Figure 1.--This is Dutch boy Harty van Engelen leading a carefree life of school and music before the War. He is outside his home in Utrecht. He and his family would help save Jews during the the World War II NAZI occupation. He would put his bicycling skills to work during the War to help deliver food to needly families. He has provided us with a fascinating account of his family's experiences.

We have collected a few personal experiences from Dutch people recalling their childhood experiences during the War. These personal observations containn all kinds of fascinating details about the war and living under NAZI occupation. Too often histories of war including World War II focus exclusively on the great figures and battles, important subjecrs to be sure, but we think the tories of ordinary people who experienced the War are also important historical topics. And in our website we are especilly nterestd in the experiences of children who experienced the War and participted in it. This is an important part of our World War II country pages and would welcome any additional experiences that Dutch readers could contribute to building this section.

Harty van Engelen

I was just a little boy, born in the big city of Utrecht, growing up as any other enterprising youngster, discovering what it felt growing up as my parents’ only child. They had a big store selling all sort of vegetables, pickled vegetables, potatoes, fruits and soft drinks, looked after by my mother, while my father ope-rated a mobile horse-drawn store, both rather very busy during the time of the Great Depression and the looking after of their son was put in the hands of two young aunts, Betsie and Riek Spans, who at their young age exposed the cultural world to him, including the many concerts, opera, and Walt Disney movies. Enjoying the musical world, he enrolled as a boy soprano in one of the local church choirs. Everything was rather peaceful until his world changed on 10 May 1940, when Germany attacked Holland. He observed the rising of big clouds of smoke over Rotterdam and on 14 May the Germans threatened that the beautiful city of Utrecht would follow the same fate of Rotterdam if the Dutch army would not lay down their weapons. On 15 May 1940 the surrender followed, while on the next day we saw German troops passing our street, the 6th German Army of General von Paulus, well-known about his defeat at Stalingrad.

Rudi Stueck

A Dutch reader has provided us details on his boyhood which include World War II experiences. "I had a good friend who's father was a Dutch Fascist. This man had been in Indonesia (at that time still the Dutch East Indies) and had married a woman of mixed ancestry. There were many Fascisrt parties in Europe and many of them were not as race-obsessed as Hitler's NAZIs. My friend Eugene became a member of the Jeugdstorm and was one of the few who had a brown skin. I don't know what happened to him, because we moved away. Be sure this was in 1938-39 before World War II. The NAZI-oriented parties in Western Europe became more strict about race as NAZI influence grew. I suspect that he may have been expelled. This might have saved his life. Many of the older Jeugdstorm boys after the occupation were drafted into Waffen-SS units and deployed in the East. (The Germans were not sure that they wold be reliable against the Americans and British in the West. I have alwaysoindered how he made out. World War II and the German occupation was a very difficult time. There was not much damage when the Germans invaded except in Rotterdam (May 1940). The situation got worse and worse as the War progressed. Food shortages developed. During the War we were forced to listen to German "Unterhaltungsmusik" (entertainment music). Some of the melodies were quite nice and easy to listen to. But we did hear Glenn Miller and other American bands through the BBC until the Germans confiscated all radios. My mother kept a tiny radio in the attic, because she wanted to hear the news from England. The German occupation did not affect Dutch boys' or other fashions for that matter, because textiles were rationed and pretty soon there was no fashion to speak of. At the end of the War we all were wearing rags. In 1945 I did not even have shoes anymore. My first long trousers I got from a Canadian soldier who had them sent from Canada to me. I was 16."

John Vandenberge

"As a 4-year-old boy I lived in Rotterdam, Holland, when the Nazis were stopped at the Maas River Bridge and three days of bombings began. My father, who worked for the Dutch government, escaped the flak, his suit white with dust. Soon, Nazis were everywhere. Five long years of fear, misery and hunger began. My parents each weighed about 75 pounds at the end of the war. I vividly remember, May 5, 1945, when the American and Canadian tanks and trucks came rolling down my street and brought us freedom. I was standing on the sidewalk, shaking from excitement, weakness and the ground shaking from the tanks and trucks with smiling and waving soldiers. I had never seen smiling soldiers. The real hero for me was my father. As an administrator who spoke German, he was assigned to help the process whereby Dutch men, between the ages of 17 and 42, were called up to the office where my father, Johannes D. Vandenberge, worked. There, a Nazi physician was stationed to see which men were physically qualified to be sent to work in German war factories or perhaps worse. My father was the interpreter, and he soon learned which diseases would keep one from being sent. Every once in a while, when the physician would sign each paper at the end of the day in the lower right hand corner, my father was able to slip in a blank page, which he would later fill out with names of the underground, plus any friend, relative and his own brothers and thus, helped to prevent many men to be forced to have to leave their families. This was very risky. When Nazi soldiers knocked on our apartment door at 2:30 a.m., we never knew whether they came to arrest my father or whether they were looking to see if we were hiding any Jewish people. Of course, I did not know about his work until after the war. When I was downtown with my father, someone would walk up to him and say: "Oh, Mr. Vandenberge, aren't you the one who helped my husband (or brother or father) from having to go to Germany!" I also found out that my father and his brother hid 25 Jewish people under he pulpit of our church for the last months of the war. He turned out to be a real hero in my book. He never shared his story unless we pressed him on the details. What a godly man he was!" [Vandenberge]

Sources

Stueck, Rudi. E-mail message, various messages.

Vandenberge, John. "A Silent Hero," The Washington Post (May 28, 2004), p. W11.


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Created: 4:04 PM 12/24/2017
Last updated: 4:04 PM 12/24/2017