My childhood home was destroyed by German bombs

I come from a large Catholic family. My mother was 48 when she, much to her surprise, discovered she was expecting her tenth child, my youngest sister. That’s just how things were back then. We had a strict, Spartan upbringing. It couldn’t have been any other way. My parents simply didn’t have the time to give each of us individual attention. Every evening, we knelt in a row for our prayers, each taking a spoonful of cod liver oil, and then went to bed at the same time. And in the morning, we all got up together. If you were late, you didn’t get breakfast. When my husband and I got married, we told the priest: “You can marry us, but you are not to interfere with the size of our family!”

My father was a coal merchant. We lived in a large house with a spacious coal shed behind Restaurant Rutten.

I only have fragmented memories of the war. Perhaps the most significant one is that my youngest sister was born during those years—life went on, even in wartime! But the other big memory is losing our home to German shelling from across the Waal. It was in the final year of the war. My father had only just had the roof redone when, one day, we suddenly had to flee into the cellar because of heavy gunfire. Father had barely closed the cellar hatch above our heads when the bombs struck—hitting our house and Restaurant Rutten. Our home was severely damaged and was never rebuilt.

Like many of our neighbours in Wamel, we spent a long time sleeping in the basement of the Van Beers family, a wealthy household who lived in a grand mansion on Dorpsstraat. The cellar was packed with beds. I still remember Mrs. Thijssen, who had a newborn baby, bringing a sugar pot with her. If her little boy started crying at night, she dipped his dummy in the sugar pot before putting it back in his mouth. That always settled him!

The Van Beers family had a large garden with a seesaw and a sandbox. We played there during the day, with Mr. Van Beers standing guard. If there was an air raid warning, he would blow a whistle, and we had to rush back into the cellar immediately!

Later, we were evacuated to Appeltern on a flat cart, wrapped in old-fashioned quilted blankets, with lanterns hanging from the back of the wagon. From there, we moved on to Alfen, where we stayed with the Smits family.
Opposite their house was a wooden shed that had been turned into an improvised school. That’s where I went to school for the first time.

One of my fondest memories of the liberation is sitting in a Jeep with the Canadian soldiers. At six years old, I absolutely adored those boys!