The hunger winter of ’44-’45 was not only characterised by hunger, as the name suggests, but also by cold. That is to say, frost and ice. In my memory, it seemed to go on forever, but in the list of extreme winters, it does not rank very high. However, the last three months of 1944 were bleak, gloomy and rainy. On 23 December, however, it started to freeze, followed by snow, and it stayed that way until the end of January.
Extreme winter
There was no more coal, the gas had been reduced to a low setting and at one point was even shut off completely at . The same applied to electricity. Fortunately, there was still water. If that had also been shut off, the consequences would have been even worse. Fortunately, it started to thaw in February and the weather remained mild for the rest of the month.
All in all, I still wonder how we got through that winter. The amazing thing was that when there was ice, we spent hours every day skating on the Boerenwetering. But perhaps it was true that you felt the cold least when you were busy.
Cold and snow. Somehow, fuel had to be found. The hunt for anything combustible had already begun in the autumn preceding the hunger winter. Trees were the first to fall victim.
Thanks to our joint efforts, the tree in front of our house soon met its end. A piece of trunk about three metres long was captured by the Karelsen family, our neighbours on the third floor. It was extremely heavy, so getting it upstairs was quite a job. To continue the story, I need to explain something about the layout of the houses in Scheldestraat. Almost all of them are three-storey houses with an attic. In the part of the street where we lived, the staircase was located entirely inside the building. Our staircase, leading to the first floor, was straight and ended in a small landing. Further up, it was a staircase with curves and an open space in the middle. A spiral staircase, in other words. This meant that from the landing you could see all the way to the top, to the roof, where a wired glass window provided light.
When they had almost got that piece of trunk upstairs, the Karelsen boys must have lost control of it. The result was dramatic. Because there was no longer a banister – it had been burned – to hold it back, it fell like a spear down the stairwell and landed with a huge thud in the small hallway on our floor. It then pierced the wooden floor and ceiling of the flat below, finally ending up in a bedroom, where fortunately no one was present. I can still remember the angry baker storming upstairs.
The story does not mention what happened to the log. Perhaps it was burned in the indignant baker’s oven.
Stealing blocks from the tram tracks
Incidentally, that wood was far too wet to burn, and a few logs remained in our attic for years.
So we went hunting for other wood. Everything that was loose or fixed in empty houses was demolished. The Karelsen family soon burned the banister from their upstairs.The wooden railings disappeared from the small wooden bridge over the Boerenwetering near Wielingenstraat, leaving only the floorboards.
Tarred wood blocks, which were found in many places between the tram tracks, were very popular. At one point, we also had a number of them, but we gave them away because they produced a lot of smelly smoke when burned. Another popular activity was searching for small pieces of coal that could be found in places where people had once burned them.
My eldest brother took care of the wood for us. Together with the boyfriend of the daughter of the neighbour above us, he salvaged it from an empty office building in the neighbourhood. I remember that I wasn’t allowed to know where it was, but I knew very well. Once, , things almost went wrong when they were stopped by a police officer with a load of wooden panels, who wanted to take them to the station. Somehow, however, the friend managed to bluff the officer with a story and they were able to take their loot home undisturbed.
Incidentally, a wooden bench that came from there stood in the room for decades. Everyone thought it was too beautiful to burn.
Thanks to all these efforts, we had enough wood, but it first had to be sawn and chopped into small cubes that would fit in the miracle stove. Let Ruud do the chopping, they often said, and I was fine with that. In any case, I preferred it to grinding corn in the coffee grinder.
The miracle heater
The miracle stove, or emergency stove, was indeed a miracle. It was made of sheet iron and measured about 20 by 30 cm. You needed a normal stove to put it on so that the chimney could continue to function as a flue. Then it was just a matter of regularly adding wood to keep it burning. My experience as a woodcutter and fire stoker came in handy then.
Earlier during the war, the fireplace had already disappeared from the living room and been replaced by a kind of pot stove made by Salamander. The advantage of this stove was that you could burn anything in it and you could also put a pan or kettle on it. We often simmered our laundry in a large kettle on the stove.But when the coal ran out, we had to find another source of heat and cooking, and that became, as already mentioned, the miracle stove that was placed on top of the Salamander.
The stove served two purposes. The first was to provide heat for the house, i.e. the living room, where the stove was located. The second, and certainly just as important, was to provide heat for cooking. This was especially important when the gas ran out at the end of 1944. And then there was the drying rack with laundry, which was often nearby. Looking back, I can hardly imagine how my mother managed to do the laundry for six people without gas or electricity, using only that miracle stove as a heat source, while the temperature outside was below zero. But she managed, even though we couldn’t get clean underwear every day, to name just one thing.
Food
I’ve already mentioned the food, I know, but I have to say something about the nasty taste of flower bulb soup. Did we eat flower bulb soup? Certainly, and I still feel queasy when I think of the taste. Disgusting, but I later read that flower bulbs are full of starch and are particularly nutritious.
The smell of sugar beet stew was just as disgusting. Have you ever driven past a factory where they make sugar from sugar beets in the autumn? It smells awful. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s no longer allowed for environmental reasons.
But if you’ve ever smelled it, you know what that food smelled like. A disgusting smell.
What would you say to a pulp biscuit?
What could you do with sugar beet? All sorts of things, but it was best to grate the beets and then boil the mass. That way, the sugar was separated from the pulp. Of course, cooking it made the house smell awful, but the syrup was edible, on your bread or in rye porridge. From the leftovers, you could then bake ‘delicious’ pulp biscuits in a little linseed oil. It was a real treat if you mixed the pulp with some home-ground wheat flour.
I once talked about it with my youngest sister, how we ate them during Christmas and New Year’s Eve in the hunger winter instead of apple turnovers. I think there was even some apple in them. She remembered it being really cosy, all of us together in the warmth of the cosy humming miracle heater. We probably sang together and tried to play Monopoly by the light of burning oil lamps.
Can anyone who grew up in our affluent society imagine what that must have been like? I think it’s difficult. Everything was so different from today. Yet we always kept our spirits up and clung to the thought that the war would eventually come to an end.
Air raid sirens
Another thing that is difficult to imagine is the air raid siren. From 1942 onwards, groups of British or American aircraft flew overhead several times a week. They were on their way to Germany or returning from a bombing raid they had carried out there.
In the Amsterdam area, anti-aircraft guns were set up in a number of places, trying to hit the Tommies. When such a group approached, sirens warned everyone to stay indoors or take shelter in one of the bomb shelters in the city.
The anti-aircraft fire produced a lot of noise and you could see a growing number of smoke clouds in the sky as a result of exploding shells. Sometimes German Messerschmitts also took part in such battles, which you could see circling around the larger aircraft as small black spots. Most of the time, the Germans were unsuccessful. I say most of the time, but you did sometimes see an aircraft being hit. The ever-growing flames and clouds of smoke coming from such an aircraft were a nasty sight. And then, at the end, you saw the black dots jumping out of the aircraft, after which the parachutes unfolded.
In the horror stories that were told, those ‘rotten Krauts’ also shot at those parachutes. I don’t know if that really happened. In any case, after the war it turned out that many pilots saved their lives by leaving their damaged aircraft in time. Most of them were taken in and hidden by the population and eventually brought back to England via escape routes.
At school, we enjoyed the air raid siren interruptions. We loved it because the Germans were getting their comeuppance and also because lessons had to be interrupted until the all-clear signal sounded. Besides no school, it was one of the nice things about those days.
Just not to Friesland
During the hunger winter, I was almost taken to Friesland with a group of children.
This was an initiative of the municipality of Amsterdam, whereby children were sent to host families in the north and east of the country for a few months. In this way, the two Karelsen boys stayed in Ommen for six months.
I don’t remember exactly how it worked, but at some point my mother had secured a place for my brother and me in a group that was going to Friesland. By boat. All the preparations had been made and a small suitcase made of red cardboard had even been purchased for our clothes and other belongings.
However, on the day of departure, there was a hitch. While we were waiting with our suitcase behind Central Station for our departure, after a few hours we received the news that it was cancelled. The boat we were supposed to take had been shot at on the IJsselmeer and, badly damaged, had barely managed to reach shore.
I didn’t mind. Despite everything, I much preferred to stay with the family in Amsterdam. To my delight, my mother made no further attempts.
The hunger trips
The hunger marches. I almost forgot to mention them.
When the amount of food provided on ration cards became increasingly smaller, many people in Amsterdam set out to try to find something edible outside the city. They travelled into North Holland on foot or by bicycle. Some searched even further afield and went to the Veluwe and even to Overijssel.
Their main target was, of course, the farms. After all, it was all about food. However, most farmers wanted something in return. Because money had little value at the time, people took all kinds of barter goods with them as payment. Sheets and other linen, gold, silver, jewellery.
My mother made quite a few of those trips. She usually rode her old bicycle to the polders north of Purmerend to Enkhuizen. She was usually gone for a few days and then came back with milk, butter, cheese, eggs, potatoes, vegetables, etc. in her bicycle bags. Not all farmers were willing to cooperate. Some simply had nothing left after a while, others refused at some point because so much had been stolen from them.
If, after much effort, you managed to collect something edible, you had to be careful on your return not to be stopped by the Landwacht or the Wehrmacht. There were frequent checks, especially at the city limits, and you ran the risk of having everything confiscated.
Fortunately, that never happened to my mother. During one of her trips, she was even photographed once. The photo appeared in the Parool newspaper a year after the war. In it, she is walking next to her bicycle, staring into the distance. After much searching, I finally discovered the photo a few years ago in an old book at De Slegte. It was later used in a series about the Second World War in De Parool and on the cover of a book by Bernlef about the hunger winter.
When she passed away, I told a story from that time that fits nicely into this chapter.
During a multi-day trip, she was looking for shelter in the evening. It was already getting dark, so she rang the bell at a small farm where no one was to be seen. When no one answered after ringing the bell a few times, she decided to walk around the back of the house to see if anyone was there. There were no signs of life there either, but the door was ajar and after knocking a few times, she decided to go inside.
In the semi-darkness, she could hardly see anything at first, but after cautiously walking a little further, she heard a human sound, as if someone was crying softly. In the living room of the farmhouse, she finally came across a strange scene. On the table was an open coffin, next to which sat an old farmer who was visibly upset.It turned out that the deceased was his son, who was to be buried the next day. The evening and night would be filled with prayers, but something terrible was happening. The candles that had to be lit according to custom were missing and could not be found anywhere.
“My dear sir,” my mother must have said. “Wipe away your tears, for I can help you.” She then retrieved her bicycle bags and produced two candles from them. She had brought them along as a means of exchange.
Sent from heaven, the old farmer probably muttered, but he didn’t leave it at that. The next morning, she was able to continue her journey with full bags.
Here, one man’s death literally became another man’s bread.