I kept a journal

For us, the war didn’t truly begin until 1944. My mother had been unable to walk since my birth. She couldn’t even take me in the stroller to visit her own mother. My parents slept downstairs, because my mother could no longer climb the stairs. In the course of 1944, an SS officer came to our home and ordered my mother to make the bed properly, as he wanted to sleep there. It was a horrible time. The SS men occupied our living room, while we were confined to the kitchen. They had a radio transmitter and broadcast for one and a half days. Any longer would have been too dangerous, as the English could track the signal and attack. At the time, I didn’t fully understand how much danger we were in.

During this period, I decided to write down my experiences in a journal. It wasn’t a proper journal, just a simple notebook. My first entry described an attack by two English fighter planes on ships anchored in Nederhemert, hoping to wait out the war in peace. The attacks continued for days, injuring several ship crews. Many dyke residents fled their homes for safety, seeking shelter with family and friends in the village.

In 1944, the English captured Heusden. We hoped they would advance further, but the river Maas got in the way. Soon after, German soldiers were quartered in our home again—but this time, they were different men. Some were quite kind.

I remember one moment vividly: I went outside to feed our goats and saw one of the young soldiers standing there, crying. He was barely eighteen years old, from Austria, and longed for his mother. I tried to comfort him as best I could. One of these men operated a transmitter at our kitchen table. He oversaw the firing of a large artillery piece positioned just two houses behind ours. We had not yet experienced incoming shells, but their eerie whistling sounds made us shrink with fear.
That day, the English fired more than eighty shells from Heusden, all targeting our house. Miraculously, every single one missed. My mother and I were in the cellar, while my father stood behind the house. Our home was never hit—not even once. We were miraculously spared.

I closed my journal with a verse from the beautiful Dutch patriotic song “Kent gij het land, der zee ontrukt”:

O Netherlands, blessed land,
small speck upon the world’s great map.
May God’s hand protect you still,
and may you honor your fathers’ will.