The Story of my parents (Part 2) (8/4/2025)

Back to 1940. A few days after the Dutch government surrendered my grandparents on my father’s side got a knock at the door. The visitor was someone from the red cross informing my grandmother that one of her son’s had died during the Battle of the Grebbeberg. The visitor handed Wim’s military dog tag to my oma and he left. I have been told that my distraught oma locked herself into a private room and meditated for three days. My oma was a known fortune teller; family lore told us that one of her foremothers was a gypsy fortune teller. I remember that when I was young, during card games with my oma, she would suddenly gasp when she looked at the new hand she had been dealt and say something like “Oh my someone I know will become ill and will be dying soon.” She would refuse to tell you who the person was and that made it even more spine-chilling.

When my oma exited her room after three days, she announced that “Wim wasn’t dead.” Less than a week later Wim walked in the home, very much alive. His partner in the foxhole had been killed and Wim had swapped dog tags with the dead body in the attempt to hide his identity and enable him to join the resistance without implicating the family. The story goes that my grandmother’s hair had turned white during the three days of meditation. She had been a redhead before the episode.

It also seems that my dad worked in France during the early part of WWII. This might have been in 1940 or 41. He never told us much about it, except that he lived or spend time in a brothel in northern France (near Amiens?). While I assume he had a good time with the ladies, he never provided a lot of details of his life there. I found old photographs which showed him on a building site at an airport. On a few pictures you can see him doing some kind of roofing job; he was sitting on top of the roof rafters. I can assume that this was a work camp of sorts. The Germans forced a lot of young adults into forced labor. Jan, my mother’s oldest brother ended up in a labor camp (the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen) and died there two days after being liberated by the Americans.

What happened after that is somewhat of a mystery. I don’t know when exactly it took place, but my dad told me that he tried to escape to either a neutral or an allied country, and he traveled to Finland to try to cross the border into Sweden. I assume he somehow left or escaped the labor camp in France. He probably made it back to the Netherlands and took off for Sweden. I am not sure what his route was, except that he spent some time in Latvia. My research shows that Latvia was officially occupied by the German Army in July 1941 during operation Barbarossa when Hitler tried to invade Russia. Latvia remained under German occupation until October 1944. I also wonder how the heck he was able to do this as a young adult (it must have been in either 1941, 42 or 43, so he was between 19 to 21 year-old) without attracting the attention of the Germans and being (re)captured; however, it seems that he made it to Rovaniemi in Finland and spent the winter there.

The stories that my dad told me of this time include an account of him sitting in a soup kitchen in Latvia across from an elder man with a Jewish star on his jacket. My father told me he was able to sneak one of his id-s in the hope that the guy could use it to stay out of the hands of the Nazis. Stories of Finland include tales of cold, darkness, skiing, drinking and saunas. I learned about one of his buddies who was drunk and went outside to relieve himself. They found him, the next morning, just outside the door dead, frozen solid. Dad told me that they assumed that he tripped and that was it. Dad was never able to cross the Swedish border and somehow made it back to Holland.

Here it gets strange. When I got an interview for a job at a company in Amersfoort, my father insisted on going with me, and he and Donna went to visit the site of Kamp Amersfoort. After my interview they took me there, as well. It seems that my father ended up in that camp after the Finland episode. Amersfoort was a work/transfer camp. I am not sure how long he was back before he was captured. Kamp Amersfoort seemed to house a few Jews, but mostly workcamp evaders waiting for transfer to work camps in Germany. Furthermore, it had some resistance fighters, black marketeers and Russian prisoners of war. It seems that the surviving Russians (Uzbeks) were executed after a few months. Dad talked about having to work in the camp filling sandbags. He told us that he responded to an inquiry by the Germans if there was someone who could operate a train. The train was taking the sandbags to a point from where they were shipped to who knows where. Dad told us that he volunteered but did not know how to drive a train. The train promptly derailed. Did dad sabotage it? He claimed he did, but I am not sure. It could also have been pure incompetence. He told us that he was put in the “Rose Garden”, an enclosure surrounded by barbwire and had to stand in it for 36 hours without water and food.

He became ill with dysentery in the camp and credits his survival on a Russian guard who somehow smuggled in opium which stopped the diarrhea. Amersfoort was mostly a transfer camp. Jews were sent to extermination camps in Germany and the non-Jews to work camps. At times they were the same camps. It is therefore no surprise that my father was put on a transport train to the German concentration camp Buchenwald. It appears that he was not sitting in a cattle car but in a regular passenger car with guards. This might be a separation between the forced labor and the Jews, who I am sure were stuck in cattle carts. Somehow the Dutch resistance jumped the train near Venlo, overwhelmed the guards and my father was thrown out of the slow riding train. He was still very ill and somehow made it to a nunnery or cloister in Belgium, where he was rehabilitated. He told us that he was in a coma for approximately a week. “I saw the light,” he often told me, a near-death experience.

There is another gap in his stories and the next one he told me about was that he joined the Canadian soldiers in the spring of 1945 when they fought their way through the Netherlands, freeing it from the Germans. They were sitting in a barn somewhere in Over-IJssel or the Achterhoek when all the sudden a projectile came flying through one of those typical thatched roofs that many Dutch farmhouses and barns had. It had gotten stuck in the thatch, not exploded and was hanging above their heads. One of the soldiers was brave enough to climb on a chair and decommission the bomb while it was hanging in and from the ceiling. He mentioned that this was one of the scariest episodes in his life. And there you have it, my father’s life till the end of World War II, as I can remember from his stories.

A picture of my mother and her friend Hennie being silly during the war.  The sign says "Safety order, it is forbidden to take pictures or have cameras on you.  The storm troupes from the Netherlands."  These were the German troupes stationed and/or recruited in the Netherlands under Hitler.