1945

New Year’s Day came on a Tuesday. After my spectacle with the hungry hordes, the grown-ups decided to remove me from the Koopmans’ farm again. That was for my safekeeping since any idle talk from those who had seen or encountered me might just prompt another search by the ever-curious S.S.

The Hunger Winter of 1944-1945, Amsterdam. Photos by Cas Oorthuys/Hollandse Hoogte

So little Dickey was on the road again. And it wasn’t a great day for traveling. It was as dark, frigid, and snow-blown as any day that the Hunger Winter had to offer—and I had quite a trip in store for me. Annie plopped me on the back of her bike, with its hard rubber-hose tires, and we rode off toward the town of De Weere.

Because Annie was Catholic, she was only to take me as far as De Weere. After that, we’d be in Protestant territory, where she didn’t know anyone. Just miles apart, the two districts might as well have been two different planets.

As we rode, I realized I was on my way to the parting company—maybe forever—with this beautiful person I now had my arms around. I had my animal friends, but Annie Koopman was my only real human friend. I was sad about leaving her.

The wind kept blowing Annie’s skirt up, and I kept trying to push it back down. She was wearing long underwear, but still, it was a bitterly cold day. She had her scarf wrapped over her face to keep out the blowing snow. I held on as tight as I could to her body. My rear end felt like a chunk of ice, and my feet were pretty cold, too. Fortunately for me, Wim had done some repairs to my wooden shoes, adding new soles and some wire bands around the top to keep them from coming apart.

At one point, we paused behind a stopped milk truck for a few minutes, warming ourselves in the heat of its exhaust. This was a bit risky since we knew NSB collaborators drove milk trucks.

Then, we had to pass through the village of Opmeer. That was the distribution center for dairy products of the Aurora Melkfabriek. Since all food products were now under the strictest Nazi control, police and German soldiers were everywhere, with their motorcycles and sidecars, running us off the road. We slipped several times and fell onto the hard snow. I’m sure Annie would have loved to get her hands on some of those guys and throttle them—and she could have done it, too. She was as strong as a wrestler.

I was wearing the gloves my Mama had sent me, knitted in black wool. I remember at some point putting my hand to my mouth and tasting the yarn in the cold. To this day, whenever I get the edge of anything wool in my mouth, I think of those gloves and that bicycle ride, as well as my farewell to Annie Koopman.

At De Weere, we met up with my Papa. I gave Annie one last embrace and watched her ride off the other way, into that dark winter.

Papa took me on the back of his bike, as far as Abbekerk. Here, I was introduced to Frans Feld, who took me on the back of his motorcycle to his home in Benningbroek. Here, I was given a nice hot cup of imitation coffee to warm me up while I waited for the final leg of my journey.

A noise at the door, a welcoming stamping of feet, and nowhere was someone new. I was introduced to my latest protector—another teenage girl whose name was Grietje Keijzer. Grietje now took this sad little boy on the back of her bike to her family’s home in Midwoud.

Her bike was more comfortable than the others. Grietje’s sister-in-law ran a bicycle shop, so

Grietje was lucky enough to have a deluxe bike—with pneumatic tires. It was also the first bike I’d ever seen with a split saddle. After riding astride cold metal all day, finally, I had an actual seat.

My whole trip from the Koopmans to the Keijzers couldn’t have been more than twenty kilometers, but it took the entire day long. The last leg was difficult because we had to ride right past the mayor’s house and the garage Vos and his brother Gerrit Vos—both well-known NSB members. Just recently, these collaborators had turned in a most influential doctor named Joop de Vries, and I’m sure they would have loved to hand over yet another Jew. On the day of his scheduled execution, a guard came to fetch the prisoner Joop de Vries—but since that is a popular Dutch name, the guard got the wrong Joop de Vries—and another man was executed in his place. After his release, our Dr. Joop had become an even more vibrant helper of the resistance.

But we slipped by without attracting attention, and around nightfall, we arrived at the home of Reijer and Trijntje Keijzer in Midwoud. I was crying again. My new Aunt Trijntje made me a special sandwich with candy-crumbs on homemade bread, but I couldn’t stop crying even to eat. So she took me into Grietje’s bedroom, where I was to sleep. As she opened the bed, I saw the most luxurious white sheets and heavy comforters. That looked so good to me; I think my tears finally ran out. Aunt Trijntje tucked me in with a hot water bottle by my feet, and my long, sad vacation was over. And I slept.

Reijer and Trijntje Keijzer took me in and were very good to me. But this was not a good time. “Gelukkige Nieuwjaar,” people whispered to each other. But it was not a happy new year. To me, it looked a lot like the end of the world.

The homeless, hungry refugees were a never-ending stream pouring through our villages and roads like some dreadful cold syrup. My Papa had soundly warned me that I must never again risk trying to help the hungry, as I had two days before. But it was impossible not to identify with them, even as their own identities faded into whiteness. This hunger was a thing so pure and raw. The passing faces were uniformly spiritless, gray, and sad.

We heard the slow lumbering of pushcarts and wagons, the bicycles with no tires, the footsteps through the snow, and the soggy slush. They struck our land, and our people were undergoing a total moral annihilation. Who could afford a soul simple these days when even owning a personality was such nostalgic fantasy? There could be no pretense here—there was only wanting. What would you give for a potato, even a rotten one? What savagery might you risk, what degradation might you pay to endure, for a one-in-ten chance at a morsel of bread?

These people, our good Dutch citizens, walked no longer in the world, but in hunger. They would skim food from the underside of the earth if it should yield any—just to get enough strength to keep on searching for food, food, food.

Look up, and you would see the Germans standing among the trees, on the bridges, on the walls. Were they grinning like wolves? Maybe not. They were bitter. They would eat, and their collaborators in the NSB would eat. But we, the Dutch, had betrayed the Reich, had sabotaged the dream, had shunned the purifying salvation of their genocide. In their eyes, indeed, we were only getting what traitors deserved. That was to be an enduring bitterness.

My new Aunt Trijntje and Uncle Reijer, their son, and their daughter Grietje—they all looked so gray. Their eyes were hollow. They had no life’s color in their skin. But in fact, they did have enough to eat. Just enough. And they were very, very lucky.

I looked out the window of the great room, and Grietje pulled me back—just in time. As I pulled back, I saw a squad of German Grüne Polizei passing by our window, looking around. They kept going.

Grietje told me she had seen a poster by the city hall, stating that harsh reprisals would necessarily follow the recent killing of a German S.S. officer. How many of our local Dutch citizens would now be arbitrarily executed by German rifles?

We sat around the wireless one cold night, listening to the warm, faraway voice of our exiled queen. It was good to hear her voice, but her speech was very disheartening.

In the coming days, however, the bulletins of our own Binnenlandse Strijdkracht would give us at least a ray of hope. Surreptitiously printed and distributed at significant risk, they contained all the better news.

The liberation would come soon, they said. We had only to hold on for a few more months — everything possible was being done to get us liberated.

On January 3, the village of Midwoud was crawling with Germans. Dirk Keijzer, a boy just about twice my age, came to tell me it would be better for me to hide in the horse barn, which was about a kilometer back from the house. So early that Wednesday morning, I set out for the distant barn, in my wooden shoes, with a blanket under my jacket. I had on a white undershirt and underpants knitted of sheep’s wool, and best of all, my black socks Mama had knitted by hand for me.

Where, I wondered, was my Mama?

After a long walk in the cold, I arrived at the barn. Here, I heard the voices of my friends, the horses. One was a stallion, all black; the other three were dark brown females. The moment I slid open the metal lock and opened the door, I was welcomed by their faces—beautiful and friendly horses. I grabbed some hay and pushed it under their noses. I took the metal brush and slid it onto my hands—it fit like a glove—and began to brush each one down.

By this point, my love of the animals had become a solid and mysterious passion. It often seemed that the farm animals cared as much for me as I did for them. I was quite a different boy now from the one who had once lived at Waalstraat 109 in Amsterdam South. Believe it or not, even though day and night these poor beasts had to listen to the awful noise of gunfire, air wars, bombardments, and missiles, whenever I came in, they were as happy as puppies to see me.

It was illegal for these horses to be here. Should the Germans learn that the Keijzers were keeping horses in their barn—horses which under the present emergency should already be the property of the Reich—it could mean death by firing squad.

Now, around noon, I helped myself to a few sugar beets and cut them into slices with the sickle used to cut grass. The Keijzers kept cheese under some of the hay, so I took a hefty portion of that too, peeled off the mold and the skin, and had myself a nice meal. There was not much to do while I hid in the horse barn, but it was warm enough inside with the animals and my warm clothes. So, after all the commotion of the last few days, I decided to take a nap.

I was awakened by the stirring and hissing of the horses. There was Dirk Keijzer, smiling. He thanked me for going up to the barn all alone. He carried a green bucket in his hand, which, as I could smell before seeing, was filled with potatoes mixed with carrots and peas and a bit of meat on top.

“Dickey,” he said, “I brought you some dinner now—because tomorrow, January 4, the whole village of Midwoud and its surroundings will be pure hell, and I may not get back here.” Dirk was fast becoming like an older brother to me. I looked him in the eye and said, “I want the horses to be safe.”

I ate my nice, hot meal and had another slice of cheese. Dirk fed the horses, said farewell, and went off back to the house. It had grown dark meanwhile, and the wind blowing through the rafters was cold. But surrounded as I was by four big horses, I stayed tolerably comfortable. I crawled under my blanket in the straw and tried to go to sleep. But what Dirk had said about the next day kept me awake for a long time. I prayed that my parents—and the Keijzers, and the Koopmans too—should be safe from the spree of random executions we all expected. I knew that in the present state of the world, people could easily be put against the wall and shot for no greater crime than being Dutch. It was nothing personal. We were all the enemy now. And into these sweet thoughts, I finally dozed off.

Deep in the night, I was roused by airplanes thundering overhead, planes by the hundreds. It seemed to me they were passing right over our barn—whose tin roof acted as a giant drum, making the sound ten times worse.

The horses were going wild. I got up and held the older mare’s head, scratching her forehead right around the white patch. As she calmed, the other three horses calmed a bit, too. I went to each of them and rubbed their foreheads until their ears went back to a relaxed position. Then, I gave them all some pieces of the sugar beets.

I listened. There was silence all around. Such quiet was a sweet thing—because usually, so great a passage of bombers would draw plenty of fighters and antiaircraft fire. I wondered why the Germans were so quiet that night.

I retired in the straw, under the blanket, and went back to sleep. Daylight had come by the time I was roused again—this time, by the distant report of small-arms fire. I thought of my Dutch friends and neighbors, who were indeed being executed as I lay listening. Each shot went right through me as if they had shot me myself. I knew that they could have aimed any of these shots straight at my Papa, Dirk, Annie, Grietje, or at any of my numerous protectors. These wicked “saboteurs” had dared to save my life.

My friends, the horses, must have noticed me shaking. It now seemed as if the horses were trying to keep me calm. I looked at them. Their eyes were so impressive, so affectionate, that in a moment, I rose again. I went over to the horses, grabbed each one of them by the head, and kissed them all.

And I cried that day. I cried until Dirk came down to the barn at around noon with another meal for me. He looked exhausted and pale, so the best thing for me was to say nothing—take my dinner, sit down, but Dirk spoke.

“It was a horrible day,” he told me, “and we can only hope the bastards get revenge.” I looked at him and didn’t know what to say.

“I’ll come back before dark, and then we’ll both go back to the house together. My sister Grietje is worried about you.” In the dark, he came again for me, and we went back home.

Grietje told me that what I’d heard the night before were not British or American planes, but rather, some 200 Luftwaffe planes en route to attack somebody. That was why there had been no flack fire.

Papa came to visit me that night. As an advance birthday gift, he brought me a wooden wheelbarrow made with his own hands. I thanked him very much and asked him a question. “Papa,” I said, “how did you know that Oma Betje is dead?”

Papa explained that once, when he was working in a greenhouse in Benningbroek, he saw a confident man come in, about his age, who looked like he might also be Jewish.

“I started to whistle the Sjama, and this fellow answered back, whistling the next part of the same tune. So I felt safe to talk.”

This man’s name was Bay Kooker. He invited Papa over to Frans Feld’s fruit barn, and there, Papa met Bay’s wife, whose name was Riek. They all got to talking. Once Riek found out that Papa’s real name was Cardozo, not Bakker, it turned out she had a story to tell him.

Riek explained how, in July 1942, the Jewish Council had given her a special appointment as a social worker. Riek was exempt from deportation with her particular job, but she volunteered to work at the transit camp at Westerbork, near Assen, in the northeast of Holland.

Westerbork had initially been built by the Dutch government in the 1930s to receive the many thousands of German Jews fleeing west to the safety of neutral Holland. In a bitter turnabout, once in power, the Nazis had transformed the camp to a stopover point for Jews and other deportees going the other way—east, to extermination.

Riek arrived at Westerbork shortly before the human landslide began in earnest. Now, suddenly, space had to be found for thirty thousand people. She helped nurse the sick in the camp hospital barracks, and on departure days, she helped get the inmates ready for their trip east.

She told Papa everything she’d seen at Westerbork—the mud, misery, sickness, and overcrowding. Westerbork had its hierarchy, its leaders, guards, medical staff, and cultural officers. As an employee of the Jewish Council, Riek held a rare travel permit—which allowed her to return to Amsterdam on occasion and collect medical supplies. She used these opportunities to bring news to the families of the people in the camps.

In November, she had just returned to Westerbork and visited Barracks 66. There, she met a lady named Betje Krijn Cardozo. She remembered this because the name Krijn rang a bell—Dries Krijn was a famous actor.

Riek had to tell her that she was there to help prepare them for imminent departure by rail. Betje had told Riek that she had received a lovely parcel from her family—and please, if she should ever meet up with one of her relatives, please thank them. She had also been told that when her son Maurits and his family were aboard a train to escape Holland, her little grandson Max had started to talk, and they’d all been arrested.

It was on a Monday, Riek said. Riek saw everyone waiting in groups between their barracks under a gray, cold sky as she walked through the camp. Riek was on the team who helped the old, the infirm, the mothers, and the babies. They dressed and escorted them down to the railhead, then patiently, gently helped lift them into those bare cattle cars. Those who couldn’t walk would be carried on stretchers.

“I did know if they knew their fate,” she told Papa. “I did. And I cursed myself.”

So Riek Kooker told Papa about how she had seen his mother aboard on the train. She was dressed in a long, black, fashionable dress. She had noble brown and white wavy hair piled high.

“A plain, beautiful woman, still with beautiful hair, only one year ago,” Papa told me. And we both started to cry.

January 11—Dickey’s birthday—came and went again. Now I was eight.

I had no friends my age. I was afraid to try and make friends with the kids in the area since they had no idea I was Jewish, and I didn’t want to “blow my cover,” so to speak. If I did go outdoors, local people would always question me since I was a stranger. Where is your father? What’s your father’s name? What does he do? I always told them my father was away in a German labor camp. But I was terrified that they would see through me and report me. I can say that at the Keijzers’ farm, we never really went hungry during the whole Hunger Winter. How lucky we were! We were always able to make our butter and cheese, and we had some sugar, too. Best of all, I loved the buttermilk. We had a massive barrel of buttermilk with a big spoon, so everyone in the house could help themselves. And right beside that was a barrel of sauerkraut, with lots of mold on top. The thicker the mold, the better the sauerkraut.

One January day, another flock of American bombers thundered overhead when we heard a curious noise within the general furor. We looked out the door to see this: one great, dark B-17 flying fortress careening out of control, directly toward our farmhouse. For a second, my breath went away. Then, we were all scrambling to get out and clear of the house.

The troubled bomber would miss our house, while we watched in horror as it passed close overhead. The plane was on fire. Maybe the men had tried to evacuate too quickly; I don’t know. But something had gone desperately wrong. Parachutes had snagged on the broad wings and stabilizers; trailing behind them, in thin air, were the helpless crew members. The doomed airplane swooped so near to us, for a few seconds, we could hear the screams of young American boys. Years later, I learned that one of the crews of that airplane had survived that awful crash—a flyer named Cecil Belton. Eight other crewmen had perished.

A moment after the crash came a vast explosion and lots of smoke. We ran toward the scene.

Within minutes, the Gestapo, the Grüne Polizei, and the Wehrmacht converged on the area to search the smoldering wreckage for valuable documents. They were casually throwing men’s body parts around. I was sickened. But we didn’t see what happened next; we had to run because the Gestapo began rounding up the locals who had run out to try and help. Grietje took me home. We later heard that eleven people from the village of Midwoud were summarily executed by the Germans that day, including several of Grietje Keijzer’s close friends.

Grietje—my new big sister—was just now at the prime of her life and a fine, strong young woman. But every time she got close with some young man her age, he would either be deported or murdered by the Nazis. The Germans and their collaborators saw every young man between sixteen and forty as a terrorist, even if they had the proper identity cards. Every night, it seemed some young man would be pulled out of his home and arrested, packed away on a truck, and eventually eliminated. That night, Grietje’s sorrow was so overwhelming, I wept right alongside her. She no longer believed in God, but I managed to say a little prayer. Then, I went to the bedroom.

By this point, I hadn’t seen my Mama for over two years. I knew from Papa that she was alive and well, but I had no idea where she was or what she was doing. Only later would I learn about the very unusual events surrounding her birthday—January 23, 1945.

Through our friend Arie Broers, Mama had been recruited to work as a writer/editor for an underground resistance newspaper in Schagen, Holland. That was one of those little secret newspapers, published from basements and private closets, which helped the embittered Dutch keep up their morale through the darkest times. Mama was an intelligent woman with a facility for the written word. And best of all, she could type! In this rural region—whose few skilled typists would have already been usurped early on by the Nazi bureaucracy—Mama’s typing skills alone had extraordinary value for the resistance.

Just then, Mama was preparing to publish an exposé on the Mayor of Schagen and his brutal misuse of power for personal gain. A prominent and long-standing Fascist, Mayor Titus Buitenhuis, had been appointed by the Nazis. He became notorious for using his police and the “legal” system to extort wealth from the local people. He appropriated property left behind by deported Dutch Jews and moved it abroad for “safekeeping.”

Somehow—it was later said to be through the confidence of a local priest—the mayor discovered the underground newsletter’s location, and he heard about the forthcoming article decrying his abuses. So, he immediately sent out his police to pick up this treasonous editor—my mother.

That dreary Tuesday afternoon, Mama got a telephone call. Frans Feld, one of my father’s trusted comrades, was on the line, urging her to get out of the office at once! By a miraculous stroke of luck, our friendly Knokploeg officer had gotten wind of the mayor’s plan, I can’t be sure. What I do know is, that phone call saved Mama’s life. It was a lovely birthday gift. That night, Frans moved Mama to live with Jan Broers in Benningbroek, where she had to take a slight demotion in rank. Instead of a brave underground journalist, she would henceforth be a laundress.

Mama’s reprieve from fate would be temporary. Another harrowing episode, of a different nature, would lay claim to her life before the sunshine returned. But I would only learn about it later. It was February 1945 when I remember airplanes and missiles, night and day, coming from all directions.

From mobile trucks and railroad cars to the left and right of us in northern Holland, the V2 rockets would rise right up out of the earth’s atmosphere in a gentle arc before slowing and falling, gaining speed—till they struck their targets in London and points south. Or at least, that was what was supposed to happen. Very often, the mighty rocket would simply go wild and plummet back onto Dutch soil. Every time I saw one of those silent birds sailing across our little patch of the stratosphere, my heart seemed to stop for a second.

Some Allied airplanes were trying to wipe out these V2 launchers in north Holland. Others were bound for points further east. And some were parachute-dropping equipment and supplies to aid the Dutch resistance.

Every night, we performed the same scene in our heavenly theater. First, we’d hear the rumbling engines. Then, we’d see the searchlights come on, sweeping, catching, and illuminating the ghostly underbellies of the airplanes. Then came the streaking flack fire. Then the midair bursts. Soon came the whistling parachutes, each bearing some terrified young man trying to save himself. And then, finally, came the heavy machine-gun fire from the ground—trying to pick the airmen off like ducks in midair. For someone, indeed, it was a great sport.

That whole freezing month, my Papa was busy every night, working with his pals in the NBS, pulling in the loot from the Allied airdrops.

By the middle of February, I developed an infection in my teeth and gums—which, in turn, brought me down with a terrific fever.

In my febrile delirium, I kept seeing re-plays of all the gruesome sights. The starving wanderers, the wounded men, and worst, the parts of men—bloody arms, fingers, legs—these visions had drilled holes in my too-young mind, and now they wouldn’t leave me alone. Grietje did everything she could to keep me comfortable, but I still wasn’t well after a few days. At some point, they secretly took me to a clinic, where a doctor pulled two of my teeth—without using any painkiller. Anesthetics were probably in too short supply just then to be wasted on something as inconsequential as a little boy’s teeth. It was excruciating. I may even have fainted.

As I lay trying to recover back home, now and then, Grietje would come in to visit me with two packets of aspirin powder and a glass of water. I still remember that puckering, bitter taste.

I was by no means alone in my illness. I was fortunate. During that Hunger Winter, poor home conditions led to poor health across the country. A shortage of soap meant a lapse in general hygiene and sanitation. We heard of outbreaks of tuberculosis, and infectious lice were helping spread disease. Trijntje Keijzer sprayed us with DDT almost every night to ward off lice.

Papa came to visit me while I was sick. He told me about one of his recent adventures with the resistance. He and his pals had raided the headquarters of a black marketer in Benningbroek to get coveralls for the NBS to wear as uniforms. It was good to see him. His story was pretty funny and laughing made me feel better.

Early the following day, I woke to see that Papa was here again—but now he had tears in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong. Seeing me awake, he snapped out of it but spoke very gravely. He told me that Mama was very sick, and she had to have surgery right away. He couldn’t stay—as soon as he gave me his blessing, on, he went.

Grietje tried to reassure me, explaining that special medical teams could be trusted, and they would take care of Mama. But I was scared. Somewhere, I’d heard that if Jewish people were secretly taken to a hospital but didn’t survive, their bodies would be cremated in the central furnace or just left on the sidewalk for the police or the Municipal Health Service to dispose of at the nearest cemetery. Then, as I lay there, another even more dreadful thought came to occupy my mind. My makebelieve name was Dickey Kramer, and I knew Papa’s name was Willem Bakker.

But I had no idea what my Mama’s name was. Papa was my only link to her. Papa, who led a risky life—a real live enemy of the state. If he were to get picked up by the Gestapo now, not only would I lose him, but I would have no way of ever finding Mama! Between these horrible thoughts and my fever of 104°F, I couldn’t sleep. Grietje kept putting moist towels against my body to try and cool me off. Papa came to see me again. Mama was in the hospital.

And the fighting continued. The Germans’ retribution against the treasonous Dutch was growing more brutal by the day, and even hospitals were no longer exempt from attack. Papa was very depressed. As he left, he said he would take Mama to a unique recovery place where she would be cared for by the nuns.

Very early on the morning of Friday, February 23, Papa was by my side as I awoke. Seeing him here at this hour—it couldn’t have been past six—I was gripped by such a terror that I screamed out loud. But before I could say a word, Papa put his finger to his lips and gave me a slight smile. “She made it,” he told me. “Mama’s alive. She made it.” It seemed to me my fever dropped four degrees right at that moment.

Later, he came by again with a three-wheeled carrier bicycle—what the Dutch call a bakfiets. Papa had to fetch a hospital bed from the Green Cross and take it to Opmeer, where Mama was recuperating. Then, per Mama’s request, he was to come and fetch me.

It was about four in the afternoon by the time he returned, this time on a regular bike. He told us that upon leaving us earlier that day, he’d taken the back lanes, riding his bakfiets, when an RAF Mosquito fighter dove at him, apparently intending to open fire. Papa knew that the RAF had orders to shoot anything that moved. So, he rode off into the ditch, tumbling ungraciously off the bakfiets with his cargo. As the fighter flew past, Papa saw the pilot smiling and waving. The pilot had just had a bit of fun with Papa.

Papa also related that he’d been stopped in the road the night before by an NSB-er who demanded to see his papers. As usual, Papa stayed cool and pulled out his phony persoonsbewijs. But the face of this Dutch Nazi seemed oddly familiar—and it seemed like the NSB man recognized him, too. He squinted at the I.D. card, then looked Papa in the eye and said, “Your name’s not Bakker,” and drew his gun. Papa wasn’t sure what to do then.

Just then, the man opened his jacket and showed the label inside—Spier—the same clothier Papa had represented as a salesman from 1939 to 1942. Of all things, the Nazi was a former customer! “Hey, Spier,” he said, “you’re lucky this is such a good suit. Otherwise, you’d be dead. All right, then, go your way.”

Now it was time for Papa and me to go our way down those same bumpy back roads as darkness fell. We arrived in Opmeer at about seven that night, and we went to the Sisters Gruneberg and the Hospital of the Holy Spirit. All the nurses there were nuns. They had crucifixes hanging from their necks.

And I saw my mother again, for the first time since September of 1942. Mama had decided for us to stay the night in the hospital with her. It would be hazardous for us to try to return to Midwoud so late.

During the night, I stared for a long time at the crucifix hanging on the wall. Above the doorway hung the image of Jesus nailed to the cross. At some point, a black-robed figure came into the room, holding a candle, and looked at Mama and me, then set the candle down in front of a bit of statue of the Virgin Mary. I was ill at ease in this place. My family didn’t belong here. And I was scared that if I failed to appear respectful toward one of the priests, something terrible might happen to us. But the night passed in peace.

Mama didn’t realize how much I’d grown. She spoke to me as if I were still five. But that didn’t matter. I was just ecstatic to be at her side again—whatever the circumstances—and glad that we could stay the whole night.

In the morning, a nun came in to give Mama a sponge bath. And so, much too soon, we had to say goodbye. And Papa rode me all the way home to Midwoud.

Returning to the Keijzers’ house that day, I was crying. Grietje, as usual, tried to comfort me. I was hungry, tired, and feeling the whole weight of the war. How long, I wondered, till I would see Mama again?

I went to bed early. Grietje came in later. We each had a twin bed in her room. When I seemed to be asleep, she would go in and stand over my bed, and she would say a little prayer. Sometimes, she prayed that there would be no more planes or flying bombs that night. Then, she would get ready for bed.

On Thursday, March 8, I overheard Dirk Keijzer telling his father about all the people who had been killed in Spanbroek. It sounded like the Nazis were simply gunning down everyone in sight. I wondered what would become of us.

As the Allies came closer to taking northern Holland throughout March, the Nazis continued desperately hurling their “vengeance weapons” into the sky, which meant sheer terror for all of us living below. At least you could hear the V1 buzz bombs coming, with their obnoxious puttering, and you would hope that the noise continued because if it stopped, the bomb was falling. The V2 missiles held a more icy, abstract terror because you would never hear them coming; they traveled faster than their sound—a chilling concept. So, our nagging, gnawing fear never entirely went away, even in the quiet times. One night, as I lay in bed, it sounded to me as if a buzz bomb passed right over our rooftop. And I prayed, “Just let it go on; don’t let it stop.

On Saturday night, March 24, we all sat around the Keijzers’ illegal wireless, listening to Prince Bernard speak from London. Then, on the morning of the 28th, it was our Queen Wilhelmina speaking. I was just over at the house of Jan Keijzer when I heard a truck stopping. Someone quickly shut the radio off.

The German soldiers walked right in the door. It was a bicycle roundup, they told us. Jan Keijzer told them he had a heart problem and couldn’t get by without his bike. So, they took his wife’s bike.

The soldiers were, by then, openly admitting that they had lost the war. But the retreat was going to be bitter. There were S.S. and NSB collaborators everywhere you turned. Anyone unfortunate enough to get in the Germans’ way was arrested or shot without explanation. And every farmhouse was required to have a giant foxhole on its property for German tanks to hide.

On April 11, a squad of German soldiers showed up and commandeered our very farmhouse. We were ordered to stay in the back, not to use the front of the house. Imagine my Papa’s distress on hearing this news, from afar—that his Jewish son was in the same place with German soldiers! Of course, he couldn’t dare come near. I had already been “captured” by the Germans. They made me play with them, gave me candy, and gave me piggyback rides. One of them told Uncle Reijer he knew I was a Jew. A month earlier, it might have mattered; today, they were all just waiting to go home.

The Keijzers figured it would be better to try and get along with these young, homesick men— even if they were acting like animals and using our cooking pots to pee. So, Aunt Trijntje asked them if they would like something to eat. She made up a nice, big pot of rabbit stew. I had some, too. The stew was delicious; I even had seconds and licked my fingers when I was done. And the next day, I noticed half the cats were gone. Our Wehrmacht guests stayed for a while until their officers arrived. Then, they moved on.

By Sunday the fifteenth, we hadn’t seen any Germans for a few days.

Allied airplanes had been flying over to make food drops in the cities day; we had an emergency food drop right in our back one day field; I’ll never forget that moment. Something about that food dropping from the sky, that simple gift, came to me like a message: It’s going to end soon. The terror is going to end. And we waved to the pilots as they passed over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbt4e87DvWc

The food packages contained giant tins filled with biscuits, egg powder, milk, bread, beans, and chocolate. I helped myself to a container of chocolate right away. For breakfast, I broke some chocolate up into crumbs and put it on my bread. For lunch, I had chocolate pudding. For dinner, chocolate crumbs again. That was, in my opinion, a perfect diet indeed. It was wonderful to receive that food from the sky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zMydpYrFk8

Of course, we knew that if the Nazis returned and caught us with this bounty, we might all be shot. Dutch people were still being executed at random in the towns around us. That day alone, the Germans had pulled ten young men out of jail in Zijpersluis and shot them dead. No, we weren’t out of the woods. Not quite.

Two days later, on April 17, the Germans blew up the dike at Wieringermeer. You may have heard of the “scorched-earth” policy of the retreating Nazis. That was their drenched-earth policy. In Holland, destroying a dike would produce a devastating flood—so it was a simple, low-cost method for slowing the Allies’ approach. They killed many innocent people, and farm animals killed, well, that was just too bad.

When we heard this news the next day, for some reason, Grietje Keijzer decided she had to go to Wieringermeer herself and see what happened with her own eyes. I wanted to go along, too, so she put me on the back of her bike, and off we went. We arrived in Wieringermeer about midday, and what we saw was Hell. It seemed to me just like the flood in the Bible. Animals were screaming for help. Some had clambered onto the roofs of submerged houses; some were just floating crazily in the light brown water.

Grietje met some of the local people who had gotten some of their belongings out on a cart. She offered to take them to shelter with us in Midwoud. Arriving home again, we moved the pigs out of the barn, cleaned the stalls, and helped these people move in what was left of their furniture. Luckily, we had saved some extra food, just in case.

The next time we saw Papa, he told us that a good friend of his, A.C. de Graaf, a transport and food supply officer with the Binnenlandse Strijdkracht, had been shot dead by the Nazis that very day after being flooded out of his home. The following Monday night, April 23, I noticed more strange happenings in the sky. Paratroopers and their weapons were dropping now in earnest. It was almost another two weeks until we heard the simple announcement: