The situation we were living under got worse as time went on.
People were on the verge of starving, and there was not a living dog or cat in the city. I was the oldest, and it was my duty to get the daily ration of watery soup. I had grown out of my clothes and clothing was not available, so I was wearing my dad’s clothes. There I stood in the daily soup kitchen queue, with the pant legs and sleeves rolled up. The toes of my shoes were cut off so I could get in my shoes; my footwear looked like weird sandals and did nothing to help my ice-cold feet.
There was not a wooden railing or bench left in the city, and people started to burn furniture and doors to keep warm and heat the soup.
One night, ignoring the seven-o’clock curfew, my dad and some other people cut a big elm tree down on the road behind us. The tree came down with a big bang and fell over the electric street car lines. My dad came running home and hid in his hiding place with our downstairs neighbours.
For days, women and children, including my mom and I, hacked at the tree with small handsaws and axes. The wood was used in very small wood stoves called majos and heated our kitchen, in which we lived.
At one raid, a German soldier opened the kitchen door and saw all four of us children huddled in blankets on the kitchen floor. He started to cry and threw his helmet and rifle on the floor, and my mom gave him a hug. He had a wife and two children in Germany and did not know if they were still alive.
Every night, Allied planes flew over, and the sound of sirens and anti-aircraft guns mixed with the drone of planes bound for Germany filled the air. I cannot remember when the V1 and later V2 rockets were sent to England from a launching place in the sand dunes not too far from where we lived. Some of the early V1 rockets failed and fluttered through the air like a balloon, with nobody knowing where they would land. One of the rockets landed four blocks away from us, killing a girl in my class just before the schools were closed.
When life became almost unbearable, my sister, younger brother and I were illegally shipped to a small town in the north-eastern part of Holland. I cannot remember much of that, except that my younger brother and I ended up in a small farm for a month, and all three of us came back about a month later. It saved rations for my parents and little sister, but it was hard for the three of us to come back to hunger and misery.
The second time we were illegally shipped to the N.E. part of Holland was in the early spring of 1944.
Bert de Vink is a regular Observer contributor. Part 1 of Bert’s story was published in the April 4 edition of the Observer, while Part 2 was published on April 25, Part 3 was published May 9, and Part 4 was published May 16.
