Outdoor Expo Buren

From the fighting at the Grebbeberg to the resistance that sprang up in small villages: every place has its own story. In Buren the orphanage concealed two hundred radios. In Ommeren brave citizens helped American prisoners of war. And in Zoelen families took in people who had been forced into hiding.
Because of its strategic location between the rivers, the area was severely affected by the war, with V1 bombs buzzing overhead, Allied bombers crashing to the ground and German troops occupying crucial positions.
The liberation in May 1945 came at a high price. Stories of ordinary people living in extraordinary times shed light on how this community came through five years of occupation.

In 1942, a Jewish family from Lienden faced an unimaginably difficult choice. The Frank family had to go into hiding, but what should they do with their four-year-old daughter, Ellie?

In de familie van Gert van Schaik wordt over de oorlog gezwegen. Tot in 2012 een e-mail uit Amerika alles verandert.

Gert van Schaik’s family did not talk about the war. At least until 2012, when an email from America changed everything.

For seven-year-old Carel Borneman from Zoelen the war was a time of confusing contradictions. In his parents’ grocery store he saw his father in May 1940 handing out cigars to Dutch soldiers. “They weren’t for those rotten Germans!”

In 1939 Buren was transformed into a garrison town. The Dutch armed forces commandeered the school and other buildings to house mobilised troops.

Buren’s orphanage was a safe haven for eleven-year-old Gerard van den Berg. ‘The first years of the war went by fairly quietly for us,’ recounts Gerard.

Sannie de Haas, a quiet, serious boy, grew up in the shadow of the Grebbeberg, which in 1940 was the scene of heavy fighting. During the war he saw his family get involved in various acts of resistance: his father made a gun, they took people into hiding.