Winter in Wartime

by Jan Terlouw

  Contents

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  1

  It was such a dark, dark night.

  Step by step, holding out one hand in front of him, Michiel made his way along the cycle path at the side of the track. In his other hand, he was carrying a cotton bag with two bottles of milk inside.

  New moon, and really cloudy too, he thought. But I must be somewhere near Van Ommen’s farm by now. He peered to the right but, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t see anything. Next time I’m not going unless I can take the dynamo torch. Erica can just make sure she’s home by half-past seven. This isn’t going to end well.

  He was soon proved right. Even though he was walking so very slowly and carefully, the bag still smashed into one of the posts that were meant to stop the farmers’ carts driving onto the cycle path. Blast it! Carefully, he felt the bag. Wet! One of the bottles was broken. What a waste of precious milk. In a foul mood, and even more cautiously than before, he started walking again. Goodness, it was so dark that he could hardly see anything at all. He was only about five hundred yards from home and knew the way like the back of his hand. Even so, being inside before eight was going to be a challenge.

  Wait a minute, though—he could see the vaguest shimmer of light over there. Yes, that was right, the Bogaards’ place. They weren’t too careful about the blackout. But they didn’t have much more to hide than the light of a candle anyway. He knew there were no other posts until the road now, though, and once he was there it would be easier. There were more houses, and a little light usually managed to escape somehow or other. Oh yuck, there was milk dripping into his clog. Was that footsteps he could hear? Not likely, it was on the stroke of eight. And everyone had to be inside their houses by then. He could feel a different surface beneath his feet. The main road. Now he had to turn right and just be careful not to end up in the ditch. Yes, it was easier now, as he’d expected. Very, very dimly, he could see the outline of the houses. The De Ruiters’ house, Miss Doeven’s, the Zomers’, the blacksmith’s, the Green Cross building. He was almost home.

  Then, just in front of him, an electric torch flashed on, shining right into his eyes. He nearly jumped out of his skin.

  “Es ist after eight o’clock,” said a voice. “Now you are my prisoner. Was ist das in your hand? A grenade?”

  “Turn that bloody torch off, Dirk,” said Michiel. “Why’d you want to go and startle me like that?”

  He’d recognized the voice, even with the fake German accent. It was their neighbours’ son. Dirk Knopper was fond of silly jokes—or at least his idea of a joke. He was twenty-one years old and he wasn’t scared of anything.

  “A bit of a fright, eh? It’ll toughen you up,” he said. “Anyway, it’s true. It’s gone eight. If a German comes along, he’ll shoot you dead as a threat to the German Reich. Heil Hitler!”

  “Ssh! Don’t go yelling that name around.”

  “What’s the problem?” Dirk said casually. “Our occupiers like hearing Hitler’s name, don’t they?”

  They walked on together. Dirk shielded the torch with his hand, so that only a little light slipped through, but it still seemed like broad daylight to Michiel. He could see the roadside clearly now, which felt like a luxury.

  “Hey, how did you get hold of that torch? Not to mention the batteries.”

  “Stole it from the Krauts.”

  “Yeah, a likely story,” scoffed Michiel.

  “No, really. You know we’ve got two officers billeted with us, right? Well, the other day, one of them—the fat one, you know—had a cardboard box in his room with what must have been about ten of these torches in there. Well, I say his room, but I mean our room, of course. And so I… liberated one.”

  “You just went wandering into his room?”

  “Yeah, of course. I always pop in when they’re not around, just to check it out. No trouble at all. The only person I have to watch out for is my dad. He’s such a coward. If he knew I had this torch, he wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink tonight. But he can’t sleep anyway, because of Rinus de Raat. Right, there’s my place. Bye, Michiel. Can you find your own way from here?”

  “Yes, I’ll manage. Bye!”

  His clogs crunching on the gravel, Michiel walked through the front garden. He was glad Dirk hadn’t noticed the broken bottle. He’d never have heard the last of it.

  Inside the house, the carbide lamp was still burning away brightly. It was always like that early in the evening, when Father had just recently filled it. That was a nasty job, because of the smell. But once the metal pot was closed and the flame was burning, the smell went away and the lamp gave off about as much light as an electric one. Unfortunately, though, as the evening went on, the light grew weaker and by half-past nine only a tiny blue flame remained, just enough to stop you from tripping over the furniture.

  Michiel would have liked to read in the evenings. There was plenty of light all day long, but he had no time then. At night, when he did have time—no light. He’d discovered eighteen yellowing books by Jules Verne in his father’s bookcase, and he was longing to read them. At the beginning of the evening, you could read if you were within a couple of yards of the lamp, but later on you could only make out the words by holding the book right up to the little blue flame. It wouldn’t have been fair to hog the light though, particularly not when there were guests—and there were nearly always guests.

  The front room was packed tonight too. In addition to Mother, Father, Erica and Jochem, Michiel saw at least ten other people. Glancing around, he didn’t recognize any of them, except for Uncle Ben. Mother introduced him to everyone. There was a married couple, Mr and Mrs Van der Heiden, who told Michiel he’d sat on their laps when he was little. They came from Vlaardingen, so it was possible, as that was where he’d been born. Then there was a very old lady with wrinkles, who said she was his Aunt Gerdien and demanded a kiss from him. He didn’t even know he had an Aunt Gerdien. Mother explained that she was a very distant cousin of Father’s, and that Father had last seen the good woman twenty years ago. Only she didn’t quite put it that way. Then there were two unfamiliar ladies who remarked on how very tall he’d grown, plus a smug little man who had the nerve to call him “lad” even though Michiel was almost sixteen, and a few others. Except for the “lad” fellow, they all seemed to know exactly who he was.

  “They’ve done their homework,” muttered Michiel.

  All the visitors came from the west of the country, the famine having driven them to the east and the north. It was early winter 1944–45, and there was a war on. That meant there was barely anything left to eat in the big cities. There was no transport either, so everyone had to walk. Sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds of miles. They made their way along the roads with handcarts, prams, bikes without proper tyres, and all kinds of other strange contraptions. There was a curfew too, so by eight o’clock the streets had to be empty. That made it essential to have friends and acquaintances who lived somewhere along the route. Michiel’s parents had previously had no idea they knew so many people—or rather, that so many people knew them.

  Night after night, at around seven o’clock, the bell would ring and keep ringing for the next hour. Some stranger would be standing there on the doorstep, beaming at them and exclaiming, “Hello! How are you? You remember me, don’t you? Miep, from The Hague. I’ve thought about you so often.
” It would have been amusing if it weren’t so very sad. Miep would turn out to be a lady who’d been introduced to Father and Mother as Mrs Van Druten on one occasion at the home of a mutual acquaintance. However, when you saw that Miep was malnourished and exhausted, and heard that she’d walked all the way from The Hague in a pair of worn-out gym shoes, just to fetch a few potatoes from Overijssel for her daughter’s children, then you said, “Of course, Aunt Miep! Come on in. How are you?” and you gave her a bowl of pea soup and a chair by the lamp, and a bed for the night, or at least a mattress on the floor.

  When Michiel had said hello to everyone, he asked his mother to come into the kitchen with him, lighting the way with the torch. It worked like a bicycle dynamo, and was powered by manually pumping the handle, which produced a fairly decent beam of light, but also tired out your thumb. “I’m sorry, Mother. I broke a bottle.”

  “Oh, Michiel. Couldn’t you have been a bit more careful?”

  Michiel stopped using the torch and lifted the blackout blind. The darkness was as black as ink.

  “Well, there’s no moon tonight, see, and I didn’t have the torch,” he said apologetically. He lowered the blind and began pumping the torch again, so that they had a little light.

  His mother was already regretting her remark. She stroked Michiel’s hair.

  He’s doing a man’s work, she thought. Going out in the pitch darkness all on his own to fetch milk, which I’d be too scared to do. And all I’m doing is shouting at him.

  “I’m sorry, Michiel,” she said. “It just slipped out. I know it wasn’t your fault. I’m just thinking about all those people in there who are waiting for their coffee.”

  Coffee? That was stretching it. What they drank was ersatz coffee, a substitute with brown colouring, and the hot milk was needed to make it drinkable.

  “I can’t go back again,” said Michiel. “It’s past eight. If you could hold the torch and give me some light, I’ll take the broken glass out of the bag.”

  “Leave it until tomorrow. Would you hand me the other bottle? Thanks. So how did it happen?”

  “Hit a post, near Van Ommen’s place. Shall I pour the milk into the saucepan?”

  “Here, I’ll do it.”

  Michiel took back the dynamo torch and they returned to the front room to heat the milk on the stove. There’d been no coal for a long time now, so they had to use blocks of wood in the stove instead.

  When they’d finished their coffee, the guests began to tell stories about life in the big cities. Hunger, cold and fear—those were the main topics of conversation. The shortages. The uncertainty. Everyone had a story about a family member who’d had to go into hiding, or a friend who’d been dragged off to a concentration camp, or a house that had been destroyed by a bomb. Then they moved on to the rumours about the war—about Patton, the American general who was making such good progress on the Western Front, and about the losses the Germans were suffering on the Eastern Front, or so people said.

  Then there were jokes about the war. Rumour had it that Anton Mussert, the leader of the Dutch pro-Nazi NSB organization, was married to his aunt. Mr Van der Heiden told them a story about a newsreel clip of Mussert being shown at the cinema. Someone at the front had called out: “Anton!”, and a high-pitched voice at the back had replied: “Yes, Auntie?”

  That cheered them all up a bit, and Uncle Ben said, “Have you heard the one about Goering, Goebbels and Hitler having a bet to see who could stay in a room with a polecat the longest? Goering tries it first. Fifteen minutes later, he leaves the room, gagging. Then Goebbels. He manages half an hour. Finally, Hitler goes in. Five minutes later, the polecat comes running out!”

  They were so tense and miserable that such simple jokes were all it took to fill the room with laughter.

  The carbide lamp was almost dead by now. Clutching stumps of candles, everyone shuffled off to bed or to a mattress on the floor. Michiel checked there was enough kindling wood for the stove tomorrow morning. He couldn’t find another candle, and his mother had the torch, so he felt his way to his bedroom in the attic, got undressed and slipped into bed. Far in the distance, he heard the drone of an aeroplane.

  “Rinus de Raat,” mumbled Michiel. “I hope he doesn’t fly our way.”

  Then he fell asleep, and slept right through that one thousand, six hundred and eleventh night of the German occupation.

  2

  When the German army, on the orders of their great Führer, Adolf Hitler, invaded the Netherlands and Belgium on 10th May 1940, Michiel van Beusekom was eleven. He remembered the radio broadcasting the thrilling news about parachute troops dropping over Ypenburg, repeat Ypenburg, and over Waalhaven, repeat Waalhaven. All day long, Dutch soldiers on horses passed through the village, joking with the girls and looking anything but heroic. Michiel, though, had secretly decided that war was a very exciting business, and he hoped it would go on for a long time.

  He changed his mind soon enough. In fact, his first doubts came after only five days. That was when the Dutch army gave up the one-sided battle. Father turned pale when he heard the announcement on the radio, and Mother wept. Then there was all the worry about the boys from the village who’d joined the army. Fourteen of them in total. News soon came that eight of the lads were unharmed. They heard the same about three others a few days later. But there was still no news of the last three: Gerrit, the baker’s son; Hendrik Bosser, who came from a farming family; and the Van Beusekoms’ gardener’s boy, who was known as Whitie, because his hair was so blond. Michiel could still remember it as if it were yesterday, sitting on the wheelbarrow for hours, watching Whitie’s dad working in the garden. He said nothing—just kept working steadily. A week later, he went on working steadily, after Gerrit and Hendrik had turned up and there was still no sign of Whitie.

  Gerrit had been captured. His fat face gleamed with glee as he told them about a German officer pointing in amazement at the freckles that covered his face from top to bottom.

  “It’s the rusty ends of my nerves of steel,” he’d replied, a retort that made it feel as if they hadn’t lost the war entirely after all.

  It simply hadn’t occurred to Hendrik Bosser to send a message home. But Whitie was buried at the Grebbeberg. His father went on weeding Mayor Van Beusekom’s garden and didn’t say a word.

  Even then, so soon after that 10th of May, 1940, the young Michiel had realized his wish for the war to go on had been a foolish one. He wanted it to be over, the sooner the better—but that, too, was wishful thinking. The war had lasted for four years and five months now, and it was only getting worse. The Americans and the British had landed in France last June and were working to push back the Germans—they’d already advanced to the southern part of the Netherlands—but they hadn’t made it across the rivers. They’d tried, at Arnhem. Sadly, though, the Battle of Arnhem was won by the Germans. And now winter was on the way. A winter as black as pitch. The German occupiers, well aware that they were losing, were wreaking havoc. They seized almost everything that was edible and transported it to Germany. Famine broke out in the big cities. The Germans had lost control of the air. American and British planes flew around, shooting at every means of transportation they saw, and forcing the Germans to move at night, in the dark, which was no easy task.

  The village of De Vlank, where Michiel’s father was mayor, was on the northern edge of the Veluwe, near the town of Zwolle. The River IJssel ran between De Vlank and Zwolle, and it was an important strategic point, as there were two bridges across the IJssel, one for cars and one for the train. So the Allies were doing their utmost to smash the bridges. There was constant bombing. Destroying a bridge would cut off German transport routes.

  The bridges had another important function besides allowing traffic to cross. They were a good place for stopping people and checking their papers. Young men could be arrested and sent to Germany to work in weapons factories. Individuals without valid identity papers could be caught. Yes, the Germans thought the IJssel
Bridge was a very fine trap indeed.

  As a result, travellers often stopped in De Vlank to ask if they would be able to cross the bridge safely, and how strict the checks were. It was well known that the mayor was no friend of the Germans, and that meant there was plenty of coming and going at the Van Beusekoms’ house.

  The morning after the night of the broken bottle, Michiel got up at half-past seven. There wasn’t much point getting up earlier, because it was dark. So he thought he’d be the first one up and about, but no. Uncle Ben was already lighting the stove.

  Uncle Ben wasn’t his real uncle. Erica, Michiel and Jochem called him that as he was such a close family friend and he often came to visit them, usually staying for a few days. That would have been a problem with almost anyone else, because of the food. But not with Uncle Ben. He always managed to rustle something up. The last time he’d even got hold of half an ounce of pre-war tea for Mother and a cigar for Father.

  “Morning, Uncle Ben.”

  “Oh, hello there, Michiel. I could do with a little help, chum. I need to get hold of a sack or two of potatoes today. Any idea where I can find some?”

  “We could try Van de Bos. He lives right out in the sticks, a good half an hour’s bike ride away. He’s quite a long way from the main road, so he doesn’t get many people coming by. I’ll go with you.”

  “Thanks.”

  The room was getting nice and warm, with the stove roaring away. Michiel watched it suspiciously. The damp wood they usually had to make do with didn’t burn that well. He lifted the lid of the old oak chest. Yes, it was empty. Uncle Ben had gone and put all the sticks of last resort in the stove.

  “Hey, you’ve used up all the sticks of last resort,” snapped Michiel.

  “The what?”

  “The sticks of last resort.”

  “And what exactly might they be?”

  “Those thin, dry bits of kindling wood from the chest. Sometimes Mother gets a bit desperate. You know, when the stove looks like it’s about to go out just before the food’s cooked. Then she’s allowed to use the wood from the chest. Father and I take it in turns to chop the wood very thin, and we put the sticks behind the stove to dry them out.”