Dutch Girl

by Robert Matzen

  Said Steven Jansen, a witness on Oranjestraat in Velp, “Worry is stamped heavily on the faces of the evacuees. Worry for what they left behind, concern over the future.”

  With the sounds of battle constant in the distance, most homes in Velp opened doors to refugees that weekend. The baron accepted his responsibility as a titled Dutchman and welcomed friends and strangers alike. Audrey made note of the Wehrmacht radio operators in the attic when she said, “Not counting our uninvited guests upstairs, we eventually had thirty-seven people sleeping in our house as evacuees continued to arrive.” Two of the faces that showed up at the villa caused tremendous joy: Alex and Miepje lost themselves within the crowd of displaced and sought out the Beukenhof at this most desperate hour. The reunion with Ella and Audrey brought momentary joy in the face of utter sorrow.

  And at least one of the thirty-seven faces under the roof of the Beukenhof would have been especially grimy and battle-scorched. Audrey told her son Luca that the van Heemstras hid a British paratrooper in the cellar of their house in Velp.

  “At first I remember my mother told me it was thrilling for her—it was risky, he was a stranger in uniform, a savior, and therefore a knight and hero.” The war had literally come home to Audrey in a way a fifteen year old could never have expected, a way that knocked the pins out from under her. But with the excitement came deadly consequences. Luca added, “Then I learned about the German law that if you were caught hiding an enemy, the whole family would be taken away.”

  Years later, Audrey alluded to the fact that by this point in the war, people in the Netherlands knew the fate of the Jews whom she had seen crammed into cattle cars. She well remembered the news about Otto and the others taken out and shot. The consequences for hiding a British paratrooper, one of the brave Red Devils of the 1st Airborne, would be lethal.

  As the combined and growing German forces in the area set about crushing the British attack, uncounted hundreds of these highly skilled Airborne troops had gone underground, many with the aid of Dutch civilians. In response the Germans had indeed promised death for any civilian aiding an enemy combatant. If shooting an entire family would teach the Dutch a lesson, so be it. As a result, said Luca, his mother “said she had this mix of excitement and fear. But he [the paratrooper] definitely stayed inside the house, I don’t know if for a week or even more.”

  Logistics would not be easy for the van Heemstras, with the Beukenhof full and now the vital living space of the cellar taken by an onderduiker—no matter that the Englishman would be polite, as they all were, as well as apologetic for what his mates had done to Arnhem. The simple fact was that the baron faced the challenge of keeping this Tommy not only hidden but also fed when supplies were already critically low.

  The population of Velp swelled thirty- and forty-fold. Dr. Visser ’t Hooft would have taken in refugees, but with now five children, a nanny, neighbors whose home had been confiscated by the Germans, and various family members sheltered there, his villa was full—not to mention that the ivy-covered carriage house behind the villa held fugitive Tommies in the upper floor. It was certainly Visser ’t Hooft who asked the van Heemstras if they could manage to hide a British fugitive or two—through the course of the war he had been in charge of distributing and moving Jews through the village, and likewise it would have been his job to parse out the Airborne fugitives among trustworthy homes in the village.

  The churches of Velp filled with refugees. And on Sunday, as the remainder of Arnhem emptied, and again on Monday, the battle raged on in Oosterbeek, with the British paratroopers squeezed into a sliver of town that they defended with their lives. Each rattle of machine-gun fire and explosion of a grenade or mortar round carried on the breezes into Velp and signaled fresh death. King Tiger tanks had been brought in to finish the job, and all the Tommies could offer in return were small cannons that were light enough to be carried in gliders—toys by comparison to the tanks. These cannon were set up all around the Old Church and the surrounded men fought on.

  The home of Jan and Kate ter Horst by the church had been serving as an aid station for a week and was crammed with wounded British soldiers in every room. Kate had marveled at their manners—and at their sorrow for the damage done to her house. More than fifty had already died and a steady stream of bodies were carried out for burial in her garden. She said to her liberators, “With death or imprisonment before your eyes you have, like all the other officers and men, found that marvelously pure comradeship and simple strength of mind which makes the life in this house, which is bleeding to death, rise to a mystery of human perfection.”

  Said a German officer trying to lead an attack on the British cannons at the church, “Reports and detonations followed almost without let-up, the earth was trembling and a curtain of fire and dirt of unprecedented dimensions rose over and between our positions. We ducked down and sought shelter, but still remained exposed to the blind raging of the shells.”

  By now, another new and terrifying instrument of death in this hell’s symphony was reaching ears in Velp. First came a devil’s cry that made no sense—a repeated series of howling sounds that carried for miles and signaled a series of impending explosions to follow. The Tommies in their Oosterbeek perimeter knew this terrifying howl all too well, as if prehistoric dinosaurs now roamed Gelderland. It meant that German Nebelwerfer rocket launchers, nicknamed “screaming mimis,” had been brought into play to pound the Airborne at the church and houses nearby.

  Incoming shells tore into the church’s sanctified stone from the Roman Empire that had been laid a thousand years earlier. It had sat there so long; the high tower of the Oude Kerk commanded the entirety of Oosterbeek. Now the tower made a perfect target for enemy guns.

  Then came a rumble of thunder from the south: Long-range Allied artillery from Nijmegen ten miles away started shooting at the Germans attacking the church. The 2nd Army was in radio contact with the 1st Airborne Division survivors and did their best to help from a distance. The Tommies welcomed the help from their long-range guns—even if those guns were aimed at Germans that crouched across the street, and even though any change in wind could nudge the shells down on British heads. It was that kind of battle.

  Up the road a ways at the Beukenhof in Velp, it was banshee cries in one direction and rumbles like thunder in the other. The shells from Nijmegen whined northward on a blistering arc and fell less than five miles away with frightening explosions on the edge of Oosterbeek.

  As evening arrived on Tuesday, 26 September, a gentle rain began to fall and still the thud of rifle fire and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns echoed in the blackness. But after one more fitful night of sleep for all in the van Heemstra villa now teeming with humanity, finally, at long last, the air grew quiet.

  The baron would learn later that the British armored column moving north to relieve the 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem had been stopped mere miles south of the city, and there was no hope they could save their mates hanging on in Oosterbeek. Instead, the surviving paratroopers in the red berets, the ones fighting to the death on behalf of the people of the Netherlands, had been ordered by Allied command over the radio to withdraw south across the Rhine and retreat through a path that had been cleared to Nijmegen. They had sneaked out in the darkness and rain right past the Old Church, fewer than 2,400 of the original 10,000-man invasion force. The survivors crossed the river with the expert guidance of Canadian and British engineer units on boats brought up from the south. The Airborne Division, what was left of it, had vanished from Oosterbeek, leaving the worst of the wounded behind to be cared for by British doctors who stayed behind, and by German doctors as well, after all the wounded had been captured.

  It was now nine long days since Allied fighter-bombers had roared over to hit German barracks and flak guns as a prelude to parachutes filling the skies over Wolfheze. Back on that bright and glorious Sunday, the word “Liberation!” was spoken freely and repeated every second. Now the citizenry saw what had come to pass from thi
s invasion. They were demoralized, their towns destroyed, 100,000 Dutch now refugees, and their bellies increasingly empty.

  Velp had accepted every refugee the town could hold. They filled vacated spaces in most homes and public buildings not occupied by Germans. Hundreds poured into the Openlucht Museum on the northern edge of Arnhem, with its series of structures from small huts to towering windmills that traced life in the Netherlands back centuries. It was outside the evacuation zone and now teemed with city dwellers who had once considered the museum only an afternoon’s diversion. Still, refugees shuffled into Velp under white flags and dragging their belongings, this time displaced from Oosterbeek. But now Velpenaren could only point these latest souls to towns farther east.

  Velp’s hospital operated around the clock, with critical care and services supported by nine healthy young men, former soldiers and Jews, who were known as de jongens in het wit—the boys in white. All were onderduikers hiding in the attic of the hospital under the noses of the Germans. They had already proven invaluable to the running of the hospital and now became heroes for turning a car motor into a generator to provide electricity, and serving as ambulance drivers during the chaos of the battle for Arnhem and later during air attacks.

  To ease the sudden medical crisis, schools were converted into hospitals; whenever it was deemed safe, Audrey continued her work in support of Dr. Visser ’t Hooft. Conditions were deplorable: no beds or mattresses, and only what bedding and blankets the citizens could spare. With no utilities, the buildings weren’t really hospitals at all. Like many, Audrey and Ella kept a pot of water boiling to sterilize old cloth and then tear it into strips for bandages. They also boiled dirty bandages for “second use.”

  “Cleaning bandages was a very important and necessary business these days,” said Clan Visser ’t Hooft. “There was a terrible shortage of materials. Used bandages were cooked on the stove as the only way of sterilizing them. Then after drying they had to be stretched by two people and put into rolls again for the next patients. This was daily routine as well at the hospital as in our own kitchen.” For Audrey, it was a way to help.

  The Germans, with wounded by the hundreds, were scrambling as well. They converted the Park Hotel to a war hospital and casualties streamed up from Arnhem and swamped the structure inside and out.

  At the Beukenhof, the baron saw fresh ration cards offered in gratitude from those poor souls he had taken under his roof, and yet what good were ration cards when there was no food for miles? He had almost forty mouths to feed, including the Tommy in the cellar. But the shops of Velp stood empty a week. Everything on hand in every shop had been consumed, mostly by the moffen who had stolen it, and no deliveries were made because of the fighting. Food preserved in family cellars across town was all that remained now in what had become in so short a time a crisis. The crisis extended to the entire Netherlands, one signaled by Radio Oranje when an announcer admitted, “The weeks before us will be the most difficult in the existence of our nation.”

  With the battle ended and conditions primitive—no electricity or running water, with liberation a dashed dream, the enormity of the railway strike sank into the marrow of a citizenry gripped by the first frosty, foreboding nights of a winter to come. Posters placed by the Resistance mysteriously appeared all over town reminding of the strike and urging loyal Dutch railway workers to abide by it. As fast as the SD or Green Police tore down the posters, fresh copies appeared. But ambivalence reigned. Simply put, stopping the trains would hinder the Germans, true enough, and maybe slow down the rate of V1 attacks on London. But at what price would the English get their respite? Without trains, there would be no food or fuel to resupply the desperate Dutch. Freezing temperatures and snow were weeks away at most, and it seemed to many, including the van Heemstras, that the strike amounted to a death sentence.

  On Friday, three days after the end of the battle for Arnhem, German troops pounded on the front door of the Beukenhof. The hearts of the van Heemstras must have stopped, considering the paratrooper in the basement. But the Green troops had purpose and dragged away healthy men from the ranks of the refugees to work as day laborers on general cleanup details for Arnhem’s streets, which must be made passable for military vehicles. The men were handed shovels and told to remove debris and bury the bodies of British soldiers still littering gardens and alleyways in just about every block between the bridge and Oosterbeek.

  On Saturday the news grew more grim. The Green Police ordered all Arnhem refugees—everyone taken into people’s homes, everyone at the Openlucht Museum—to leave Velp by 4 October. The simple fact was that British paratroopers had slipped out of Arnhem alone and in small groups and had made their way into Velp. They were now on the run, mixing with the refugees and creating for the occupiers a situation that could not be policed. With the refugees gone, house-to-house searches could more effectively root out the fugitive British Airborne—like the one in the Beukenhof cellar and those hiding in Dr. Visser ’t Hooft’s carriage house.

  The only exception to the order to vacate was for those too ill or grievously wounded to be moved from hospitals. The van Heemstras wanted to know whether this also meant that everyone in Velp must leave their homes. Ella, the baron, and Meisje could only wonder where they could possibly go in a country now gripped by the strike and still controlled by Germans in a murderous mood. Panic was close at hand for the village and for every surrounding community as rumors of a pending evacuation tore through like a virus. One said that two fresh German infantry divisions were moving in and these troops would be quartered in the homes of Velp. All knew what that would mean. It would be the end of everything with the moffen looting and destroying at will.

  By now, hundreds of British prisoners from the battle were jailed by the Germans in villas on the Velperweg. Among them was Maj. Anthony Deane-Drummond, who would become Velp’s most celebrated Tommy for his exploits, not so much during the battle as after it. While a prisoner at the Villa Bena Sita, he slipped into a cupboard and stayed there eleven days, long after the 300 other prisoners had been moved out. He then made good an escape past the German occupants of the villa and traveled the streets of Velp by night. He talked his way into in two homes, first at Laarweg 2 with the Broekhofs, and then at Schaapsdrift Overbeek 16, a rambling two-story brick home up the street and around the corner from the Beukenhof.

  The Huisman family lived in this home, and although already hiding two onderduikers, they offered refuge to Deane-Drummond. It was here in early October that the emaciated English major became known to some of the Velpenaren, including Ella van Heemstra. The baroness likely learned of the fugitive Tommy from Dr. Visser ’t Hooft, who was in communication with Deane-Drummond’s contact in the Resistance, a man known to the English as “Pete.” Like everyone else in the neighborhood, Ella was astonished at the story of Deane-Drummond’s eleven days hiding in a cupboard, his reckless escape from the Germans, and his perilous journey through Velp looking for someone to shelter him. The British officer had quickly become a legend—the Houdini of Gelderland. The night before the Resistance was set to move Deane-Drummond out of town along with other Airborne outlaws, Ella sent him a precious bottle of champagne from its hiding place in the cellar with a note addressed to the “poor British officer who is so thin.”

  History doesn’t record when the Tommy in the van Heemstras’ cellar headed out into the world; the Resistance was conducting groups of paratroopers over the Rhine on a regular basis. The van Heemstras had contributed, for which Audrey would always be proud. And the villagers threw Deane-Drummond a going-away party that made good use of Ella’s champagne. He said, “By the light of flickering candles they were soon singing patriotic songs in quick succession at the tops of their voices. Thoughts of war and Germans were pressed into the background. Here, at least, was a little piece of patriotic Holland trying to forget its worries and anxieties.” Audrey was among those feeling especially patriotic: Her family had done the right thing, taken the risk of shieldi
ng a Tommy, and lived to tell the tale. For a time at least, she didn’t have to feel shame that her mother had once been a fascist.

  In the future, those dangerous days harboring an Englishman provided a direct, unbreakable connection between Audrey and Anne Frank. When Audrey said that Anne’s diary “paralleled so much what I had experienced,” prime among those memories was the constant anxiety that went with potential discovery by the Green Police of the British paratrooper in the cellar of Villa Beukenhof—the same anxiety that Anne Frank had lived with for two years in het achterhuis.

  Said Luca, “My mother used this story to explain to us the meaning of war: Hiding somebody could take away your normal life, but, she said, ‘For us it was the big reason. If we had been discovered, we would have all been shot.’” But they hadn’t been discovered. They had, in fact, helped one of the liberators to avoid capture, which made it, according to Luca, “my mother’s favorite story; one she always told us.”

  For the remainder of her lifetime, Audrey would remain taciturn about her part in the war, which was a very Dutch trait. After all, she considered her role insignificant. Had her mother Baroness van Heemstra not always taught that one must never boast?

  Audrey was deflecting interviewers’ attempts to draw out stories about Resistance work with a wag of the head even forty years later. She told one, “I’ll never forget a secret society of university students called ‘Les Gueux,’ which killed Nazi soldiers one by one and dumped their bodies in the canals. Now that took real bravery, and many of them were caught and executed by the Germans. They’re the type who deserve the memorials and the medals.”