"My father was never really scared."

Hiding family of Voon Brothers, in Benningbroek"

As a child, I lived in Benningbroek with my father Arie and my mother Annie, together with three brothers and a sister. My father was a fruit grower, alderman of the municipality, commander of the fire brigade, and active in the theater association.

I just went with my brothers to school in Nibbixwoud," says a daughter of the Vroon Brothers. They lived in a bedroom with the door locked. They only came down at night to eat. After that time, sometimes they dared to work in the fruit garden during the day. In case of trouble, they would end up in the greenhouse. Aunt Annie and Uncle Willem were also hiding diagonally from where my father's brother, Jan Broers, and his wife Maria lived.

When it was dark, they could take a short walk in the orchard behind the farm. Mom and Dad have never said anything about it. I didn't even know those first three months that my Aunt Annie and Uncle Willem lived in the house. Once, we caught our mother going upstairs with coffee in early December, so my brother Jaap and I asked for whom it was intended? My mother replied coolly that the coffee was for Sinterklaas and Black Pete on the roof. We believed it right away. Luckily we always had enough to eat.

Behind the house, we kept a pig that the Germans did not know we had. That pig became fattened, and it was finally slaughtered. After the war, I told my father that a distribution group from the resistance fighters had a robbery in Spanbroek and made off with the safe in which the Nazis kept the voucher cards; the resistance had it blown up. People used these extra vouchers for foodstuffs for the Jewish people who were in hiding.

Coffee Surrogate

My father found the German oppression wholly wrong and had resisted. I didn't know what that meant; of course, I understood that he hated the Germans. In September 1942 (when I was six years old), my parents told me that aunt Annie and Uncle Willem Bakker were coming to live with us. My father had them before picked up from the station in Hoorn, and they were housed with the Van Diepen family in Veere

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