In the months after their arrival, the Canadians became a familiar sight in the city. Close to our house, on Scheldeplein, a group was quartered in the garage that now houses a bowling centre. Naturally, they attracted the interest of the entire neighbourhood. Everyone tried to scrounge something from the soldiers. Food, chocolate, cigarettes. Military decorations were very popular with the young people. The soldiers’ interest was, of course, mainly focused on the fairer sex.
Celebrations
In the first six months after the liberation, liberation celebrations were organised everywhere. Every neighbourhood wanted to be involved, with competitions for the children and dances for the older people. And there was also a constant carnival atmosphere. Not small carnivals, but large ones. One was set up on the Jozef Israelskade, a few minutes from our house, which remained there for months, but there were also carnivals in other parts of the city.
I also remember that all the schoolchildren in Amsterdam were invited by the Canadians to spend an afternoon at the fair for free. Through school, I had received a ticket for the fair on Jan van Galenstraat. Upon arrival, you were given a large bag of sweets. You could go on anything you wanted: cars, merry-go-rounds, you name it. However, our liberators had underestimated the number of young Amsterdammers, which led to utter chaos. Even for the most ridiculous merry-go-round, you had to wait fifteen minutes before it was your turn for a free ride. But we loved it, I know that for sure.
What happened to the NSB members?
The arrest of members of the NSB and the WA was initially carried out with a great deal of force and publicity and naturally attracted a lot of attention. Especially in the first weeks after the liberation, it sometimes threatened to degenerate into a kind of public execution.
The arrest of these traitors was entrusted to the BS (short for Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten, or Internal Armed Forces). One might question whether all members of that organisation were equally suited to the task. In any case, the number of members had risen sharply only in the last months of the war.
In hindsight, it appears that quite a few mistakes were made during this reckoning. People were wrongfully arrested, while bad characters managed to escape punishment.
The women and girls who had consorted with German soldiers (what an expression) were also a grateful target. They were shaved bald or had their hair cut short amid the cheers and jeers of the spectators who had gathered, and were smeared with tar.
Here too, the way in which all this took place was not the finest example of popular justice. And among those who carried out these sentences were quite a few participants who were not entirely ‘free of blemish’ themselves.
Army equipment
Because the Canadians did not know what to do with all the captured German war material , it was stored in Amsterdam a few weeks after the liberation in a number of places on the outskirts of the city.
We were lucky to live on the outskirts of the city. Where the RAI is now located, there used to be a large piece of reclaimed land, which was of course a wonderful playground for the children. For example, I played a lot of football there with the boys from the neighbourhood.
It was quite a surprise when that piece of land was suddenly used as a temporary storage site for discarded German army equipment.
This dump quickly became a meeting place for the whole neighbourhood because there was plenty to be had, or rather stolen. Not only the young people but also the older ones stole like the proverbial ravens. Tools were particularly popular, but old helmets, bayonets, gas masks, whole rifles and the like were also sought-after items. I believe that at one point, entire lorries were even driven away.
Smoke screen
One of the absolute highlights of those first few months was when I and a few other lads managed to bring some unusable smoke gas cylinders back to life. In case you don’t know what these things are used for, they were used to create smoke screens.
We had already tried a few times to ignite one, but without success, until one Wednesday afternoon we decided to tackle it on a larger scale.
We first lit a fire with all kinds of flammable materials, and once it was burning well, we placed one of the smoke cylinders on top of it with the opening facing the fire. After about five minutes, the thing – which measured about 15 by 70 cm – actually started to produce some smoke, and we enthusiastically made the fire even bigger so that we could put a few more on it.
The success exceeded all our expectations. The little bit of smoke turned into a lot of smoke, and after another five minutes or so, all the smoke cylinders were belching out thick clouds of smoke.
There was a very light breeze that day, which first blew the smoke towards Scheldeplein and then into Scheldestraat. And it wasn’t just a little mist, no, you really couldn’t see a thing.
We were delighted, of course. But there was panic among the residents and shopkeepers in Scheldestraat.
And the Canadian soldiers, who had been ordered to guard all that material, were understandably annoyed. They would have much preferred to spend their time enjoying the local female beauty.
In the end, the fire brigade had to be called in to locate the fire caused by the smoke bombs and then extinguish it, but of course, the success of our mission could no longer be undone.
A barbed wire fence was then erected around the dump, but that did little to stop the theft. It must be said that the Canadians were not particularly interested either.
A second smoke screen was not possible, but that was not necessary because the liberation celebrations and the fair provided enough other distractions.
Food at last
Food was, of course, also a topic that was in the spotlight. After all, we had just come through the ‘hunger winter’ and everyone expected to end up in a kind of land of milk and honey. That was not the case, and only after a hesitant start did the food supply get going in mid-May. The food parcels dropped by the Allies on 30 April – I mentioned them in an earlier chapter – were not distributed until 17 May. Everyone received a tin of sausage or cheese, tea and a bar of chocolate. The temptation to eat that bar in one go was great, but I grated it so that I could put a kind of sprinkles on my bread for a week.
Egg powder, which was also included in the food parcels, was distributed in generous quantities. You could use it to make a kind of omelette. We had to wait a while longer for real eggs.
Biscuits. That’s a story in itself.
No, not luxury biscuits, of course. Something biscuit-like, roughly the shape of today’s ligakoeken. These were provided in abundance fairly quickly. In exchange for a voucher, of course, everything was on ration and had to be paid for. There were two types, brown and white. They were supplied in large square tins, which were a very popular item because you could make rafts out of them. That is, if you tied enough of them together.
Those biscuits were the kind of nibbles you couldn’t stop eating. As long as you had them, of course.
A number of horror stories quickly circulated about continuing to eat them. These biscuits were bone dry, and if you ate too many and then drank a lot, you could end up with quite a stomach ache because the dry biscuit mass increased in volume when water was added.
At my school, there was a rumour going around that several people had ended up in hospital with ruptured stomachs because they had eaten too many, and our teacher even warned us about it in class.
In the end, many items remained on the ration card for a long time, and it took until the early 1950s for the last items to be completely released.
Clothing and shoes
Even after the liberation, these were still hard to come by. In mid-August, shoes with soles made of a kind of pressed cardboard appeared. You couldn’t walk in the rain with those.
Perhaps because of my father’s role in the resistance, we received a number of parcels from America. Just as we now sometimes hold collections for starving populations in Africa or, not so long ago, Poland, the Americans did the same for starving Europe. It was always a surprise to open those parcels to see what was inside. Usually it was sweets and various tinned goods. Packaged in pages from the Saturday Evening Post or Life magazine, you could feast your eyes on the image of America that was revealed.
Clothes were apparently also collected there, and you could come and choose them at the invitation of the municipality in a warehouse on Waterlooplein. For years, I wore cheerful blue trousers, altered to plus fours, which came from the States.
To the cinema
At the end of May, the first eight cinemas in Amsterdam reopened, followed shortly afterwards by the neighbourhood cinemas. We had two relatively close by, the Rialto and the Ceintuurtheater.
The latter in particular was a real neighbourhood cinema with a musty smell. When a cowboy or fight film was shown, the audience often cheered and whistled throughout the performance. This cinema was not unjustifiably nicknamed ‘the Stinkertje’ (the little stinker). The first film they showed again was a Charlie Chaplin film. The interest was enormous.
The cinema was a huge attraction at the time. You didn’t just go there whenever it suited you. No, you had to buy tickets in advance. Advance sales started at 11 o’clock in the morning, and then you had to queue for a few hours before you could buy a ticket for the afternoon or evening show or for the next day.
Transport, gas, electricity
Public life only slowly got back on track after liberation. In fact, at the end of the war, the conclusion was that recovery was an almost impossible task. The city was in a terrible state, with the population in a worrying state of health, no gas, no electricity, no trams or buses, no refuse collection, a severely stagnant sewage system, a devastated police force, no telephone or radio, deprived of motorised and horse-drawn transport, a devastated and blocked seaport, a ruined airport, thousands of houses rendered uninhabitable by timber theft, devastated parks and public gardens, 18,000 missing trees, demolished and broken-up houses, miniature-sized newspapers, and – to conclude – even an acute shortage of coffins.
Yet people did not give up. On 18 June, the first trams started running again after almost eight months in the depot. At the end of September, the number of hours they ran was increased from five to seven.
The situation with the trains was similar to that with the trams. The reason was that a lot of material had disappeared to Germany. In addition, a lot of repairs had to be made to the tracks and overhead lines.
I can still remember the trip we made in August to visit Aunt Mieke in Eerbeek. Because there were not enough passenger carriages available, we were put in a goods wagon.
After seven months of absence, the gas supply was restored in June-July. So we had to use the miracle stove for cooking for a few more weeks.
The lights came back on for private individuals at almost the same time as for businesses and government buildings, also after an absence of seven months. However, this was limited to a few hours a day.
In short, it was not ‘all’s well that ends well’ and the road to full recovery would be long.
School
Quite soon after those crazy days of liberation, we had to go back to school. It had not been closed during the last months of the war ( ), but operated on a schedule of half days instead of full days.
I can still remember that we went on a school trip to the water supply dunes in July. Only the fifth and sixth grades went because there was no more transport available.
I can still picture the journey clearly. We travelled in two old open lorries, which had been ‘organised’ by an enterprising member of the parents’ committee.
Driving very slowly, to avoid losing anyone, we made our way towards Haarlem at a snail’s pace.
Fortunately, the weather was nice and warm that day, and because we weren’t used to anything else, we thought it was a fantastic day.
Have I already mentioned the name of my school? I’m sure I did in one of the previous chapters. It was the Meerhuizenschool on Meerhuizenplein, named after the country estate that once stood on that spot on the Amstel river.
Our class teacher was called Bloksma and was one of those old-school teachers. That meant that, in some respects, he ruled over his pupils like a kind of enlightened despot. Apart from that, however, he had also set himself the goal of teaching his pupils things beyond the normal compulsory curriculum, such as the history of Amsterdam and the trees and flowers in nature.
In September 1943, I was placed in the fourth grade. Fortunately, I had learned the necessary things during the previous four months at school in Eerbeek and had been able to catch up on some of the ground I had lost during the three years I had spent in hiding. In terms of time, I was only one year behind.
The Meerhuizenschool was a regular public primary school with six classes. The class below mine had Mr Beuken as their teacher, who always wore a grey dust coat and was known as a joker. I had the opportunity to experience him as a substitute teacher for a few weeks (he had to teach two classes at the same time) and, to be honest, I didn’t find him to be a particularly cheerful person. It just goes to show how opinions about someone can differ.
We also had gymnastics. I can still picture that man. Stiens, feared by all the boys. Tall and sturdy with one stiff leg, or at least a leg that didn’t function very well. According to the stories, he had been a competitive gymnast and had broken that leg in several places when he fell from the high bar. According to those same stories, he was also so strict that he once smashed a piece of equipment on a pupil’s back.
The headmaster, Mr van Zanten or was it van Zuilen, was also a gloomy man. Well, it doesn’t matter. He was the kind of man with a face like he had a stomach ulcer. It was said that he was constantly at loggerheads with his wife. It was also said that this made it difficult for him to stay off the drink, and that he would sometimes stand in front of the class in the afternoon with a ‘kegel’ (a type of drink). I later heard a greatly exaggerated story from other sources.
I don’t remember how many children were in my class. I think there were about thirty.
I can still remember most of them. Pietje Prins sat next to me in the classroom. He came from IJmuiden but had been evacuated to Amsterdam with his parents because of the war.
If I’m not mistaken, his father was a shipowner and the family was well off.
He was a bit of a bully, but nice. I visited his home several times. After the war, he quickly amassed a whole collection of German war equipment, complete with helmets, gas masks, bayonets, a real rifle, a revolver and I don’t know what else.
Imagine that, an eleven-year-old boy.
Because I sat next to him at school, he gave me a scale model metal jeep. It measured about 10 by 20 cm. It had rubber tyres and a real linen hood. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep it. It would have been worth a lot of money now.
Wim Bouwman was the most handsome boy in the class and Wimpie Drolsbach, because of his name and small stature, had the inevitable nickname of ‘little turd’.
Henk van Bleek, who lived on Rijnstraat, was also a friend of mine, as was Gerard Pais from Maasstraat. He went to Spinoza MULO with me. His father was the manager of an Albert Heijn branch. I happened to read an article about Gerard in de Volkskrant because he had made it quite far in the banking world. I thought that was quite funny to read. I don’t think he was very good at maths and we both had to repeat the first year, but apparently his father’s grocery shop had contributed to his success.
The leaders at school were selected on the basis of their physical abilities. There were two of them: Sjakie van Wijk, an athletic lad who was good at football, and Kootje Zieleman, who was more like a battering ram. Kootje later made it quite far as an amateur cyclist.
And then there was also a smooth talker in the class, Tommie Pauka. He later capitalised on that trait at the VARA.
Wasn’t there a prettiest girl in the class? Yes, of course, in my eyes that was Hennie da Silva. I doubt she knew that. Another girl was also desirable, partly because she was the daughter of the baker on Meerhuizenplein and sometimes brought leftover white rolls to school. In two of the girls’ families, only the father was Jewish, which meant that those families survived the war. I don’t know about the boys. I got in touch with one of those girls through the Schoolbank website. She lives in South Africa and I email her my stories because she likes them. To return the favour, she regularly sends me emails with YouTube videos that I shouldn’t miss. She gave me a printout of our class photo with the names of all the children. I couldn’t remember her and it was a surprise to see myself standing next to her in that photo. She still knew a lot about that time and she told me that one of the girls in the class came from an NSB family. Apparently, she didn’t return to school after the liberation.
What a time.
My first attempts at football date back to that period, that is, the first post-war year. With the boys from my class on a piece of land behind Amstel Station, where there are now houses.
On free Wednesday afternoons, the place was always swarming with boys playing games on improvised pitches. Youth competitions as we know them today did not exist back then. You played football on the street or on patches of grass.
Those who arrived first at Amstel Station on such an afternoon naturally chose the best part of the field. And the rest followed until, at a certain point, everything was occupied.
The pitches of neighbouring teams often overlapped, and arguments would sometimes break out when players got in each other’s way. But that usually sorted itself out.
There were always discussions about whether a goal was valid or not. That was because there were no real goals. You made a goal out of a few piles of clothes. Did it go over the bar or not? Even more difficult, was it too high or not? The presence of a few players with verbal skills in your team often made the difference.
Ah, those football matches, always with Sjakie van Wijk as the star player.
The biggest problem was when the ball ended up in one of the ditches around the field, and the biggest fun was when one of us ended up in the ditch trying to retrieve the ball.
And what I mustn’t forget to mention is that strange smell that always hung around Amstel station. That was because there were two small factories there at the time, where they processed cocoa, and so there was often this indefinable sweet smell. That typical smell of chocolate.
The end?
Is my story now finished? In fact, yes, but there are still a few chapters to follow. About the Resistance Cross that was awarded to my father posthumously, about Mr Simons, the arrangements for the resistance pension, the street name in Amsterdam West and a chapter that really has to conclude the book.
Perhaps a little more smoke, because once I start on that, as my sons know, I am almost unstoppable.