“It is impossible to describe what radical and dire consequences the lack of coal is having for the Netherlands,” wrote a Red Cross official, “and how incredibly primitive life has become.”
For the van Heemstras, the lack of heat and electricity exacerbated an already dire situation. But for Audrey, hunger and its consequences overrode everything else. And for all, the war had never left. Audrey lived exclusively in the cellar now with her mother, Meisje, and Opa, their mattresses moved down there. They would make mad dashes up to the toilet off the kitchen or, during heavy shelling, resort to use of a bucket. There was no other choice but to live this way as a war that could not possibly grow more hellish did exactly that.
Audrey would later talk about a particular evening in early March 1945. She said, “We had no food whatsoever, and my aunt said to me, ‘Tomorrow we’ll have nothing to eat, so the best thing to do is stay in bed and conserve our energy.’”
But Audrey loved to tell this story not because of the privation, but because of what happened next, thanks no doubt to Dr. Visser ’t Hooft: “That very night a member of the Underground brought us food—flour, jam, oatmeal, cans of butter.” For Velp, the famine was breaking, and for Audrey, the timing of the food’s arrival after Meisje’s gloomy statement gave the young girl a belief in her own personal luck that she would keep close at hand through a lifetime of struggles. “You see?” she said. “I’ve had black moments, but when I hit rock-bottom, there’s always something there for me.”
Other Gelderlanders would not be so fortunate. After dark on the evening of 6 March, ten miles north of the Beukenhof, between Arnhem and Apeldoorn at a country crossroads known as Woeste Hoeve, four members of the Dutch Resistance lay in wait to hijack a truck they could then use to distribute food supplies to Dutch civilians. When headlights approached, the Resistance men flagged down the vehicle, which turned out to be not a truck but an SS staff car.
The driver rose up over the windshield of the BMW convertible and barked, “Don’t you know who we are?” He drew his luger and the Resistance men opened up on the vehicle with British-made Sten guns. More than 200 bullets shattered the windshield, tore up the doors and fenders, flattened the back tires, and killed the driver. Now the vehicle was of no use for a food heist, and the Resistance fighters fled into the night on their bicycles.
They didn’t know that left behind was SS Gen. Hanns Albin Rauter, head of the Dutch security police and the most feared German in all the Netherlands. This ruthless officer with the dueling scars was on his way toward Apeldoorn from his office in Arnhem when the car came under attack. His aide joined the driver in death, and Rauter lay an hour in pools of blood until finally discovered along the lonely stretch of road. He had bullets in his lungs, shoulder, thigh, jaw, and hand and was scraped off the floor of the car and taken to Apeldoorn. The SD from Arnhem investigated immediately as Rauter, one of the men instrumental in the death of Uncle Otto and his four companions not to mention a mile-long list of other innocent Dutchmen, clung to life in the hospital. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS in Berlin and Rauter’s boss, ordered 500 executions, which Seyss-Inquart thought might set off a general revolt.
Two days after the ambush, 116 political prisoners and captured Resistance fighters from Arnhem and Apeldoorn were trucked to the spot where Rauter’s car had been hit, Woeste Hoeve. All 116 were machine-gunned in reprisal for what had been done to Rauter. But that didn’t end it. The Green Police ran rampant through Velp and spread “moffenterror,” in this case roughing up civilians, making arrests for the most minor offenses, and holding those arrested to act as forced labor. The moff also stole anything of value, particularly food and bicycles. For the Dutch, this was just another cruel act by the occupier because now more than ever, bicycles were needed to reach the food now arriving in town.
It was during this time that Audrey got caught up in the SD’s hostility and retributions for Rauter’s ambushing. She said in a 1988 interview for Dutch television, “I did once witness some men being tegen de muur gezet (set against the wall) and shot for some kind of reprisal. You know how they used to make people stop, and you couldn’t walk on.” She said after the executions the street was opened again.
During these days of Nazi payback she also came closest to entering a nightmare situation that might have killed her. On the streets of Velp, she walked into a Green Police roundup of Dutch girls and women to work in German kitchens. It was the occurrence that always had worried the baron and Ella: a teenage girl walking about during the day in wartime. Green guards herded Audrey and others into the back of a truck at gunpoint.
“I was picked right off the streets with a dozen others,” said Audrey. The truck began to move but then made another stop during the roundup. By now, such German police weren’t the cream of the crop—they were teenagers and old men, the bottom of the barrel. “When they turned to get more women, I nipped off and ran,” she said. Hepburn lore would claim that Audrey hid in a bombed-out building for a month. In fact, she ran straight home to the Beukenhof “and stayed indoors for a month.” Now, even volunteer work at the hospital was out of the question.
No one could guess in what direction the winds of war would blow next. The British had made their way north from Nijmegen through the Betuwe and now sat on the southern shore of the Rhine where they could gaze on the jagged skyline of a destroyed Arnhem. Their shells blasted the city from close range and snipers picked off Dutch citizens forced to dig slit trenches for the Germans. Above, Allied fighters crisscrossed the skies looking for targets of opportunity, including the chance to shoot down V1s headed for Antwerp.
By the day, the final death gasps of war drew closer to Velp. “There was a lot of shooting and shelling from across the [Rhine] river,” said Audrey, “so constant bombing and explosions. And this would go on all night and most of the day; there would be small moments where you’d go up for fresh air and see how much of your house was left, and we’d go back under again.”
The Americans had crossed into Germany to the east. Patton’s Third Army was rampaging through the German countryside and had reached as far as Ludwigshafen. Suddenly, the Tiger II tanks stationed in Arnhem were heard rumbling up Hoofdstraat in the dusk of evening on their way east to answer desperate calls for defense of the fatherland.
Tuesday, 27 March, passed like all the others, to the sounds of war: fighters and bombers overhead, artillery in the distance, occasional bursts of machine-gun fire, and a smattering of thumps from the anti-aircraft batteries. But after midnight it grew quieter.
In the Beukenhof cellar, Audrey could hear only the hum of a fighter plane overhead taking advantage of the clear sky and bright moonlight to look for moving targets. Then came a chilling sound but one all too familiar to the citizens of Velp: A V1 had launched off to the east. As with all such launches, she listened intently for the puttering motor to carry the death machine on past Velp.
Directly overhead she could hear the fighter firing its machine guns; who knew what might be the target? Then, dear God, the evil pulsing of the V1 motor stopped. The plane had been shooting at the V1 and had hit it! But where was the explosion? All knew at once: The buzz bomb was going to come down in the middle of Velp—instincts were keen after so long at the front lines.
Breathless seconds followed in the cellar as the V1 spiraled earthward in a building scream of high-speed flight. Was this the end?
The explosion rocked the earth. Attached to it, the roar of smashing glass sounded all around. Screams joined the cacophony. There had been so many moments like this, where afterward Audrey wondered if the villa still stood above their heads, or if it was ablaze, or if those that had been killed a second ago were friends or family. Out the small cellar window in the sliver of world that could be seen, there were no flames. There was just the deep blue velvet of night. About them grew stillness. The only sound was the lone fighter plane, the villain in this aerial play, heading back toward England in the distant night sky. Yes, that pilot had perhap
s saved a detonation in Antwerp, but, oh, what had he done to Velp?
As a leading citizen of the community, the baron rushed out of the basement with the women trailing behind. Yes, there was a curfew but it meant nothing at a time of such desperation. They rushed down Rozendaalselaan and in the night could see a blazing fire beyond the rooflines on Hoofdstraat. It was so close and they were heading right toward it. By the time they reached the village center there was glass everywhere, blown out of every window and storefront.
People ran toward the fire from all directions, and the van Heemstras followed the flow of traffic, rushing across the main street and down Oranjestraat, where they found a scene of utter devastation. As they approached, they saw that all the houses on the right side of the street were gone or reduced to rubble and blazing. Bodies intact and in pieces could be seen littering the street in the firelight. As Audrey took all this in, another V1 puttered over. Everyone ducked on instinct. This one malfunctioned and fell some distance away. The Velpsche fire engine, the one stolen by the moff, would have come in handy this night—except there wasn’t running water to fight the flames anyway. Instead, rescue efforts centered on recovering the dead in the houses not burning, including several children of the family van Remmen.
Steven Jansen lived just a few doors up from the V1’s point of impact. In his diary he wrote, “Searches are conducted for victims under the heaps of rubble. Several are saved. For nine people, no help is possible. The night is endless. However, thirty V1s fly over. At least eight crash down in the surroundings…. Finally, the day breaks.”
But it’s another day of war, with planes menacing the village and artillery exchanges punctuating every hour. And of course there are V1s. But wait…
On 29 March Allied planes flew over Velp with what seemed to be ferocity—fighter-bombers at low level. Waves of them. Then, a ways off to the east came the sound of booms, booms, and more booms, so many and so heavy that the ground trembled. The citizens of the village could only thank God that this time, they had been spared.
Later came word: The V1 launch sites east of the IJssel had been flattened, and at long last the menace of the German terror weapon was at an end, not only for distant Antwerp but for the Dutch in Velp who had lived for three-and-a-half agonizing months under its curse.
Then came more good news. Food! A new wave of shipments from the Swedish rescue missions poured into Velp along with more generous ration coupons: for a two-week period, 2400 grams of bread, 4 kilograms of potatoes, 125 grams of meat, 200 grams of cheese, and 80 grams of oils. It arrived in quantities generous enough, as per the Swedish plan, that no one would have to wait in a line hours long.
The van Heemstras ate a rare meal of substance, and the baron crept across the street after dark to listen to Radio Oranje on the Mantels’ radio set. Allied forces were blazing through Europe and the Germans were desperate—hanging on by a thread. Fear now centered around the possibility of a final battle for Velp that might lay waste to everything, as had happened in Arnhem and Oosterbeek. The German presence in Velp remained strong, and with the tanks rolling through, the planes flying over, and the rockets and shells falling, it seemed likely to the Dutch that nobody was going to make it through alive.
33
Gates of Hell
“When I could afford it,” said Audrey, “I went to a doctor and he told me I was very anemic and must eat a pound of red meat a day.” That physician was Dr. Adriaan van der Willigen, Jr., chief of staff at the Velp hospital, who had been consulting medical journals on the topic of edema because of its prevalence in the village. But the doctor was dreaming—the ration was just a small fraction of a pound, and for two weeks, not a day. But the van Heemstras pooled their resources, and their youngest ate all the meat available. “Very soon,” Audrey continued, “I began to look and feel like a different person. I have great respect for how closely your appearance and vitality are related to diet.”
March drew to a close. Reports on Radio Oranje described the Allies closing in on Berlin, the Yanks and Brits from the west and the Russians perilously close on the east. The bomber stream seemed endless as American planes of the Eighth Air Force flew over Velp in formations a thousand strong to deal final blows to German cities. Then sometimes would come the deep and distant rumble of detonating bombs.
Much lower, fighter planes continued to prowl the streets of Velp looking for German targets. Unfortunately for the van Heemstras, enough leaf cover had sprouted that the armored columns once again called their street home. German vehicles were parked in every possible place of concealment on the streets of Velp due to its abundance of hundred-year-old trees. Because of the hunters above and Allied ground forces at several points in Germany and the Netherlands, the tanks and half-tracks had nowhere to go at the moment. Their operators were frozen in place.
On the last day of March, the Saturday before Easter, a fighter dove against a luxury convertible driving down the Hogeweg just four blocks from the Beukenhof. Pilots knew that only German staff officers would be driving around these days with the shortage of vehicles, tires, and fuel. The fighter flying east to west strafed the car as it drove along the Velpsche street, but the pilot kept his finger on the trigger a second too long and when he pulled up over the treetops, the spray of bullets ripped into the Ziekenhuis and then over its roof and into the houses beyond, straying perilously close to the home of the van Heemstras. Fate had been unkind to Velp of late, but in this instance at least, no one was killed.
The next evening another British fighter plane screamed earthward over Velp, and as villagers gasped in anticipation of impact, the pilot managed to keep his plane airborne and came down in a farm field behind the centuries-old Castle Biljoen just to the east of town. The brave pilot who had avoided the houses below him died on impact. Explosions from his gas tank and ammunition sounded in the night.
At four the next morning grenades began to explode in Velp, killing and wounding several. Radio Oranje reported that the Dutch town of Enschede northeast of Velp near the German border had been freed and the liberators, said to be Tommies, were marching southwest toward Zutphen. That would put them just twenty miles from Velp and so they must arrive by nightfall. And if not today, then tomorrow for certain.
Excitement grew when a distant boom revealed that the Germans had blown the Westervoort bridge over the IJssel just to the south of town, no doubt to stop the British advance. It was wonderful news and meant that the Tommies must be closing in. And then from prime vantage points the Velpenaren could see the red, white, and blue Dutch flag flying over Westervoort, which indicated the Tommies were already there, just five miles away!
Then came word that a Canadian army pushing toward Velp from the south had been repulsed by the Germans. With this reprieve, the Wehrmacht and SD used their newly won time to lay mines in the roads and gardens along Hoofdstraat in Velp and cut down the beautiful trees lining the street from the wreck of the Park Hotel eastward all the way to Rheden, more than a hundred trees in all, the pride of the village, to block the advance of the Tommies from Zutphen. All the while, Allied fighters roared over, and grenades exploded with brutal ease from one end of Velp to the other.
Audrey told a story to magazine writer Kirtley Baskette in 1953 about a moment of terror at around this time, early April, when there had been a lull in the action, and she had pulled on a sunsuit and crept into the garden. Baskette paraphrased it this way: “She breathed deeply and, because she hadn’t sampled any fresh air for weeks, she found it intoxicating. Then she stretched out on a pad in the sun and the bees in the orchard blossoms buzzed her to sleep. But she dozed fitfully because in her dreams the ‘whump, whump, whump’ of artillery seemed to march up the Rhine right to her garden, which was smack in the Nazi battle lines. Only when the earth shuddered beneath her and a blast tumbled her off the pad did she wake up and realize this wasn’t her routine nightmare. It was real. Bits of gravel peppered her skin and shell fragments whined wickedly past her ears.” Bask
ette wrote that Audrey lay flat on the earth as shells burst around her. “Finally the barrage moved on and she crawled back to her cellar door, shaking. She never wanted to try that again.”
More days passed. Overhead roared British Spitfire and Typhoon fighters who turned their attention on Arnhem and pounded German positions in the poor destroyed city. Artillery was coming in all around, most of it hitting Arnhem but some straying into Velp. More grenades fell. More villagers perished.
Audrey and the others had now spent what seemed to be endless stretches in the cellar of the Beukenhof.
“During the day we merely existed,” she said. “At night our only diversion was gathering around the fire. That was the only light we had—whatever wood we could find nearby. We couldn’t talk about the day’s happenings, because nothing had happened to us. So we sat around and made up stories, invented things. We entertained each other, and it helped carry our minds away from the horrible life we were leading.”
In the midst of battle, it was a miracle the villa hadn’t been reduced to rubble or set ablaze, although, as she recounted, “Parts of our house kept being shot away.” She described Velp as “a shooting gallery between the two armies. Day and night the din continued until we grew so accustomed to it, we paid no attention even to the biggest noise.”
Two blocks away, Steven Jansen wrote on 13 April, “If it remains quiet a moment, one crawls from the cellar. One does not venture oneself far from home. The stores of water must be replenished however…. Velp looks a sight. Stones, sand, scree, and fired branches lie on the street. Burned houses. Houses with direct hits and, most of all, houses without glass.”
Later that day came a report on Radio Oranje that the president in America, Franklin Roosevelt, had suffered a stroke and might be dead. The people of Holland had always considered Roosevelt one of their own because of his Dutch blood. It was another bad omen, with liberation so close at hand; the world needed this American president now more than ever before.
Dutch Girl Page 25