My grandmother kisses her father goodbye and then lifts Elsje onto the child’s seat on the back of her bicycle. There’s a damp fall chill in the air, and she isn’t looking forward to the long bike ride back after the cake and the warm house.
At the same moment, twelve British RAF planes that have taken off south of London cross the channel into Dutch airspace. They fly low over Apeldoorn in the direction of Zutphen at the same time that my grandmother and mother pedal over the IJssel Bridge headed toward Apeldoorn. About twenty minutes into their ride, they intersect with the squadron, flying in the opposite direction. In the distance, my grandmother hears the air raid sirens in Zutphen caterwauling. She stops, wakes my mother, and lifts her quickly off the bike, which drops into the grass as they jump into one of the bomb shelter ditches dug into the side of the road.
Moments later, they hear the bombs. It’s a thunderous noise of 137 bombs making impact for over ten minutes, shaking the ground. It is 3:53 p.m. My mother clings to my grandmother in the ditch. Elsje pops her head out of the shelter to look back at the massive cloud of black smoke rising above Zutphen before being yanked back down by my grandmother. My grandmother has seen the bull’s-eye roundels on the wings of the planes and recognizes them as Allied planes. She assumes their target is German troops. What she does not know is that the target is the Dutch bridge, which has a railway across it and is used by the Germans to transport ammunition.
By the time my mother and grandmother cycle into Apeldoorn an hour later, tired and chilled, the news has already reached there: The bombers have accidentally overshot their target and taken out not just the bridge but the neighborhood next to it as well. In their street, the neighbor children taunt my five-year-old mother with the one part of the story she will recall vividly for the rest of her life. Skipping alongside her and my grandmother as they pedal up to the house, the neighborhood children call, Your granny and grandpa are dead, deh-ed, deh-ed, deh-ed. Ha-ha, you dirty NSBer! My mother’s grandparents, whom she had been drinking tea with hours before, have been killed instantly in the bombing.
* * *
Zutphen, the Netherlands, 2015
Today, my great-grandparents’ house is number twenty-two on an audio tour of historic Zutphen. On the internet, there is a downloadable recording for tourists, along with photos of the exterior of their home both before and after the bomb. A virtual museum docent recites the details of site twenty-two on our city walking tour in his measured, museum-quality voice:
Stand with your back to the IJssel River. The Brugstraat and the IJsselkade lie in the center of the stricken area. On the corner of the Brugstraat and the IJsselkade lived the family Barto. At the time, stenography courses were offered in their house. Because of that, there were usually more people in the building than just the family members themselves … The house of the Barto family collapsed after the neighbor’s house was hit by a bomb. Mr. Barto and his wife, who would have had her birthday the next day, did not survive the strike. And there were more victims on this spot, including one dead and one wounded student.
According to my mother, the wounded student survived because my grandfather threw himself over her body during the bombing.
I visit the memorial for my great-grandparents in a wooded area of the Zutphen cemetery for war casualties. My great-grandmother’s name is misspelled on the marble commemorative stone. I walk to the riverfront where their home once stood, amid a row of homes, looking out on the bridge and the broad, slow-moving IJssel River. My great-grandparents would have looked out over the water at the children fishing for eels on the banks, the long barges passing through, lovers strolling along the waterside path with dogs in tow. Toward the end of the war, they would have seen tanks crossing the bridge, the lamps rattling as their stenography students looked up, alarmed, from their machines. I have to imagine all of this, because the only photo I have ever seen of their house from the time they lived there is of the rubble of brick and glass and a jagged hole the bomb tore through it. As an adult, my uncle Pim attends an exhibit about the war in a military museum, and realizes with a shock that he is looking at another angle of his grandparents’ home, a particularly unique angle. The photo has been taken from the belly of the airplane that dropped the bombs, and it shows a bird’s-eye view of the house, a bomb captured on film in the air directly above it, suspended in time in the seconds after its release. Somewhere just out of frame in the landscape below are my grandmother and my mother, cycling back to Apeldoorn.
Today, there is a bland, concrete square block of an apartment building on the site of my great-grandparents’ former home, the kind the Dutch were proud of calling “contemporary” in the 1960s and ’70s, the kind that I abhor. Somewhere on the sidewalk there is supposed to be a small brass square embedded in the pavement to commemorate the lives lost in the bombing, but after circling the building twice, I cannot find it anywhere.
* * *
Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, 1944
Not only does the war continue for the Dutch after Mad Tuesday, but in September of that year, the country enters into one of the most difficult periods yet, the Hunger Winter, also known as the Dutch famine of 1944–45.
After D-day, the Allied troops manage to liberate the southern part of the country, below the rivers that slice the country in half. But the northern provinces continue to be stranded after the failure of Operation Market Garden. In September 1944, there is heavy fighting along the rivers, and the residents of Arnhem are told to vacate their homes or risk being bombed. So it is that Hannie comes out of the woods one afternoon after foraging for chanterelles and sees them coming down the road into Apeldoorn like a zombie invasion: fifty thousand emaciated people dragging wheelbarrows and wagons, exhausted and gray-faced. Behind them, their city is crushed and set ablaze as the Allied soldiers battle the Germans for control. These are the lucky ones. On the road behind them also lie the bodies of their former neighbors, people in the wrong place at the wrong time as they fled under fire. The Arnhem refugees pour into Apeldoorn and the surrounding towns, putting even more stress on a dwindling food supply as the region heads into winter.
As a result of the failure of Operation Market Garden, the Germans now control the bridge, and with it, the only route to transport goods and food by train to the northern parts of the country. The Dutch railway workers attempt to aid the Allied effort by striking and preventing the Germans from transporting their troops, ammunition, and supplies over the rails. In turn, the Germans retaliate by placing an embargo on the shipments of food to the north, a common tool of war. In cities like Apeldoorn, the people are starved out in a deadly game of chicken. People already have to use ration books during the war due to the limited food supplies, but now their ration books don’t buy anything at all, because the stores are empty. No bread, no potatoes, no eggs, no meat, no cheese, no fruits or vegetables. People trade anything they can: a piano for a wheel of cheese or a couple dozen eggs, a wedding band for a sack of potatoes. If there is food in the shops, the rations now allow only approximately one thousand calories a day per adult anyway, which isn’t enough to sustain them. In the streets, everybody is gaunt, their cheekbones jutting out as they smile. When they still smile.
When the Germans partially lift the embargo, allowing the canals to open for transport of food by boat, it is too late. The country is in the midst of one of the coldest winters in its history. The rivers are frozen solid, and no boats can travel up them anymore. The snow piles high on the roads. No food enters the region.
During this period, 4.5 million Dutch people survive only because of soup kitchens established by charities and the Red Cross, while 20,000 succumb to starvation during this last stretch of the Nazi occupation.
In Apeldoorn, the snow creeps higher on the garden fence, and my mother, five years old, sinks in it to her armpits. The De Kock family heads into the woods to dig for anything edible and to hunt small animals, but they aren’t the only ones, and many of the woods in that area are cordoned of
f due to the German munitions storage under their cover. The blackberries, blueberries, and mushrooms frozen in storage from the previous summer are quickly depleted. Rabbits, deer, and wild boars are spotted less often as the woods are stripped by hungry people. By midwinter, the family has nothing. My grandmother serves the children runny soup with boiled tulip bulbs from the cellar, but still their stomachs rumble at night.
One night my grandmother and grandfather sit down at the table with their eldest child. Many people have been going on “hunger tours,” traveling to the far north on foot or by bicycle to the farms in Friesland and Groningen, bringing anything they have left to barter. My grandfather has to stay at his job at the auto mechanics’ school to avoid losing it. But two people will have to go for food, or the family may starve. My grandparents look at their twelve-year-old daughter. “Hannie, do you think you can handle the trip with your mother?” her father asks. She nods solemnly.
It’s decided. Hannie and my grandmother will go on a hunger tour. They will go north to get potatoes and vegetables and meat on their bicycles with wooden wheels, as all the rubber has been turned in for the war effort or taken by the Germans. The wooden tires will add time to the journey. The deep snow and cold will add even more time. Altogether, it will take ten to twelve hours each way, so they leave very early in the morning, in the dark. Friesland, the northernmost Dutch province, is 150 kilometers from Apeldoorn.
I talked about this trek with my aunt Hannie the year before her death in 2009. “We had to cross a river,” she said. “But the Allies had bombed the bridges to slow down the Germans, and in places, the narrow railway bridge was the only way across, guarded by the German military to allow trains of their soldiers and ammunition to cross. So when we got to the IJssel River, we had to stow away on a train carrying German soldiers.”
After three hours of biking, they reach the river and wait just before the bridge for the train, shivering in the subzero temperatures just beneath the berm. The train slows to a crawl when it gets close to the bridge, and they scramble up the embankment. Amazingly, German soldiers appear in the vestibule of the train: smiling young men in olive-green uniforms holding out their hands to them, offering to help them aboard. They pass their bicycles up to the men, then are lifted into the train themselves. The German soldiers hide the bicycles and bring Hannie and my grandmother to their seats, telling them to get down low in case the officers pass the train on the other side and spot them. These soldiers know nothing about the stowaways’ NSB affiliation, so as far as they are concerned, they are helping regular Dutch citizens. They are just boys enlisted against their will by Adolf Hitler and forced to fight. They see a girl and her mother trying to get food, like so many others on this trek to the north. Inside the train, there are no enemies. The men dig through their duffel bags and give my grandmother and aunt their own army rations—crackers, sausage, chocolate—which they rip open and eat quickly. They drink from the men’s canteens. When they reach the other side of the river, they have to jump out before the train picks up speed again, and the soldiers pass them their bikes, waving to them as the train slowly moves on, carrying many of these young men to their deaths in the final months of the war.
From Zwolle, where they’ve now successfully crossed the river, my grandmother and Hannie continue cycling north in the snow. After twelve hours, they arrive in the farmlands of Friesland at dusk, the windmills rising from the flat horizon like agricultural lighthouses to the weary travelers. Cycling from farm to farm, they knock on doors to barter with the farmers, exchanging their money and jewelry for a comparatively small amount of food. Then they cycle to the coastal Frisian city of Zoutkamp, where they have family that also gives them some food. They load their bicycle bags with potatoes and beets, a few cuts of meat, loaves of bread, and more, and then immediately begin to ride back to Apeldoorn, where hungry mouths and young children are waiting.
They have already cycled for twelve hours, and they are exhausted. After about four hours, my grandmother calls through the dark to Hannie, who is cycling with her head down ahead of her. “Hannie! I have to stop. I have to rest!” So they rest on the side of the road, collapsing directly into the snow. They nearly die there. “We were so tired that we started to fall asleep,” my aunt told me. “Our bodies were just completely spent. But we knew that if we fell asleep, we would freeze, so we kept saying, ‘OK, in thirty seconds we have to stand up and keep going.’ But we couldn’t do it, and the more time that passed, the harder it became to stay awake and stand up.”
In the distance, a light burns through the window of a farmhouse, the orange glow fanning out over the snow like spilled sun. They can almost feel its warmth. Inside will be a fire crackling, a cup of hot tea offered to them. The house is only about a hundred yards away, across a field. “Mom, we have to walk to that farmhouse down there and ask if we can come in or we will freeze to death,” says Hannie, standing up. My grandmother nods and slowly stands, wobbling on her legs like a newborn calf. She and Hannie look across the snow, a sea of blue between them and the orange light. They stand like that for several minutes, staring. “I can’t,” my grandmother finally says. They are too weak to walk.
“I don’t know how we did it,” Aunt Hannie told me, “but somehow we got back on our bicycles, and we said, ‘We can’t stop again, no matter what, or we’ll die.’ So we just kept cycling.” When they return, they have been on the road for twenty-four hours, cycling for almost all that time. Hannie is carried by her father to her bed and sleeps for thirty-six hours straight, a record that holds in the family to this day. But they have food again, and they carefully ration it. Elsje is a very little girl when she watches her mother and big sister come in from the snow, half dead from exhaustion with bags full of food. Food becomes a charged thing for her in adulthood. The rationing of it, the fetishizing of it. Later, my mother will become a dietitian. My aunt Hannie, for her part, will become convinced of an economic collapse in the run-up to the millennium as the media floats doomsday scenarios about computers going haywire. The first thing she does to prepare for the year 2000 is to panic-buy a brand-new bicycle, even though she already owns one. The “millennium bike,” as the family calls it, sits unused in her shed for years as the year 2000 comes and goes without incident, an expensive symbol of war trauma.
This near starvation of the family becomes a point of contention for my grandfather later as he defends himself, because they didn’t have to starve. He could have used his membership in the NSB to get extra food, get money, and gain status. In fact, other NSB members trade in their working-class jobs to become mayors of cities all over the Netherlands, as the Germans allow only NSB members to hold local political positions. The fact that my grandfather’s family suffers alongside the rest of the Dutch population and that he doesn’t use his position in the NSB for favors becomes a point of defense in his trial later. “I never profited from my membership in the NSB during the war,” my grandfather writes to the judge. At trial, others testify that he was offered positions that would have put food on his family’s table and money in the bank, but as a socialist, my grandfather refused these positions, unwilling to accept favors. Repeatedly in the trial transcripts, I read affidavits that say, “He was an idealist, and not a war profiteer. He was not interested in the Nazi agenda.”
So it is with a great deal of bitterness in later years that my grandfather realizes that after his difficulty surviving the war years, when the Germans are finally defeated, for him, the war isn’t over.
When the Nazis surrender on May 5, 1945, and the Allied soldiers roll through the country in ticker tape parades, smiling Canadian troops waving from atop their tanks, people’s fear lifts. Elsje stands on the corner outside their house with her brother Bert watching the troops, delighted by the joy all around her. The soldiers march by, smiling and waving. People hug and dance in the streets. They wave Dutch flags. Elsje is five years old and likes a good party. She doesn’t understand that her family is on the wrong political s
ide of this liberation. She waves at the soldiers, and a Canadian soldier stops his green Jeep to beckon her over. She approaches reverently. She gazes up, and the soldier reaches down to hand her a tiny mohair Steiff bear with a brass button in its ear. He winks at her. Elsje feels she is looking at a god. She clutches the little bear to her chest. It’s the most precious thing she’s ever gotten and the last happy moment she’ll know for a while. Because as the relief sets in for the Dutch people, and years of anxiety leave their bodies, in its place comes a wave of hot anger long suppressed, a wild fury about years of living under occupation. It sweeps through the streets, a smoldering that ignites house after house as neighbor talks to neighbor, finally free of their muzzles. One thought consumes them. Revenge.
9
HATCHET DAY
Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, May 5, 1945
As soon as the war ends, payback begins. The country goes into a period of ferocious vigilante justice they call Bijltjesdag. Hatchet Day. In the months following the liberation of the Netherlands, the Dutch unleash their anger, grief, and resentment on neighbors whom they see as having been complicit with the Nazis who occupied their cities for years. Nazis kicking in doors in the dark of night with barking German shepherd dogs. Nazis pulling Jews out of attics and basements. Nazis strafing their cities at the beginning of the war to leave flaming debris behind in the place of families, terrorizing their sleepy villages so that no Dutch man, woman, or child knows how to sleep soundly anymore. Now that the Germans are gone, it is the collaborators’ turn to have their doors kicked in and to be pulled from their homes. On May 10, before she has even returned to the Netherlands from London, Queen Wilhelmina announces on the radio, “In the liberated Netherlands, there will be no more place for traitors.”
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