How a fugitive’s experiences shaped his life

“My time in hiding was not the most pleasant period of my life, but looking back, it yielded great ‘returns’ for my future.” Johan Schröer spent the final year of the Second World War as a fugitive and prisoner of the Germans. He endured harrowing experiences and recorded his memories fifty years after the war.
Johan Schröer was born in Tiel in 1924. At the start of the war, he began working for the Dutch Railways. Because of this, he was exempt from the compulsory Arbeitseinsatz (forced labour in Germany), which had been imposed on many Dutch men since 1942. However, by 1944, railway workers were also required to perform forced labour. To avoid this, Johan decided to go into hiding and, six months later, attempt to flee to the free parts of the Netherlands.

On 22 October 1944 Johan and fellow fugitive Arie van Bronkhorst tried to cross the River Waal into liberated territory. That day, luck was not on their side. In the early evening, they were caught by the Nazis and arrested. The Germans took them to a basement, where they were interrogated and beaten for the rest of the night. The interrogators continued to hit them until they provided answers that seemed believable. “After one blow to my cheek, one of the onlookers handed the interrogator the rosary they had found on me during the search. ‘Aha,’ the interrogator shouted, ‘Ein Christ! What does a good Christian do?’ I turned my other cheek. He became furious and landed two more heavy blows on me,” Johan wrote. Despite the torture, they resolved to stay strong and reveal nothing of the little information they had. They endured four nights of beatings, with no proper toilet facilities and only on the fifth day were they finally given something to eat. After several days in the basement, they were transferred between various police cells and prisons.

On 4 November, nearly two weeks after their arrest, they were taken with a group of prisoners to the Juvenaat in Zevenaar. There, Johan and the other prisoners were forced to work for the Germans. As the weeks passed, more prisoners arrived, and space in the Juvenaat became scarce. Johan and many others were still required to work nearby, but they were no longer directly guarded by SS officers. “Their misfortune became our salvation,” Johan wrote. He and the others realised that this provided an opportunity to escape the forced labour imposed by the Germans. Within days, escape routes were arranged for everyone in the group. Through a contact of a fellow prisoner, Johan managed to obtain a forged Ausweis (identification document), allowing him to travel to Utrecht. Using this, he escaped and, after a long journey towards Utrecht and the river region, remained in hiding until the liberation.

Johan’s experiences taught him that the traditional distinction between ‘good’ Dutch people and ‘bad’ Germans was not as clear-cut as many believed. “What also stuck with me,” said his son Kees, “was that my father was interrogated by a Gestapo officer who behaved very formally and correctly, while a Dutch secretary standing nearby berated him viciously.” By the end of the war, Johan was even hiding with a German woman in the Netherlands—one who was firmly anti-Nazi. The boundary between good and evil was not drawn between Dutch and Germans, but rather by individual choices: Do you or do you not treat others with respect?

Interview with Kees Schröer about His Father, Johan Schröer
By: Hidde Meenhorst and Jelle Vogelsang