For Audrey and all the van Heemstras, the war was hitting ever closer to home.
28
The Magic Stamp
“After living the long months and years under the Germans,” said Audrey, “you dreamed what would happen if you ever got out. You swore you would never complain about anything again.”
On 5 October, the day after the rocket attack had killed Corrie van Griethuysen and the others, the British fighter squadrons sought to repeat their luck finding German vehicles moving along the streets. Hoofdstraat had been identified by now as a wide-open, highly visible thoroughfare and, obviously, the main artery for military traffic moving from the German border to Arnhem and all points west.
Fighters attacked Velp three times that day, as Steven Jansen described from his vantage point just two blocks from the Beukenhof: “Majestically circling high above the village in the bright blue sky, then noses down they dive. One after the other they come rushing on the ground as their wings sparkle and crackle firing rocket bombs. The machine guns rattle. Houses collapse in ruins. Streets are ripped open. The fighters climb up, turn, and dive again.”
The second Mosquito attack of the day hit Rozendaalselaan. Rockets detonated just yards from Audrey’s home and blew in windows in the neighborhood. One house was set on fire, and a woman near the Beukenhof received a head wound and bled to death.
All grew quiet again—until a quarter to five, when the third and final attack of the day rained dozens of bombs down on Velp as the van Heemstras sheltered in their cellar and prayed. Homes were destroyed across the village and more civilians died. At dusk, the fires continued to burn. Agitation was high and families packed up to get out. Among them were the van Heemstras’ neighbors, the van Hensbergen family. They gathered belongings and headed away from what had suddenly become the war’s main street. The Visser ’t Hoofts also moved away from Hoofdstraat. But Opa decided to sit tight and hope. After all, where was there to go that was any safer than here? Even the Castle Rozendaal, that mighty fortress of the van Pallandts with walls fifteen feet thick, had been hit with an incendiary and nearly destroyed. Death lurked in every corner of the Netherlands now, and no one was safe.
On Friday the fighters circled again, firing machine guns and rockets, and on Saturday South Velp was hit and more Velpenaren died. Every ear now strained to hear an airplane motor in time to find cover, and yet attacks from the sky were but one of so many evils plaguing the population.
More than 28,000 Dutch railway workers had joined the ranks of the onderduikers after 17 September when the Dutch government in exile had urged a strike. By 1 October, members of the Dutch Resistance were alerting London to the impending disaster of a Netherlands without the food that could be carried only by train. The answer received from London to these Resistance warnings: “Military interests demand that the strike goes on—till the day the enemy leaves the country.”
Through October loyal Dutchmen followed the wishes of their queen and British Prime Minister Churchill; the trains did not run with the exception of a few moving from Germany into Velp and on to Arnhem as manned by rail forces from the Reich. These trains kept men and supplies flowing into Arnhem, but for the Dutch civilian population, there was no food at all.
Velp was surrounded on three sides by farms, and yet to journey out in daylight meant to risk death from those hunters above. The situation grew dire. The German military confiscated all the food it could find in town for its soldiers. Trucks that might carry food to the civilian population had no fuel, and those few that had been converted to wood-burning engines dared not drive about the roads. Allied fighter attacks couldn’t be predicted; any movement on the ground, down to a civilian walking on a sidewalk, could draw attention. But of all reasons why hunger began to grow, the greatest was simple math: The Velpenaren had shared food with the vast numbers of refugees and they were gone now, leaving nothing. Rations resumed for the people of Velp but they had been cut, and then they were cut again. Bread, cheap and cherished foodstuff of the Dutch people, declined in quality when wheat flour supplies ran out. Pea and rye flour were substituted, but these wouldn’t rise, and the bread was what locals described as “wet.”
On 13 October the train station in Velp was bombed, as was the makeshift German military hospital at the Park Hotel. The tidy hotel was now a wreck and would never be rebuilt.
In mid-October, rumors started up again to the effect that Velp was about to be evacuated like Arnhem. The van Heemstras made contingency plans and rounded up supplies. By this time, with the daily fighter attacks, the desire among the battle-numbed citizenry to shelter at home was no longer as passionate. Then on 20 October nearly the entire population of a village to the southeast stumbled into Velp to report they had been ordered to evacuate with no notice. Again every manner of conveyance appeared, each sporting a white surrender flag. The road to the ghost town of Arnhem had been blocked, so Velp was the next logical destination.
“We enjoyed our few days’ rest from the evacuees,” said Steven Jansen, “until we learn we must accommodate their successors.” Once again homes, including the Beukenhof, took in new boarders.
The German and Allied battle lines had solidified, with the Germans galvanizing their positions in the ruins from Oosterbeek through Arnhem and into the area of Velp. The British reinforced the city of Nijmegen to the south. Long-range artillery exchanges became a regular occurrence, usually in the evenings, and after a deep, booming launch to the south, and the arcing, whining passage of a heavy shell north, a home in Velp might simply, suddenly cease to exist along with the people inside it. Just gone. Between the air strikes and the shelling, it remained a sad, inarguable fact that most Velpenaren were being killed by the Allies, not by the Germans.
Not that sympathies toward the occupiers had changed. Since the battle of Arnhem and the railway strike, German high command reacted to every Dutch offense with an especially ruthless fury. When the Resistance attacked four German soldiers in the remote village of Putten, northwest of Velp, at the beginning of October, General Christiansen ordered executions and those who were not shot were rounded up and shipped to Germany as forced labor—589 men in all. To conclude Christiansen’s day of terror in Putten, ninety homes were burned to the ground. Of the men taken away, fewer than sixty would ever see home again at war’s end. Later in October, a massive Green Police raid in Rotterdam netted 50,000 men for shipment east to work as forced laborers in Germany.
The Germans were taking everything even vaguely useful out of the Netherlands. Food was of prime importance, from grain to livestock. It also became a common sight in Velp to see trucks piled high with loot stolen from the homes in Arnhem and Oosterbeek being driven toward the German border. Especially needed there were beds and bedding, but fine Dutch furniture was prized and anything of value left behind by refugees—from dishes to clothing to picture frames—was soon pilfered.
Everything that could be stolen from the area was stolen—like Velp’s beautiful fire engine and the trams in Arnhem. Most of those not destroyed in the battle were dismantled and taken to Germany. It was maddening.
Then came those damn rumors again. Velp would be evacuated next because the military didn’t want useless civilians around. Some families kept a hand cart always packed with essentials for the inevitable order to get out of town. Everyone in Velp had seen the looters’ cars and trucks heading for Germany, and these sights made the Velpenaren intent on digging in their heels and staying in their homes, come what may.
On 21 October came word: Velp must evacuate. Villagers knew this was fact and not rumor when they learned that Velp’s Mayor Kalhorn, who was in the know if anyone was, had begun packing. And so everyone in the village followed suit, including Baron van Heemstra and his family. They had no idea where they would go; they knew only that seventy-three-year-old Opa would be leading his two forty-something baroness daughters and his malnourished granddaughter on an odyssey by foot. They would now be the specters trudging through the country
side under a white flag, like so many before them.
The next day came a surprise reversal: Audrey and her family and all other villagers learned that they didn’t have to vacate after all. The relief was enormous and no one ever knew exactly why a reprieve had been granted.
Velpsche historian and author Gety Hengeveld-de Jong attributed the reversal to the infrastructure needs and practicality of the Germans. The local office of the Dutch National Office for Food Supply in Wartime was run by Paul Roelofsen and Jan Koens of Velp, who, according to Hengeveld-de Jong “worked to assure that there would be enough food: meat, potatoes, chickens, and vegetables from around the province, not only for the inhabitants, but for all the Germans fighting in and around Arnhem. [At this time] hundreds or perhaps thousands of Germans were sleeping, eating, and relaxing in Velp, where there were shoemakers, blacksmiths, and other craftsmen they needed. Soldiers could go shopping and to pubs. If Velp were to be evacuated, the Germans had to organize all that in little villages nearby.”
Seyss-Inquart may have realized that he would be creating headaches for all involved by evacuating the village where he had set up shop, along with Rauter and other key Nazi officials—not to mention the fighting men who had flooded into Velp. It was, after all, the only functional business district for miles around.
Another story has circulated to account for cancellation of the order to evacuate the village. In this version, a certain rare postage stamp (the 1934 Dollfuss Austrian ten schilling) was coveted by a stamp-collecting German general who knew that one such stamp existed in Velp. When the stamp was brought to him, he rescinded the evacuation order. Whichever story is correct—and perhaps portions of each have merit—the van Heemstras did not have to march out under a white flag to points unknown while their home was looted behind them.
It proved to be an isolated piece of good news. Across the Netherlands, electricity to the civilian population was cut back, and then cut back some more; in Velp it had never returned since the Airborne. In all ways, the people of the Netherlands had descended into darkness.
Even now, Audrey still managed to give private and group ballet lessons here and there, whenever relative calm returned to the village. She operated in any room that could be lit by daylight and used a hand-cranked record player.
“We had no light, no heat, no water,” said Audrey. “We had no food, because all the shops were closed. We ate what we could find.”
Many Velpenaren were too enterprising to sit in their homes and wait for the situation to improve. With the weather growing colder but snow not yet falling, the fittest took to bicycles with patchwork tires or no tires at all and ventured into the countryside. They would make their journeys at sunrise or after dusk to avoid the hunters circling in the skies. Some ventured into the Veluwe north of the village to visit farms for any food available. Others paid to be ferried across the Rhine or the IJssel in rowboats. Food was obtained in trade for real Dutch money or jewelry or clothing and brought back for those with the muscle and know-how, always at the risk that Dutch SS in zwartjassen, the dreaded black coats, would confiscate the food as it was brought back to Velp and arrest those carrying it and worse, forward them to the Reich. In many cases children were sent to find food because the Germans didn’t bother with children or consider them a threat. But the Beukenhof was home to neither fit men nor energetic children.
With the steady stream of wartime casualties, Dr. Visser ’t Hooft kept Audrey busy at the Ziekenhuis, and each day she completed that brief but intense walk from the Beukenhof, head down to avoid scrutiny by the moffen.
Among her duties was the situation with little Ben Griethuysen. “In November I had just lost my mother,” he said. “I would go every afternoon to the hospital, to where the bandages were washed and had to be rolled, and Audrey was my oppas, my buddy. And she would roll the bandages and I sat in front of her. So she took care of me a little bit.”
Visser ’t Hooft also had unorthodox requests of his young volunteer aide, like calling upon Audrey to deliver the local Resistance newspaper, Oranjekrant. With paper pulp in extremely short supply, the Oranjekrant packed its volume of critical information into a surface area about the size of half a paper napkin. Audrey described having “to step in and deliver our tiny underground newspaper. I stuffed them in my woolen socks in my wooden shoes, got on my bike and delivered them.”
Audrey wasn’t alone. Visser ’t Hooft’s daughter Clan and her older brother Willem delivered messages to addresses in Velp under the pretext that they were carrying medicine to patients on behalf of their father the doctor.
“Wim and I were always sent out together,” said Clan, because these were, she said, “rather tricky expeditions.” Later, Wim and Clan would be recognized by the Red Cross with a medal and certificate for their clandestine work.
While the Germans paid no mind to children running about, the danger and worry for the parents was real. But for Audrey and the Visser ’t Hooft children, outsmarting the Germans could at times be a grand adventure, and they never knew the significance of what they were delivering. “Messages about the refugees, the onderduikers,” supposed Annemarth with a shrug, thinking about the papers carried by her brother and sister. “We were never told.”
The situation in town remained tense, with the occasional razzia, or raid by the Green Police to find able-bodied men to work in Germany. The curfew to clear the streets was moved up to six in the evening, meaning there was even less time for outdoor activities for civilians and more hours to be sequestered at home with no electricity or heat.
On 7 November deep rumbling explosions were heard to the northwest. Villagers in Velp would learn through the grapevine that the moffen had blown up the interior of the Diogenes command bunker at Deelen Air Base rather than let the facilities fall into enemy hands. Diogenes was a massive building with walls several yards thick. Inside was the nerve center where all radar information filtered in about Allied bomber formations and was displayed on a state-of-the-art glass map twenty feet square. Those in Velp considered its destruction to be significant; it was the first hopeful sign in months. Perhaps the Germans were expecting another major attack? Another invasion? Hope made a minor comeback, yet the air was turning very cold, and coal for the furnaces was fast becoming a precious commodity.
November brought the worst autumnal rains in generations; rains so constant and so dismal that the Dutch began to wonder if the weather now favored the Nazis. Radio Oranje reported that the advance of the Allies on the western front was now checked, not by the Germans but by mud.
To the west in The Hague, food had run out. Still, the Dutch sought not to suffer but to act. “City dwellers left their homes by hundreds of thousands to descend like locusts on the farmers,” wrote historian Henri van der Zee. Some farmers cooperated, but others did not, arguing that they couldn’t feed everyone. The farther west one went, the worse the situation grew. Hunger had the Netherlands by the throat. And winter lay ahead.
29
Streaking Evil
“My childhood in Arnhem and in Velp was the most important part of my youth,” said Audrey. “I was ten when the Germans invaded the Netherlands and I was fifteen when it was all over. They were very delicate, precious years. I experienced a lot then, but it was not all misery. The circumstances brought family and friends closer together. You ate the last potatoes together.”
Intrigue ruled the country’s most important village in the latter half of November. First, the Resistance managed to free all twenty-two political prisoners who had been placed in the Rotterdamsche Bank for the purposes of confinement and torture. While the daring rescue had probably been pulled off by the more violent and radical arm of the Resistance, the Knokploegen, or K.P., the hospital’s corps of physicians was immediately suspected. Six days later Green Police cordoned off the entire building and conducted a search room by room looking for the missing prisoners. The officer in charge of the moff went chin to chin with the head nurse and Audrey’s boss in the hosp
ital, Sister van Zwol. While the nurse gave the Germans an earful, all nine boys in white used their escape hatch behind the bed of another nurse, Sister Fenna, and crawled up to the safety of the secret chamber in the attic above the operating room.
Perhaps like never before, the traditional arrival of Sinterklaas bore special meaning on 5 December 1944 in a Velp shaken by war, darkened by lack of electricity, and wracked by a deepening hunger. The uniquely Dutch secular celebration of Sint-Nicolaas Eve preceded a 6 December feast that could not properly come, at least not this year. But the celebration would be held nonetheless.
According to tradition, Sinterklaas sailed into a Dutch port from Spain in November accompanied by Zwarte Piet, his helper, who was a Moor and carried Sinter’s bag of toys and candy. Then, mitre on his head and staff in hand, Sinterklaas would mount his white steed and head to his round of appointments on 5 December, which included a sit-down in each home in the Netherlands. As Ella described it, “Sint-Nicolaas comes on the 5th of December and puts sweets and presents in children’s shoes. He rides on a white horse over the roof tops, dressed in the long red cloak of a bishop, with a mitre on his head. He has a long white beard and is accompanied by a little black boy, his servant Pete.” Pete carries the sweets and presents in a large bag—the same bag that bad children are placed in when they’re carried off to Spain.
When Ella had been told at age eight that Sinterklaas didn’t really exist, she rebelled, saying “one cannot give up one’s beliefs just like that! They become part of one’s life, especially in the very young.” As a result she always held the Christmas traditions dear, and passed this soft spot for Sinterklaas on to Audrey.
By some strange twist of fate, the Germans had looted all the toys from a store called Perry Sport in Arnhem and moved them to a building in Velp, perhaps intending that they would be taken to Germany in time for Christmas. After a certain time, it became clear that the idea was forgotten, perhaps because of the hunters and their attacks. And yet the toys remained. With Sint-Nicolaas Eve at hand, Dr. Visser ’t Hooft asked Audrey to see to distribution of these toys to the children of Velp. Audrey and children had always been a match made in heaven. “I loved them when I was little,” she said. “I used to embarrass my mother by trying to pick babies up out of prams at the market and, you know, that kind of thing. The one thing I dreamed of in my own life was to have children of my own.”
Dutch Girl Page 22