When writing a book, it is sometimes wise to reread the chapters you have already written. I have done that now, and I realise that the image I have created is very much like a wonderful, carefree time. No school, nice walks in the woods, more or less doing what I liked.
I wonder if that corresponds with the reality of that time. Was it really just one long holiday?
The answer to that question can only be no, of course. Those memories of the past also include less pleasant events. The fear of discovery by the German occupiers, for example, which was always present. It hung over us like a shadow throughout the entire period in hiding.
The consequences of all this are described below.
Added to this chapter.
Postscript 1 ‘Our visit to Deventer in 2002’.
Postscript 2 ‘Our hiding place in Deventer‘.
Tensions
The tension caused by the constant fear of being caught manifested itself in a number of ways among the adults. In my father, for example, it manifested itself in stomach problems. I can still see him swallowing powder – bismuth, if I am not mistaken – as a remedy.
The two women had a few arguments and squabbles every week. They didn’t get along very well and regularly disagreed. These disagreements ranged from the upbringing of the children to the use of the kitchen. This resulted in a series of crying fits, headaches for Reina and reconciliations in anticipation of the next crisis.
But there were also other events that did not make life any easier. In Deventer, for example, a very big problem arose when my youngest sister developed appendicitis and had to be rushed to hospital for an operation.
Not because of the operation itself, which went without complications, but because of the registration in the hospital register, the lack of health insurance and the so-called stamkaart (every Dutch person had a stamkaart in their name on which vouchers for food, clothing, etc. were issued), which raised a number of questions at the hospital that were difficult to answer satisfactorily.
There was great panic when my mother went out one afternoon to do some shopping and did not return. As time passed, everyone became increasingly tense. My father paced impatiently around the room and discussed with Bertus what they should do. Continue to wait or leave the house? If she had been arrested, for example, it was obvious that the police would then visit her home address.
Only when she finally came home at dinnertime did the pressure ease. Raised voices: where on earth have you been? What had happened? My mother had seen an accident caused by a German military vehicle on her way home. A child playing in the street had been hit by a car and was lying motionless on the road. Emotionally affected by the incident, she had rushed to the scene without thinking.
She then drove the mother and child to the hospital in the same German car. It turned out that apart from a broken leg, it wasn’t too bad, but she stayed until the child had been treated.
It all sounded very logical and, if I remember correctly, there was little grumbling about her actions afterwards, even though criticism of her impulsive behaviour would have been obvious. Perhaps that was because my father had already said before she came home that no criticism should be made. But it is also possible that the criticism only came afterwards, at a time when I was already in bed.
In any case, it was agreed that she would keep in touch with the mother and child. It would certainly have attracted attention if she had not been heard from again.
Johan van Veen found the following in the archives. The accident took place on Ceintuurbaan. It involved five-year-old Hendrika P.M. Rouwendal from Putmanstraat 9. She was run over on Ceintuurbaan by a Wehrmacht car driven by Gefreiter Geveke. This Geveke had something to do with the ULO on Ceintuurbaan where Germans were staying. The accident took place at around 1.50 p.m. and the police report was written at 5 p.m. The girl was admitted to the Geertruiden Hospital with concussion.
Note: So no broken leg.
Were there any other cases of near discovery? Oh yes, I saved the best one, if you can call it that, for last. That time in Deventer when the police came to the door in the evening.
Johan van Veen found the following in the archives.
Unwanted light in the darkness
This event took place on an evening when there was a speech on the radio. I think it was Radio Orange, the free station that broadcast from London.
Soon after occupying our country, the Germans had issued a ban on listening to English stations. Because that ban was widely flouted, Rauter ordered everyone to hand in their radios from 15 May 1943 onwards. As a result, people had to rely on the so-called radio distribution, which only broadcast programmes that had been approved by Seyss Inquart and his colleagues.
In this case, it was clearly a broadcast that was strictly forbidden to listen to. I do not know what the speech was about, but it was apparently so important that my father had a few other people from the resistance visit him to help him take shorthand notes. I assume this was with the intention of printing it in the illegal newspaper of the CPN, De Waarheid.
Concentration and silence were therefore required, so my youngest brother and I were put in the kitchen with my youngest sister to look after us.
I should mention that the story took place in winter. It was already dark early in the evening. It was pitch black outside because, from the beginning of the occupation, a blackout order had been imposed in all occupied countries. This meant that there was no public lighting, trams and cars only carried a minimal blue light, and absolutely no light was allowed to shine outside from homes and businesses.
I think it happened around half past eight. We were sitting in the kitchen reading. There was a muffled buzz in the background in the living room. Suddenly, the doorbell rang. We looked at each other in alarm. Who could be at the door so late? After a few seconds, the living room door opened and my father instructed my sister to answer it.
When she did, she got the fright of her life. Standing at the door were two police officers, who .….had come to report that light was shining through a gap in a blackout curtain. Would we please make sure that the gap was closed? Good evening.
There must have been sighs of relief in the room. The radio, which had been hastily hidden, was brought out again and turned on. The speech was not yet over and we had to go back to the kitchen.
I don’t know what they did with the missing part of the broadcast. But this unexpected visit undoubtedly increased the consumption of bismuth.
“Police, good evening, there is light shining through one of your windows.” Some events are etched in my memory. This is one of them.
Friends
During our second stay in Deventer, I had befriended a boy my age who lived in the house opposite us. I had forgotten his name, but Johan van der Veen, who wrote the story about the back door key, heard from a friend that the boy’s name was Bernardus Verhofstad. Bernard had two sisters and a brother who was a little older. The Verhofstad family lived in the house opposite ours. Father Verhofstad was the headmaster of the Roman Catholic secondary school.
The friend in question even had a photo of Bernard. He was supposed to be at the bottom left of the photo.
It would have been nice if I had recognised him, but that was not the case. Any one of the group of boys in the photo could have been him. In any case, I played with him in the street, lit bonfires on a piece of wasteland a few streets away and did all the other things that boys usually do.
His parents had a real aquarium in their house and because I liked it so much, he once gave me a large glass jar with water plants and a real fish. The creature didn’t live long in the much too small jar, but I thought it was beautiful.
Somewhere deep down, my father and mother weren’t enthusiastic about these friendships because they could jeopardise the safety of the family, but then again, a house in the city is not an uninhabited island. So a problem could arise because my friend would sometimes ask which school I went to, what my father did and where we came from.
At that time, I received my first ‘lessons’ in secrecy because, as mentioned earlier, I did not attend school. The instruction was simple. If the boys asked questions again, I was to say that I did attend school, but that it was on the other side of town.
At one point, plans were even made for me to actually leave the house in the morning to supposedly go to school, but the problems resolved themselves because Deventer apparently became too big a risk factor. The SD had managed to arrest a few people from the CPN resistance, one of whom knew the address on Schoutenweg.
My departure came as a surprise. There was no time to tell Bernard that we were leaving again.
I think we went to the station early in the morning, laden with luggage. It is possible that Bertus helped us with a cargo bike. I do not know whether the family was split up. My father probably travelled alone.
In hindsight, I can’t imagine that Bernard, his older brother and his parents swallowed everything I told them about us hook, line and sinker. Because they lived across from us, our comings and goings were so easy to monitor that they must have noticed the contradictions in my stories.
They could have asked the Webeling family where we had gone.
The end of Schoutenweg as a hiding place
On 8 February 1943, the SD raided the Schoutenweg. Bertus had seen them coming and managed to hide in a hiding place he had made under the floor. His wife and daughter were taken away for questioning. Reina stated that a family named Jansma had been living with her. They were said to have left on 3/6 February. I remember that we had left earlier for Eerbeek and celebrated Christmas there with a small Christmas tree from the forest.
After that raid, the following happened to the Webeling family. Their daughter was taken to stay with her mother or mother-in-law in Amsterdam. Reina was transported to Ravensbrück. Bertus remained in his hiding place until the SD left the house after two or three days and locked it up. Bertus then crawled out of his hiding place, dusty and unshaven, and decided to leave the house after freshening up. Dressed in a coat and wearing my father’s hat, he left the house at the back and cycled to Eerbeek to warn my father. I don’t remember seeing him then. Nor do I remember whether he spoke to my father.
He then took the train to Amsterdam and remained in hiding for the rest of the war.
Reina survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp and, all’s well that ends well, she was reunited with her husband and daughter after the war.
Postscript 1
Our visit to Deventer in 2002.
In 2002, my sister, Lia and I visited Deventer. That day, we took a kind of nostalgic trip to all the places from our past. It took some searching, but we finally found the house. The nice thing was that from the outside, it looked almost exactly as I remembered it.
During our visit, it was occupied by a young couple, the man of whom was working on the front door outside. He naturally noticed our curious attention to the house and we struck up a conversation. After we explained the reason for our visit in a few sentences, he called his wife over and they invited us in. They were nice people who were eager to know what had happened during our stay in this house.
Inside, they had modernised it as necessary, but the layout downstairs was still exactly the same. And nothing had changed at all in the shed at the back of the garden.
At one point, they asked if I would like to see the attic. I didn’t do it; for some reason, I suddenly felt apprehensive about confronting the past.
In hindsight, I don’t regret not doing so. Revisiting memories often leads to disappointment.
Postscript 2 to chapter 12, dated 1 August 2019
Our hiding place in Deventer
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, we spent two periods in Deventer, just as we did in Eerbeek. The first was from around August 1941 to March 1942. The second from June 1942 to December 1942. Both times we stayed at Schoutenweg 2, a detached house in a suburb of the city. With a small garden at the front and back, it was located in a street with more similar houses.
The sequel to the story about our hiding place in Deventer began in mid-2017 when I received an email from Johan van der Veen from Deventer. Johan, who described himself as a retired teacher, had returned to his original studies in history. He lived in Deventer and was working on an article about Schoutenweg 2a in that town. After a renumbering, that number had been changed to 93.
Mentioning that address immediately brought back all kinds of memories for me, because it had been our hiding place twice for a number of months. We lived there as people in hiding with a family who were registered as the main residents: the Webeling family.
Raid
At the end of February 1943, the SD had put an end to this hiding place with an unexpected raid.
Johan wrote the following about this: “Agent Antoon de Vries, who was involved in the arrest of Guurijna Hoeijenbos (Rein Webeling), kept an eye on the property after her arrest and then locked the door. The documents relating to this arrest eventually ended up in the City Archives. This also included the key to the property in question.
At some point, he – Johan – had got hold of that key. As he wrote: ‘Almost a relic.
Incidentally, my family had already left for another hiding place a few months before the raid described in February 1943. At the beginning of December 1942, that became the Calluna Alba villa in Eerbeek.
While searching for additional information, Johan came across my website via Google and the story about our war experiences in Before I Forget. After his first email and my response, the ball started rolling and gradually the story about the Key to the Back Door emerged, which was included in the Deventer Yearbook 2018. At the end of May 2018, Johan presented the report in the Grote Kerk in Deventer.
The biggest surprise for two of those present was that they saw each other again there after almost 80 years. Tineke Webeling and Ruud Jansen. Figuratively speaking, they met each other through the back door at Schoutenweg 2A. Thanks to a key keeper who was not satisfied until he had found the lock that this key fit. Johan van der Veen.
I have included his report as an appendix in Before I forget
It almost seemed as if everything about this history had been told until I received an email from Els D. on 6 May 2019. Els is a granddaughter of Willem Webeling Sr., the father of Bertus Webeling. She had also brought the story about their family to the attention of another granddaughter, Nancy v. O., and an extensive correspondence ensued with both ladies.
Webeling family
In my book, I recount that the Webeling family lived above us at Mercatorstraat 155 III. They had moved to that address on 1 August 1933, a few months before we arrived on the second floor from Jan van Galenstraat 307 II. To be precise, that was on 12 October 1933. I do not know whether the families socialised with each other, but I assume they did.
On 9 June 1936, the Webelings moved to Bennebroekstraat 29, where they lived for a few years before moving to Woestduistraat 146, 1st floor, on 12 December 1938. On 1 April 1946, Mrs. Webeling moved to Haarlemmermeerstraat 128, where she remained until 20 May 1952. Her next address was Sloterweg 34hs. On 11 January, she moved to Sloterweg 5 hs, where she passed away on 6 November 1964.
The Webeling family consisted of eight people: Willem, his wife Christina Alberta Beenke, three boys and three girls.
Son Albertus Christiaan (Bertus) Bertus was born on 4 June 1913 and married Guuryna Hoeyenbos (Reina) in 1937. On 11 September, the couple moved into a second-floor flat at 62 Van Spilbergenstraat.
Bertus was registered in the civil registry card system as a carpenter, painter and carpenter-contractor.
The role he and his wife played in the resistance is described in Johan van der Veen’s report and in this book.
Bertus and Reina
Willem Wiebeling
What was new to me was the active role played by Willem Sr. in the resistance, which his granddaughters brought to my attention. From an article by the 1940-1945 Foundation that they sent me, I quote the following story.
“Willem Webeling, born on 19 March 1887 in Nieuwer-Amstel, residing at Haarlemmermeerstraat 128 I in , worked as a typesetter at the Algemeen Handelsblad in Amsterdam from 1908 until his arrest. He was a member of the Communist Party and, from the beginning of the occupation, actively participated in the resistance by distributing De Waarheid and posting manifestos encouraging resistance. He also collected money for the Solidarity Fund. He made his home available for meetings of the De Waarheid resistance group. He worked together with Mr G. Rus, who lived at Bennebroekstraat 27 in Amsterdam.
This resistance work carried a certain risk of discovery. That is exactly what happened on 28 July 1941.
On that date, he and Mr Rus were distributing illegal literature door-to-door in Haarlemmermeerstraat in Amsterdam. One of the illegal magazines he had deposited in a letterbox fell into the hands of a daughter of the house, who was involved with a German who was present at the time. On the instructions of this woman, Mr. Webeling was arrested shortly afterwards by the German in question and taken to the detention centre on Weteringschans. Via concentration camps in Schoorl and Amersfoort, he was transferred to the concentration camp in Neuengamme, where he died on 27 January 1942.
The documentation I received from the granddaughters showed that after his arrest, there had been several more contacts with him, with the last messages on 28 October and 3 November from the Durchgangslager in Amersfoort.
After his arrest, his wife received a postcard from the detention centre at Weteringsschans on 1 August 1941. Later messages arrived on 19 August, 28 August and 4 September from Schoorl.
Willem arrived in Neuengamme (Hamburg) on 19 November 1941. On the Traces of War website, I found that he was among the first transport of Dutch people to leave Camp Amersfoort for Neuengamme. Many more would follow. During those transports, prisoners were also ‘loaded’ in Assen, Leeuwarden and Groningen.
When a prisoner entered the camp, he first had to shower, all body hair was removed and civilian clothing was exchanged for striped camp clothing with the familiar triangle indicating nationality (an H for Dutch nationals). Each prisoner was also given a camp number on their jacket and trousers. On another website about Neuengamme, I found that Willem Webeling’s camp number was 06566.
Due to the heavy labour that the prisoners had to perform in places such as the brick factory, they gradually turned into living wrecks who were called ‘Muselmannen’. Hundreds of prisoners died every day.
Willem died on 27 January 1942.
After the war, he was buried in the cemetery of honour near Hamburg.
I found the following report about his arrest on 28 July 1941 in the police reports from 1940-1945 in the City Archives.
Text dated Monday, 28 July 1941:
“Copy in quintuplicate to Halls”
“Bring the a.p.s. Spijker (4301) and Hoofdman (3784) on the instructions of Cornelia Deleana Touw, born Adam 19-3-22, hairdresser, Aalsmeerweg 6 III and Jan Siebesma, born in Leeuwarden on 15 May 1907 Administrator, Stolkwijkstraat 6, residing here, a person named Willem Webeling, born in Amsterdam on 19-03-87, typesetter, Woestduinstraat 146 1st floor, residing here, whom they had seen putting a leaflet containing anti-German propaganda into the letterbox at Aalsmeerweg 6.
Siebesma acknowledged this fact and stated that he had distributed 48 leaflets in letterboxes on Aalsmeerweg. He had received these leaflets for distribution from a person unknown to him on Aalsmeerweg. Shortly before, he had received a message at his home that he had to go to Aalsmeerweg – Hoofddorpweg, also from an unknown person.
He is unaware of the contents of these notes. Two notes that Webeling tore up during his escape were partially deposited by A.P. Spijkers and are attached to this report.
Webeling remains in custody. Search F.56.O25.
In connection with the above, B.P. van Dijk conducted a search of Webeling’s home, which yielded no results. Two notes were retrieved by bp van Dijk from a letterbox at Aalsmeerweg 123, one of which is enclosed with this report.
Copy in 5 copies HB Room 42
What is striking, of course, is that the two reports differ in a number of respects.
For example, the street where the pamphlets were posted.
In the article by the 40-45 Foundation, Willem Webeling was arrested by the Germans and taken to the Weteringschans. In the police report, this was done by two police officers who took him to the police station. He is said to have attempted to escape.
Jan Siebesma
And who is this Jan Siebesma? Surely not the second person mentioned in the Foundation’s report. Did he just throw leaflets into letterboxes without knowing who had ordered him to do so?
I found him on genealogyonline. Jan Siebesma was indeed born in Leeuwarden on 15 May 1907. In 1932, he married Justina Petronella Holzmann in Amsterdam. His profession is listed as branch manager.
He also appears in the City Archives’ list of persons with the following occupations: grocer, administrator. CCD controller and bedside attendant.
It is unclear exactly what happened during Willem Webeling’s arrest. It is also unclear what he was punished for. We may find out more about this later.
See also the appendix at the back of the book. The key to the back door. Schoutenweg 2a