We were very afraid of those V1s!

I was still asleep on that day, 10 May 1940. The sound of anti-aircraft fire and the drone of aircraft woke me around four o’clock. Hitler had promised to respect our neutrality, but I immediately understood he had broken that promise. I didn’t really know much about what it meant to be at war, though. In fact, during the first few years, we didn’t notice much. My father had a mixed farming business with grassland along the river dyke, and inland arable land. All the seasonal work carried on as usual. On a farm, essential tasks like sowing and planting can’t be postponed!

As the years went by and the tide turned against the Germans, we naturally saw the huge numbers of British bombers and fighter planes targeting the Ruhr area. The Waal was an excellent landmark. We often looked up. In 1943, I was working in the field when one of those bombers on its way back, was burning, broke apart over Kedichem and crashed. All seven crew members were killed. I also saw how the British shot down a German V1 with tracer ammunition. We were really scared of those V1s, as they could suddenly crash down out of nowhere. One of them did crash in the field near Asperen. It was a beautiful sight to see it being shot down, with all those blue and green tracer trails in the air.

In January 1945, we had seven Germans billeted in our front room. They weren’t bad people, and they left everything neat and tidy when they left. One of them, a certain Müller, even helped us with the threshing, which had to be done manually at that time since we had no electricity. Milking cows during the dark winter months was done by the dim light of a few storm lanterns. We often had no tobacco left, and the Germans shared theirs with us.

Because I worked in food production and transported food by horse and cart, I had an Ausweis that exempted me from forced labour in Germany. This allowed me to get through the war years without hindrance. But we weren’t free. One evening, we were chatting with the neighbour at twilight. It was already curfew, after eight, but we thought we could stretch the rules a little. Suddenly, a German soldier in field appeared and asked: “Was machen Sie auf der Strasse?” We replied: “We’re just having a chat with the neighbour.” To cut a long story short, we had to hand in our identity cards and were ordered to report at eight o’clock the next morning at the Ortskommandantur in the Kerkestein building in Herwijnen. There, we spent the whole day sawing wood! The Germans, just like us, were short of fuel, and this way, they had cheap manpower to chop firewood for them. It wasn’t a truly horrible day, though. They were older soldiers who were completely fed up with the war, and we were allowed to sit on our chopping block and have a cigarette now and then.

I don’t have any truly shocking memories. And certainly, considering that many young men of my age had to work as forced labourers or go into hiding, I had it pretty good. But still, it wasn’t a pleasant time: there was a shortage of everything. You didn’t have a bicycle, or just one with solid tyres, you had to be indoors on time every evening, everything was dark because there was no electricity. And of course, in the last winter of hunger, I saw the immense misery of all the people from the big cities. Every night, a couple of them would sleep in our barn, and my mother would cook wheat porridge for them in a big iron pot. They would gobble it down, they were so hungry. And often, they’d get sick from it because their stomachs weren’t used to solid food anymore.