I ended the previous chapter with our departure from Amsterdam and the first signs of resistance against the German occupiers. Although I do not know the exact date, I can still figure out approximately when we left. I have a clue.
It must have been a few months after the capitulation on 15 May. I remember well that during the last weeks of the first year at school, we were allowed to do all kinds of jobs for the teacher, such as covering books and sharpening pencils. Together with the boy who sat next to me, I was allowed to sort the letters from the reading board and tie them together in small bundles with elastic bands. It was a responsible task that we carried out with great diligence and pride.
Departure from Amsterdam
Shortly afterwards, at the beginning of the summer holidays, we left Amsterdam. That was sometime in mid-July. I didn’t see the start of the second year.
As I write, I realise that I haven’t yet explained the reason for going into hiding. So let me first give a brief account of the events that led to our disappearance.
Appelscha in 2001
Why go into hiding
The reason for our disappearance was the role my father played in politics at the time. In the period leading up to this, after completing his secondary education – he was born in 1900 as the youngest child in a large family – he first worked for several years at various employers in an office. He then had jobs as a sales representative and travelling salesman, again for a number of companies. According to family stories, he was the first Coca-Cola representative in the Netherlands, where he had to persuade café and restaurant owners to serve this drink to their customers. Apparently without success, because like millions of others , he became unemployed in 1929 due to the great economic crisis that began with the Wall Street stock market crash.
The way in which the unemployed were treated at that time was of a kind that is hard to imagine today. Benefits were low. The poorest sometimes received food and clothing in kind. To make it clear that the recipient belonged to this class, these gifts were marked with a clearly visible sign. A good example of this was the infamous bicycle plate.
In essence, this was a hidden tax on cycling. Despite strong opposition from various interest groups, it was introduced in 1924 by the then Minister of Finance, H. Colijn, after approval by the House of Commons and the House of Lords. For the not inconsiderable sum of three guilders, every bicycle user had to purchase such a plate each year. The plates were made of metal and were a popular item to counterfeit. To check whether you were in possession of a valid plate, cyclists were regularly checked by the police. Violations were punished with a fine of up to 25 guilders.
Owners of bicycles who could prove that they were unemployed received the plate free of charge, but it had a hole in it.
The Communist Party
In the early 1920s, my father, possibly inspired by Gorter, joined the Communist Party. Nationally, it was a splinter party, but in Amsterdam and the surrounding area it had a relatively large following.
Why not the SDAP? I don’t know, perhaps the pace at which it wanted to change society was too slow for him. Or perhaps he was more attracted to the images of the Soviet Union. Images that most people only discovered much later to be a distorted picture of reality in that country.
After the war, I had difficulty accepting his membership of that party. That he did not see, or did not want to see, the totalitarian system of the Russians, in which individual interests were subordinated to the almighty state. A system that cost the lives of millions of Russian peasants.
After Prince Bernard’s death, I read an interesting article in De Volkskrant about the relevance of such matters, using his membership of the NSDAP as an example. In it, the author objects to an investigation announced by the NIOD to re-examine the prince’s membership because it traps the historiography of the Second World War in right-wrong platitudes. It perpetuates the preoccupation with the question of how it was possible that so many millions of people could be so stupid, so opportunistic or so depraved that they supported a malicious ideology. This approach employs reverse causality: anyone who was in any way involved in a Nazi (or Communist) organisation cannot have been a good person. Unless, that is, the person in question led a double life and saved dozens of Jews. So much for this quotation.
In the stories I later heard about my father, the emphasis of his activities was on improving the living conditions of the working class. To raise them to a higher level. He was certainly not a man driven by personal gain. He was averse to self-interest in his work.
His work for the CPH (Communist Party of Holland), later changed to CPN, ultimately led to him representing them in the Amsterdam City Council and the Provincial Council of North Holland. He also contributed to the party’s newspaper.
In Germany after 1930, the relationship between communists (KPD) and national socialists (NSDAP) was one of fire and water. After Hitler came to power in 1933, this led to a ban on the KPD; the leadership disappeared with all the other leaders into a concentration camp. The same was true, albeit to a lesser extent, for the Social Democrats.
As a result of high unemployment, National Socialist principles also found fertile ground in the Netherlands, which for a short period in the early 1930s even led to the NSB gaining 7% of the vote in the House of Representatives. After that, their popularity declined. In addition to the NSB, there were a number of splinter groups in the south of the country that adhered to Mussolini’s fascist ideals.
As in Germany, communists and the NSB fought each other wherever they could in the Netherlands.
Shortly after the German invasion in May 1940, the CPN decided to continue its activities illegally, anticipating the ban that was to be expected from the occupiers.
Because there was a real possibility that the Germans would intern the leadership in the same way as had happened in Germany, a number of people, including my father, disappeared from the scene. In our case, we left at the end of July 1940 for the north and later the east of the country to continue living there under a different name.
The journey to Friesland
Of course, I had no idea that the decision had been made to leave Mercatorstraat and go into hiding.
I later heard from other family members that there had been a lot of discussion beforehand, especially about whether the whole family should go into hiding. The possibility that my mother and us would be taken hostage by the occupiers was not inconceivable and was therefore the deciding factor.
We should never have gone, my mother said a few years before her death when we talked about it in response to a television programme about the resistance. Did that statement only take shape in hindsight? I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters. The history of our family simply unfolded in this way.
In any case, the departure came as a surprise to me and my little brother. I think we weren’t told anything beforehand for fear that we would talk about it with friends or, even worse, the neighbours; one family in the street was known to be members of the NSB. Completely unexpected for me, we left one evening to stay with friends of my parents, the De Smit family, who lived on Westlandgracht. We spent the night there.
I remember it well; it was a very typical evening, with a deep black sky that looked ominous. I woke up during the night because of a thunderstorm with lots of lightning and thunder.
The next morning, we set off early. We didn’t have much luggage with us. Just a few large suitcases with clothes. No toys, but we did have books and a few comic books , featuring Bruintje Beer, who was popular at the time.
After a few weeks, the house on Mercatorstraat got new residents. Later, I heard that my uncles, two brothers of my father, had cleared out the house and stored the furniture in their workshop.
We took the tram to Central Station. At that time, the IJkant was the mooring place for the Lemmerboot, which took you to Lemmer and back every day. My father already had tickets and we boarded via a narrow gangway. Friesland was our destination.
Although the weather was fine, apart from a bit of wind, I became seasick on the way. I was already afraid that this would happen because boat trips in rocking boats are not among my favourite activities. Let alone when you cross the IJsselmeer on a windy day.
I remember how terribly ill I felt. I still remember the bottles of Fosco – a kind of chocolate milk – that the others were given to drink on the way. “Have some of that,” my mother said. “It will make you feel better.” The result was that I threw up everything. Since then, I haven’t been able to stomach chocolate milk. To make matters worse, I slipped on a small staircase and fell a few metres into a cabin. So it wasn’t really a day out for me, but after half a day of sailing, we arrived in Lemmer in the afternoon and I was glad to be back on solid ground.
In Lemmer, we continued our journey by slow train. Our destination turned out to be Appelscha, a small village, certainly in those days, but already known for the nearby forests with heathland and sand drifts.
The war and its consequences had barely penetrated there. German soldiers, who had become a familiar sight in Amsterdam, for example, were nowhere to be seen.
Ortskommandantur and German road signs in Amsterdam
Our journey ended in this rural oasis of tranquillity, where we found temporary accommodation in a farmhouse on the Opsterlandse Compagnonsvaart, close to a bridge in the centre of the village.
Why there, you may ask? And who arranged it? The answer to this question only became clear to me after the war. It turned out that the underground resistance organisations, the ‘illegality’, organised it. Just as they provided money, ration cards and identity cards.
We lived in that house for a while. I don’t remember whether it was weeks or months. But in any case, we had to improvise a lot. It was a bit like camping because we only had a few small rooms at our disposal with primitive facilities. For example, food had to be cooked on two pot stoves fuelled by hard peat. We got water from a pump, there was only one for the whole house, and to sleep, four or five camp beds had to be set up every night.
What I had to get used to was that I couldn’t go to school because we officially no longer existed. The same was true for my eldest brother and my two sisters. It seems to me that something like that could not possibly go unnoticed in a small community like Appelscha. I don’t know how my father and mother solved that problem.
Life in hiding
Be that as it may, during our stay there we had an abundance of free time at our disposal. It was actually a wonderful time, with the opportunity to do all kinds of fun things, such as walking in the woods near Appelscha. My father had bought two fishing rods and, together with my eldest brother, he used them to fish in the canal in front of the house. I remember often watching them to see if they caught anything. Once, my little brother fell a few metres down the steep slope. Or rather, he rolled down, straight through the nettles. Crying from the pain, of course. I believe my mother spent half an hour dabbing his arms and legs with water mixed with a dash of vinegar.
I can’t remember what happened to the fish they caught. They also caught eels, and I think those were fried.
In any case, our stay felt like a long holiday.
After a while, I made friends with a boy who lived a little further along the dike on a farm, and through him I was introduced to things I had never seen before, such as chickens, cows, a garden with vegetables and carrots that you could pull straight out of the ground. And sometimes I was allowed to help with a shovel and a pitchfork, a manure fork with four prongs.
I always watched with admiration as the farmer worked with a pitchfork to clear manure and, when he was done, drove the tool into the ground with one powerful swing. Being able to do that too seemed like the ultimate achievement to me, so I practised hard. Gradually, I got better at it, until one day I was too enthusiastic and instead of sticking the pitchfork into the ground in front of me, I stuck it through my big toe and sandal. I nailed myself down, as it were.
Of course, that meant screaming. The doctor had to come after they had freed me, of course, but miraculously, it all ended without incident. No nasty infections, tetanus or a numb toe. After a few weeks, it had healed.
After that, farm life was over. I think our presence became too well known, and a few days after the incident, we all moved to a holiday home in the woods behind Appelscha.
According to my youngest sister, it wasn’t a cottage but a large caravan. Undoubtedly too small for a family of seven. I don’t remember much about it, except that my father had a few visitors. It must have had something to do with the resistance. An organisation had to be set up for that.
From the moment we moved to Appelscha, my father was often away for a few days. He probably went to Amsterdam, where he stayed with the De Smit family on Westlandgracht.
One thing was clear. Not only were the farm and the holiday home too small, but Appelscha was too far from the centre of the country to lead the resistance.
Moving again
Living space had to be found for our family in another place, and at the beginning of October, that place turned out to be Eerbeek. A medium-sized village located in the Veluwe, at that time on the railway line halfway between Arnhem and Apeldoorn.
So we moved, but that’s a new story.