The liberation of the Netherlands
The Germans stole our food, and the Canadians stole our hearts
Mum never got a chance to see the Canadians enter Amsterdam when the war was over. This video of her face was made by AI from a photo.
That was on the 8th of May. We knew they would come across the bridge over the river Amstel, five minutes walking from where we lived. Trudi and I couldn't wait. Very early in the morning we took our Dutch flags and lined up with thousands of others along the street. Mum said she still had to do the dishes and would follow shortly. By mid-afternoon, when we were hoarse with singing and shouting at the soldiers, we didn't wait for her any longer and went home.
Mum was in bed, nursing a baby. Our baby brother Tom was born right when the liberation army entered Amsterdam. Tom was tiny, really tiny. And he didn't put on any weight at all. It turned out that Mum's breast milk was little more than clear water, so Tom had to go to hospital and they fed him intravenously until, a full nine months later, he had regained his birth weight. But even Tom survived! And he was born on the day the war was over.
All the same, after that first day of euphoria we stopped celebrating. It was all somewhat unreal. An unreal dream world, and full of extremes, most of them very unpleasant.
The Canadians brought in some food, like cabin biscuits and milk powder, and powdered eggs. The egg powder you mixed with water to make omelets and for the cabin biscuits, you had to soak them with water and milk powder to make them soft enough. But we found that food didn't agree with us very well, our stomachs had shrunk too much. It actually killed some people. And other people still died of starvation.
After a few months, they started putting up lists of names outside the city hall. Names of people who had survived the concentration camps and much longer lists of people who were known to have died.
Many names never appeared on either list and never have, even till the present day. And even today survivors still try to find out what happened to their loved ones.
I hadn't met Karen yet, who would one day be my wife, but she too lost people dear to her. Karen had been brought up largely by her grandmother, and the old lady's name was on the list. Karen lost her grandmother and her great-grandfather.
Karen still has the last letter her grandmother had sent from the Dutch transit concentration camp Westerbork. To some extent, heavily censored mail was still allowed then.
20 May '43
Dear Elly and children, (Karen's mother, Karen, and her brother Niels)
A last farewell, maybe so long.
Who would have thought that?
Stay healthy, thousand big kisses,
Your Mum and Grandma
On 8 June Karen's grandmother was put on a deportation train with 3016 other Jews. That train arrived in the extermination camp Sobibor on the 11th. All women and children who had survived the train ride were killed straight away in the gas chambers.
A year earlier, in 1942, Karen's great-grandfather, an old man of 89, had died in Auschwitz.
People from the resistance movement, the underground as we called it, appeared out in the open, and others, who had been 'wrong' didn't show themselves. Some young women suddenly took to wearing scarves around their heads: young women who had befriended German soldiers. They had been dragged out of their homes by their neighbours, and had their heads shaved. We thought it was rather funny: nobody else would dream of going outside with anything even vaguely resembling a scarf. Maybe that sounds cruel, but it had been a cruel time. And after all, most of them were members of the Dutch nazi party, the NSB. We saw the collaborators and others who had befriended moffen as despicable traitors, many with blood on their hands. Bounty hunters, who had betrayed Jews and resistance fighters for ten shillings a head. They were the people who had hunted down and betrayed Big Oma and Uncle Herman, who were responsible for the death of so many of our family and friends.
There was so much to organise. The power station had to be repaired, the gas works put back in commission. And we kids had to go back to school. The school buildings which had been converted into army barracks for the Germans were now used by the Canadians, so the remaining buildings had to be shared by several schools. The last years, when I was home at all, I went to school either three mornings or four afternoons per week, and that stayed the same after liberation day. The school I was enrolled in shared four buildings with, if I remember rightly, nine other schools. Four buildings, but in fact it was one big two-story building, divided into four sections around three sides of a concrete playground. The fourth side was an eight feet high steel picket fence with a gate that was locked during school hours. One of our favourite games during the 15-minute playtime was to climb into that ugly fence and hang on to the top rail while others tried to pull you down.
This was so poignant, Luigi. So sad but also joyous - liberation and birth on the same day! Amazing that you remember it. And the last letter from Karen’s grandmother; 😭 enough to break a heart. What cruelty. Yes they were different times, seems unimaginable and yet it wasn’t that long ago at all. Always enjoy your memoirs.