by Loet Velmans
The next memorable announcement I remember hearing on the radio was Chamberlain’s speech of September 3, 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany, two days after the Germans invaded Poland.
During the eight months that followed—the so-called Phony War—I had a taste of things to come in biology class, where our teacher, a fervent Dutch Nazi, tried to convert us to his cause. In this, he generally failed. But he did provide me and my friends an instructive insight into the obsessions and objectives of national socialism. A convinced Darwinist, Mr. Brouwer explained German national socialism as the inevitable consequence of the evolution of the species, which placed a Teutonic Herrenvolk at the apex of a pyramid of all the world’s races. It was the first time that my debating skills were seriously tested. The trouble was that I always seemed to arrive at the perfect knockout rebuttal in my bed, half a day too late.
Mr. Brouwer found two disciples in our class: Robby and Karel. They were much better on the tennis court than I and also had more stamina as long-distance skaters, boasting about their tours along Holland’s frozen canals and ditches. They were pleasant enough and neither ever uttered an anti-Semitic remark in my hearing, although they forcefully expressed their pro-German sympathies and did not have a good word to say about the British. Both then joined the Dutch Nazi contingent that was sent to the Russian front, and both were killed.
Despite the precarious political situation, Mother traveled to Paris to see the new fashions. I was more interested in following the news from the front than in studying. My friends and I also put more energy into persuading our parents to allow us to throw parties than in finishing our schoolwork. At those parties, I tried to dance cheek to cheek with the girls in our class and rarely managed to steal a kiss.
In the winter and early spring of 1940, I was engaged in a weekly correspondence with Marie-France, a girl I had met the previous summer in France. Mother had arranged for me to stay with a family in Lyon who were in the silk business and who, to supplement their income, looked after young foreigners. I was one of six boarders staying with Marie-France’s family, all in need of improving our French language skills. Marie-France and I held hands, kissed, and fumbled. It was my first puppy love. At the end of my vacation she accompanied me to the train station. We got there an hour before my train’s departure. We held each other close and stared deeply into each other’s eyes. Even while thus preoccupied, I could not help but notice that the station was swarming with soldiers.
My friend Jules van Hessen (the brother of the woman who would become my wife) was more successful with the girls than most. At school he and I shared a desk. We also shared the arrogant attitude of sixteen-year-olds toward our teachers, whom we judged to be mediocre or inferior, and in the case of Mr. Brouwer, obnoxious. Jules’s family used to live in the “Belgian quarter” of Scheveningen where we did, and when we were younger Jules and I had often biked together to and from school. When it was stormy out, as it often is in Holland, we would arrive at our destination out of breath and often drenched to the skin.
In early September 1939, a few days after the Nazis invaded Poland, I received my first letter from Marie-France. Each page was decorated around the edges with hand-drawn pictures of the French tricolor, its vertical red, white, and blue interlocked with the horizontally striped red, white, and blue of my own Dutch flag. “We are one against our common enemy,” she wrote. Her patriotic fervor notwithstanding, I was smitten. It was the first time that my fantasies were focused on a real-life girl. We continued to write each other once a week. I received a last letter from Lyon in the early days of May 1940, just before the Germans launched their invasion of Holland and Belgium, leading to their military victory over France. We never reestablished contact, and she disappeared from my life.
May 10, 1940. I was jolted awake by a big bang: the first German bombs fell on a military barracks less than half a mile from our home. There had been no warning. For the first eight months of the war, the German army had remained motionless opposite a French-British force on the Maginot line in the northeastern corner of France. Nobody in Holland had expected that we would become involved. We only realized what had happened when we turned on the radio and heard that German troops had crossed the Dutch-German frontier. The announcer exhorted us to remain calm and to look out for spies and traitors. We knew all about those: in Norway only a month earlier, a local Nazi leader named Quisling had played a treacherous role in the German invasion of Norway. The term quisling, meaning a traitor who will stab his own people in the back, had already entered the Dutch language.
After listening to the radio, I went out into the street, where I could smell the smoke coming from the burning barracks. Despite the early hour, our gang was out in force: two neighbor boys, Hans and Jaap, my cousin Dick, and myself.
We were very excited. None of us had the slightest intention of going to school, or even of finding out whether school was open. We wanted to make ourselves useful. We were all convinced that the Germans would be thrown back by immediate, massive reinforcements that were to come in from Britain. We wanted to witness the arrival of our allies and saviors, and to see German aircraft being shot down by our own fliers and the RAF. We went into the dunes as self-appointed spotters of German aircraft and any German parachutists who might drop down on our turf.
Over the next few days, Scheveningen, my hometown, became an imaginary battleground. We did not see a single German soldier, but rumors abounded that they were close by. Tanks were supposed to have entered neighboring The Hague. Hearsay had it that street-to-street and door-to-door fighting was taking place just south of us. Everyone was on an emotional roller coaster. (After the war I learned what really happened in our area during those days in May. In the first night of the war, sixty Dutch soldiers were killed in the air attack on the barracks near our home. German parachutists had been dropped south and east of the city with orders to capture Queen Wilhelmina and the royal family as well as the entire cabinet. That attack had been foiled, and many Germans were taken prisoner and immediately transported to England. Overall, the Dutch air defense forces around The Hague succeeded in downing about one hundred German war-planes. At no small cost, however: every single Dutch plane was destroyed.)
While my parents and my friends’ parents wrung their hands, my friends and I spent our last moments of carefree boyhood on the alert in the dunes. In all those four days, we only spotted and booed one or two German reconnaissance planes. We had reason to cheer only once, when, in the far distance, we spied what we thought might be a lone Dutch fighter plane.
The dunes had always been my favorite playground, where, every day after school, I used to walk my dog, an oversize boxer. In the early evening, six days a week, in summer and in winter, I would run along the sandy footpath at the skirting of the dunes to meet Mother’s commuter train at the Pomp Station, a small, open-air platform where only half a dozen trains stopped each day. My boxer pulled me along—I had to tug him back on his leash. Our route ran parallel to the imposing wall of the Scheveningse Gevangenis (the Scheveningen prison). One prison guard didn’t like my dog and would shout at me to keep the leash tight. My dog would snarl back. On cold and rainy nights the prison would loom dark and threatening. During the war the prison was to achieve great notoriety: the Germans filled it with prominent Dutch citizens—some as hostages, others as suspects or members of the Resistance.
By day three we knew that the Luftwaffe had destroyed our airfields, but surely, we thought, the British and French would soon be on their way to save us, and would push back the Nazis before they could reach Amsterdam, The Hague, and the western part of the country. Our confidence in an imminent victory was bolstered by the news that our army engineers had breached the dikes, flooding the countryside. Making the roads impassible was easily accomplished, since much of the land in western Holland lies below sea level. It was a tactic rich in tradition: after all, breaching the dikes had stopped invaders in the past, including the Spaniards in the early 16
00s and Louis XIV later in the same century. We were certain the German tanks would never make it this far.
The reality of our situation was driven home to us in the afternoon of May 14, when the announcement came over the radio: the Dutch army had capitulated. The Luftwaffe had pulverized neighboring Rotterdam, Holland’s second-largest city and our most important harbor. To make matters worse, the queen and her family had fled to England, devastating our morale.
2
Escape
IN MY OWN FAMILY, major world events always seemed to find us seated around Tante Aal’s table, heaped with cakes and pastries. I was slumped next to Dick, my eighteen-year-old cousin. There, on our day of shame and sadness, we hung our heads and blew our noses along with all the rest of our compatriots: 7 million people coming to terms with the awful truth—that the peaceful life we had known as a nation was over. Our life would now be directed by a hated enemy. We had no idea what he might do, but we feared the worst.
A strained voice on the radio announced that some units were continuing to resist in Zeeland, a province in the southwest of the country, bordering Belgium. Dick and I, eager for action, pushed our chairs back from the table and got to our feet. I announced that we were going down there to join the fighting. I remember the stricken look on the faces around that table, all of them too preoccupied with their own fears to react to what I was saying. None of us realized at that moment that we had just finished our last supper on native soil.
Grabbing our bicycles, Dick and I raced to the harbor of Scheveningen, a twenty-minute ride. Since the Germans had occupied most of the country, the logical road to Zeeland was by boat, heading south along the coast.
When we reached the harbor, we noticed scores of people huddled in clusters on the quays, gesticulating excitedly. Some were running from group to group. Serious negotiations were in progress. Huge sums of Dutch guilders, Swiss francs, and American dollars were being offered to any Scheveningen fisherman prepared to leave his family behind to ferry the prospective refugees across the North Sea to England.
Dick and I looked at each other. Going to England and volunteering over there seemed a much better plan than throwing in our lot with the remains of a defeated army. I saw a boy of around twelve, who was just standing there. I signaled him to come over.
“If you’ll deliver this message for me,” I said, “you can keep the bike.” I quickly wrote my aunt’s address on a piece of paper, folded it, and scribbled on the inside: “Dick and I are on our way to England. We are at the harbor. Tot ziens [Good-bye for now].”
The boy took the note and jumped on my bike. “He’ll never deliver it,” Dick muttered. We were standing close to one of the groups huddled there on the quay. I tried to wedge my way in even closer so I could overhear what they were saying. Surrounded by a protective wall of women and children, two middle-aged men were trying to strike a deal with a fisherman by showing him the contents of their open wallets. The fisherman was shaking his head.
I turned away and noticed four young men in their early twenties. They had been observing my transaction with the boy and the bike. Now they motioned us over. One said, “There’s a lifeboat in the second harbor—over there. A big motorboat. We’re going to see if we can take it to England. Want to come along?”
We jumped at the chance. I felt flattered to be asked. In the chaos of that hour, the kinship these young men felt for us—two high school kids who shared their determination to get over to England and fight the Germans—prompted them to include us in their group. It was a lucky break.
Three of our new companions were engineering students at Delft University, one of Europe’s most prestigious technical and scientific academic institutions. The fourth, also a student, had cycled down from Groningen in the north, hoping to enlist in the army. We ran over to the second harbor, and there in front of us was a gleaming, new-looking lifeboat, property of Holland’s volunteer coast guard. Its name — Zeemans Hoop (Seaman’s Hope)—seemed a good omen.
A stocky man, the lone guard, was standing in the prow. As politely as possible, we asked him if he would please, please, take us to England.
“Over my dead body.” He scowled. “Why don’t you all get lost!”
Nobody moved. We remained where we were. He watched us warily, and we stared back at him. Nobody spoke. Then after a minute or two, to my utter amazement, he suddenly backed down. “All right, then,” he said. “Take good care of her. And good luck. Watch out for those mines.” He jumped ashore and walked away.
The boat was ours.
A crowd of people had spotted us and come running in our direction—men and women of all ages, including children, all waving and shouting that they wanted to be let on board. After we managed to let down the gangplank, the boat was filled in no time at all. Many of the people were carrying suitcases. All were well dressed: the men in suits, white shirts, and ties, the women in suits and high-necked blouses. All wore or carried over their arms a beige or navy blue raincoat—in 1940 casual clothes were not yet in fashion. Many of them spoke German. These were Jewish refugees from Germany, on the run once again.
One of the men who came aboard was a Dutch sergeant in uniform, armed with a rifle. He had deserted that afternoon when his unit had been ordered to surrender. He made himself useful by firing over the heads of the crowd on the dock, because the boat was now full and the people left onshore were getting increasingly desperate. We were packed tight. “No more room,” we shouted. “Sorry!” We started to cast off.
At that moment, a taxi drew right up to where the boat was tied up. I’ll never know what compelled the driver to pull up to that particular spot. Out stepped Father, Mother, Tante Aal, and her husband, Max. And Dick’s parents, Ro and John.
“No room,” said one of the students.
“Can’t you see we’re full?” shouted another.
“But it’s our parents!” Dick and I yelled.
Our family was allowed on board, and the gangplank was finally hauled in. Father quickly filled me in on what had happened. Contrary to Dick’s expectations, the boy I’d given my bike to had kept his word. After he had delivered my note, Mother had shown no hesitation. She had stood up and declared: “Where my son goes, I go too.” Wasting no time, the other members of the family had grabbed their suitcases and said that where Mother went, they would go too. On an impulse, driven by fear, three well-settled, middle-class couples left behind their homes, pets, carpets, family silver, stamp collections, furniture, and almost all of their wardrobes.
I was proud of Mother’s display of reckless courage. I was not particularly surprised that the rest of family would follow her, even though I had never known them to be impulsive. Mother had a forceful personality. At the same time, I couldn’t help feeling annoyed that just as I was about to embark on the first big adventure of my life, my entire family was there to share in, if not direct, my destiny.
Suddenly there was a commotion around the cabin in the middle of our boat. The motor would not turn over! While our sergeant discouraged several people onshore from trying to jump aboard our boat by threatening them with his rifle, our Delft engineering students frantically tried to start the motor. Finally they threw up their hands. They could not get it started.
The ploy of the gift of a bike was repeated, and a boy rode off to locate a member of the lifeboat’s crew. He was back in no time with the boat’s engineer, who lived nearby. He started the engine and was offered a small fortune to remain onboard, but he declined. Reluctantly, we dropped him off at the end of one of the two piers jutting out into a perfectly calm sea.
“Watch out for mines!” he warned from the shore.
A roll call was taken, and each passenger’s name was recorded in a log. The tally was forty-six people, most of whom looked anxious and scared. Only our group of high school and college students, proud of our success so far, kept up a show of bravado.
Only years later did I learn that, except for one small sailboat, the Zeemans Hoop was the onl
y refugee boat to make it out of the harbor of Scheveningen that night.
There were two doctors aboard. An inventory revealed a limited amount of drinking water, half a dozen bottles of rum stashed away for emergencies on those stormy winter nights when the crew of the Zeemans Hoop performed its regular lifesaving duties, a number of first aid kits, and a dozen or so chocolate bars, which one of the parents had prudently packed to keep his child quiet.
I was assigned to be a forward lookout for mines. From the newsreels, I was familiar with what a mine looked like—a barrel-shaped form floating in the water. Night was falling. It was a glorious evening, clear and calm. Standing in the prow, scanning the water, I didn’t dare to turn around to watch the distant spectacle of the city of Rotterdam going up in smoke, the result of the massive German air raid. I listened to the exclamations of my travel companions as they described the scene—a red, glowing blaze veiled in black smoke, gradually fading into the night.
Focused on my mine-detecting responsibility, I was too excited to consider what must be going through the minds of my parents and the other older passengers who had left behind their friends, their relatives, their homes, and all their worldly possessions. Now we—the Dutch, who had thought it impossible that our country would ever be occupied by an enemy—were on the run. Now we too were refugees.
We were still within sight of land when our engine coughed and died. The Zeemans Hoop lay still in the water. Gentle waves lapped at the sides of the boat, the edge of our existence. The sky was bright and starlit. I wondered where the seagulls had gone.
A man with a double-barreled name and the title “Jonkheer,” signifying membership in the Dutch nobility, started bellowing at the top of his voice, demanding that we return to port—“for the sake of the women and children.” Others joined in. But the rest argued equally loudly that it would be dangerous to turn back, since there was no way of knowing what the German occupiers would do to us.