If Dunja hadn’t been killed, I would have stayed in Germany!

I was the ninth child in a family of thirteen. Two of them had died at birth—that was common in those days. We lived on ‘the Rot’, along the Lingedijk in Geldermalsen. My father had a small mixed farm with a few cows, a horse, some fruit trees, and a small piece of land. It was hard work, and as soon as we were able, we had to help—turning cherries, picking beets, harvesting and storing potatoes.

At sixteen, I got a job at De Chamotte, the brick factory. Two years later, the war started. There were many young men working at the factory, and the Germans quickly took notice. They regularly came to round up workers for forced labour in Germany. It must have been the spring of 1943 when my turn came. One Monday morning, the Germans arrived, consulted their lists. Two days later, I was on a train with many others from the Betuwe region. My father travelled with me, worried about my fate, as did other fathers. But when the train stopped in Eindhoven, we told them, “Get off now, or you’ll end up in Germany too!” That day, we travelled on to Dortmund, where we spent the night in the train. The next day, we continued to Gelsenkirchen—places I had never heard of. I didn’t speak a word of German either!

In Gelsenkirchen, we were assigned our workplaces. I was sent with five other Betuwe men to the Prosper fuel factories near Gelsenkirchen. There were an incredible number of foreign workers there—French, Belgians, Italians, Russians. There was also a camp with 600 Russian female labourers. That’s where I met Dunja Nebrada. We spent a lot of time together. Surprising? You must remember that we weren’t exactly forced labourers—not in the sense you might think. Of course, I hadn’t chosen to work in Germany, but we were paid decently, and in the two years I worked there, I even had three home leaves. We could go to the cinema or variety theatre in Gelsenkirchen. We did remove the badge from our clothing that marked us as foreign workers, to avoid trouble with the local German youth who liked to pick fights with foreigners.

I was doing well there. Of course, the conditions were basic. The food was mainly cabbage soup and small portions of bread. The toilet in our dormitory was just a metal milk can where you had to relieve yourself in plain sight. But the atmosphere was good. I got along well with my foreign colleagues and picked up a fair bit of German and even some Russian. I also had a good relationship with our German supervisor, a man named Oberlack. We were never mistreated, and our working hours weren’t excessively long.
If Dunja hadn’t been killed in an English bombing raid, we would have stayed in Germany together.

The Prosper fuel factories were prime targets for Allied air raids. There were bunkers, but not enough and not strong enough. The Russian women didn’t have any form of protection. I had built a small shelter in the workshop out of bricks and cement, which could hold about ten men during an attack. When the bombs fell, the walls would shake! But the Russian women had nowhere to go at all.

In the spring of 1945, Dunja was killed, along with many others. The entire factory and all the living quarters were destroyed. I visited her grave, where she was buried with seven of her friends. After that, I escaped with Jan Vrouwerff from Geldermalsen. We slept in ditches at night and walked openly between German tanks during the day, casually shouting “Heil Hitler” to avoid suspicion. That’s how I made it back to the Netherlands, much wiser for the experience.

Looking back, despite all the tragic events, I can still say: “I have never worked as well as I did in Germany during the war!”