I will never throw away leftover food

I was born in Nederhemert. I went to school in Den Bosch, courted in Lexmond and got married in Berlicum. Since 1972, I have again lived in my childhood home in Nederhemert. From the May days of 1940, I mainly remember the Messerschmitts swooping low over the river Maas. But beyond that, the transition to occupation was quiet. For us, the real war didn’t start until September 1944. Before that, I never even saw a German soldier in our village. The only place we encountered them was in Den Bosch, where I attended trade school. We knew nothing about Westerbork, the raids on Jews, or deportations. There was an old potato trader in our village, who delivered potatoes to Vught. I had no idea there was a camp where people were being imprisoned. You simply didn’t know. The newspapers and the radio were under German control. So, the only news we ever heard was that the Germans were always victorious—everywhere, all the time.

In the final months of the war, we couldn’t stay near the river Maas—it was too dangerous. The English were constantly shooting at boats. Spitfires. Sometimes, they attacked three or four times a day. Once, an English bomber was shot down—a Lancaster, on its way to Germany, still fully loaded with bombs. We were sleeping in the attic when suddenly, there was a massive flash and deafening explosions. The plane detonated mid-air. The blast was so powerful that roof tiles were blown off houses for miles around. The crew did not survive. Two bodies were recovered. The rest were never found, yet officially, all eight were buried here. As boys, we went out the next morning, searching for wreckage. War trophies. I collected dozens of shell casings and bullet cartridges during those years. After the war, I turned them into vases and ashtrays.

By late 1944, I had learned to identify whether a shell was dangerous just by the sound it made. If it whistled, you knew it would fly past or overhead. But if it hissed, you dropped to the ground instantly—because that meant it was coming straight for you. But I was never truly afraid. You adapted, you learned to live with it. And we all knew: one day, this will end. What the war taught me, is that I will never throw away leftover food. And because I had to flee my home and move eight times during those last months of the war, it deeply affects me whenever I see refugees on TV today.