the most cruel and in-humane part of the occupation troops. They were the ones that beat my mom and kicked me when looking for my dad.

Being smuggled out of the Hague put an end to living in a totally darkened city, very often with no food at all, clothes that were too big or too small, the constant howl of sirens when allied planes flew over on their way to Germany, not knowing when a bomb, a V2 or a downed plane would hit you, cold in the winter and nowhere to go in the heat of summer, sick and tired of Germans with loudspeakers giving us orders or new restrictions.

It was such a blessing when we got to Steenwijk. One of the first things that happened was that I was fitted with a pair of wooden shoes it was the first time in years I had warm feet in the winter.

It took a couple of months after all of Holland was freed by the Canadians in 1945. We went home on a boat and found out that both our parents and little sister were still alive.

A couple of years after the war I started to find out that all things were not as straight forward and idealistic as I had thought. Sweden and Switzerland were never occupied which meant that goods were exchanged between Germany and the Allied Countries and money was exchanged at the Swiss Banks during the war. The thought that soldiers lost their lives while big profits were made filled me with disgust and looking at all the crosses marking the dead , made me scream instead of just cry.

Later I found out that most large factories in the industrial Ruhr district in Germany were still standing, but where the workers lived was bombed flat. The immense Krupp industrial complex never received a bomb, but Dresden, where the workers lived, was bombed flat as was Hamburg.

I know now that a lot of Germans are really good people and that during the war they had no choice or were mislead by propaganda. Very recently I found information in a Dutch Canadian magazine called the Windmill Herald of October 23, 2009.

A German officer Hans Oster realized the danger of Hitlers ideals, but the Allies ignored him. German military tribunals ordered the death sentence of approximately 30,000 soldiers of which 20,000 were executed.

Not to long ago I was talking to a guy who is my age. I detected a very slight accent and asked him where he was from.

He answered from Germany, I asked which part and he said Hamburg. My reply was “oh my God.”

He then asked where I was from and I said Rotterdam. He looked at me and said, “we are kindred aren’t we Bert?”

From the bottom of my heart I could say yes we are. I am forever thankful to the Canadian and Allied forces who freed Europe.

I hereby give you my deepest respect and heartfelt thanks, you are still my heroes.

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