On October 31, 2019 I visited my mother on her 100th birthday. My mother loves to read and I have shared her love of books since I was a teenager. I noticed the book she was reading, Dutch Girl - Audrey Hepburn and World War II by Robert Matzen. She did not want to talk about the book because it was causing her considerable anxiety. She was being taken back to the time when she herself was a Dutch girl experiencing the trauma of WWII in the Netherlands (Holland).
I shared my interest in the book with Nikki, probably while sharing a coffee. Our parents rarely discussed their WWII experiences when I was growing up as a Canadian boy. As an adult, particularly after midlife, I became increasingly interested in the early lives of my parents and grandparents.
When Nikki came to visit me in February, she brought a copy of Dutch Girl with her and gave it to me as a gift. Thank you, Nikki. Later in a telephone call with my mother, I asked her if it was the same book she had read. No, she said, that copy she gave to my brother Bill. No doubt Bill has even less interest in Audrey Hepburn than I do but he has the same motivation for reading the book as me.
The book is well written and I enjoyed reading the story. The life of Audrey Hepburn was interesting. I got more than just the insights I was looking for.
It did not take the Germans very long in 1940 to conquer Holland and occupy it.
In the Netherlands that month, butter,margarine, fats, and cream were not only rationed but disappearing from the shops. Without warning all these ingredients that had been sewn into the fabric of Dutch life were being diverted to Germany. And so it went with every commodity as bit by bit life in Holland changed for the worse.
I was born in 1951 and bit by bit life in Canada got better and better, nothing like the experience of my parents during WWII.
Anyone caught listening to an unsanctioned station, particularly the BBC and Radio Oranje, would be severely punished.
Sometime in my boyhood, one of the glimpses into that time that I became aware of concerned Opa Swart. He had a radio which he listened to in the attic throughout the war. If caught, he could have been shot and how different this story could have been.
In recent years I learned that Opa Swart had been a soldier stationed at the Dutch border during WWI but he never saw combat. Germany did not invade Holland during the first world war. The Dutch, naively in hindsight, expected the same in the next war and were shocked to their core in 1940.
Part of the story is the relationship of Audrey Hepburn with her mother Ella, who was Dutch.
“Warmth does not go well with [Dutch] austerity.” For all she would surmount in life, she found herself unable to break through and offer physical affection to her own daughter - the one thing Ella herself had craved.
Well, that sounds familiar.
And it was Ella and only Ella who by age ten had begun crossing herself like a Catholic because she found the Roman Catholics with their icons, relics, and traditions much more interesting than old Calvinists of her own family.
So, it seems that it was not just my imagination telling me that growing up in a Calvinist family was boring.
Unfortunately, Ella had also been born into the Frisian aristocracy of 1900 and forbidden as a teenager by her father to set foot anywhere near a stage. She dreamed of becoming a ballerina or a poetess…
In 2008 I had a wonderful long talk with my mother, just the two of us. She shared with me that at heart she felt she was born at the wrong time. She had wanted to be a career woman. Instead, she accepted the role society imposed on her, being a wife and a mother. She had never revealed this to me before. She never displayed any bitterness at her lot in life because there was no bitterness, just passive acceptance and fulfilling her duty. But in my twenties I felt the impact of my mother’s desire for my success. I now realize that this partly reflected her own unfulfilled ambitions.
… the winter of 1942 was brutal… the worst in 153 years… the cold penetrated… and chilled the marrow of the bones… Dutch families were given enough coal to heat just one room per household.
These are details I am looking for, new details of what my mother and father must have experienced.
The Germans were becoming ever more authoritarian, introducing new measures, rules, regulations, and restrictions, They no longer treated the Dutch as Aryan cousins; no longer was there an effort to win Dutch hearts. The Dutch didn’t seem to be willing to walk hand in hand with the Germans, so they would be dragged along instead.
Although I have always felt totally Canadian, over the years I have gained greater appreciation of my Dutch ancestry.
With the Germans tightening their grip on the Netherlands, with rationing becoming more severe, with more people arrested, with Jews being ever more cruelly oppressed and now with the executions of innocent civilians the population was rising up against everything that represented the Reich… the life was slowly being sapped from the Dutch people… Restrictions on the Jews grew harsher by the day.
And as a boy growing up in Canada I was totally sheltered from knowing what my mother and father lived through. No doubt they experienced the full range of an intense rollercoaster of emotions. First there was the shock of invasion followed by the despair of occupation and then the faint beginnings of hope.
…the ghostly noise signaled all those big planes flying over. Radio Oranje confirmed that the planes four miles high in the sky were American bombers, B-17s and B-24s, taking off from bases in England and on their way to bomb cities in Germany. For Ella, the appearance of the American “bomber stream” merely confirmed the inevitability of the outcome of this war. American planes flew over nearly every morning in January and February 1943.
Audrey Hepburn’s older brother, Alex, was of special interest to me.
Alex was off playing a shell game, living here and there finding work where he could but lying low so the Germans wouldn’t conscript him or ship him off as forced labor… Great numbers of men in their prime were sent away - all those born in 1921, and then 1922 and 1923. As many as possible “dived under” and joined the ranks of the oderduikers who were being sheltered secretly in homes, hospitals, and other buildings across the Netherlands.
My father was born in 1921 and was 19 when Holland was invaded. To the best of my knowledge, Pa spent the war years running and hiding from Germans. He probably experienced five years of extreme stress as a young adult. No traces of the stress were visible in the father I knew. That seems remarkable to me now. Oh how I would love to have a conversation about this with Pa now, but it is too late.
During our brief conversation last October, Mom shared with me a bit of her side of the story. She would walk nonchalantly past the home of her fiancé. A signalling system was used, a certain positioning of curtains, I think. The signal meant that Pa was alive and well and Mom walked home reassured.
The Protestant and Catholic Dutch citizenry now became horrified observers as their Jewish countrymen and women and their children were rounded up at gunpoint and sent away.
But I have no memory of even a single conversation in my family about the holocaust. Why not? Did Mom or Pa have any Jewish acquaintances that disappeared? What were they thinking and feeling as they gained an understanding of these events? What I do know is that in retirement my parents fulfilled their dream of making a trip to Israel.
I learned a surprising historical fact from Dutch Girl.
It’s no coincidence that visits to cemeteries in Arnhem and across Holland reveal many dates of death on tombstones that read 10 May 1940. The day the Germans invaded, distraught Dutch Jews committed suicide because they sensed doom but didn’t have the energy or the money or the opportunity to flee their homeland. They saw no way out and for them a future under Nazi occupation meant slow death, so why not spare the torture and end it now?
As I write this during the coronavirus crisis I am also thinking about the growing anecdotal evidence of a noticeable increase of deaths of despair in the United States.
By late 1943 the daylight hours often featured burning American B-17s and B-24s falling all over the Netherlands from brutal air battles that covered dozens and hundreds of miles. Surviving air crews would abandon their crippled planes by parachute and float to earth to be picked up by the moffen or sheltered by lion-hearted Dutch.
What did my parents see? What did they know? I know so little of this part of their journey through life.
Then, on the morning of 6 June, the BBC broadcast an urgent bulletin that ended a year of expectation among the oppressed and the occupiers: The Allied invasion of Fortress Europe had begun!
Because Opa Swart had a secret radio, he probably heard this and shared the news with his family. There was hope. His three daughters would have a good life, but not yet.
“Food started getting scarcer and scarcer and scarcer,” said Audrey. “We ran out of everything. Holland had no imports or exports. It was just a closed country. And, of course, the German army took the best of everything.”
But I remember my mother once telling me that her family did not suffer as much as most neighbors. Opa and Oma Swart operated a small store and had access to a supply chain. They were not wealthy but had enough resources for Opa to access the black market.
Audrey Hepburn lived in Velp, a small town near the important city of Arnhem. She and her family had great interest in the battle to liberate Arnhem. I knew enough history to know of the impact of these events on my family who lived in De Lier, considerably to the west near Rotterdam but north of the river. (I was born in Rijswijk.)
The Allied battle plan was to push north from France, through Belgium, and into Holland. But the Germans stopped the Allies at the river near Arnhem, a river the Allies needed to cross. The plan to liberate Holland in 1944 failed with terrible consequences.
And I learned something else from this story. Many times I have heard the expression “A Bridge Too Far” but I did not know the history. It was a bridge in Arnhem that the advancing British were prevented from crossing by the Germans in 1944. WWII did not end by Christmas 1944 as planned. The British had overreached.
The whole story of Audrey Hepburn’s mother, Ella, was of interest to me because of how it connected to our story. In the 1930s Ella was impressed by the rise of Hitler and was active in the Nazi cause. She was empathetic to the German conquerors in the early years of the war. This was not uncommon and these sentiments were shared by approximately ten percent of the Dutch people. But heroes turned out to be monsters and Ella became a supporter of the Dutch Resistance. And Audrey Hepburn noted that, she didn’t have to feel shame that her mother had once been a fascist.
That wonderful talk I had with my mother in 2008 was two years after Pa died. Mom said to me that she wanted to share the family secret with me. She did not want the secret to die with her. She gave me no instructions as to what to do with this secret and, until now, I have only shared it with my sister Nikki and a cousin.
In the 1930s Opa Stokdijk, like Ella, was a supporter of Adolf Hitler. This fact caused my mother to feel shame and keep this fact hidden. I learned that Pa did not like his father and neither did my mother and this never changed. But for me this was interesting family history. Occasionally since 2008 I have wondered whether I somehow reminded my father of his father whom he did not like. But perhaps this is only true in my imagination.
After 2008 I wanted to know more about this family history.
In 2014 I learned from Mom that a relative living in New Zealand was travelling to Canada on business and was planning a visit to Nova Scotia. I remembered this in 2016 and found an email address for her. Through her I made contact with her father, my cousin, Nick Stokdijk, who I had met in 1981.
Nick and I had some email exchanges. I asked him to shed some light on our family secret. He informed me that the story of Opa Stokdijk was no secret. He had known “the secret” his whole life. I did not learn much from Nick but he did share this: “...something to think about is the original name when the first Stokdijk came to Holland he adapted the name Hendrik Stokdijk but the original name appear to have been Ludwick Stockdiek and he came from Laksbergen Germany. Have fun mate with sorting things out Nick [ sic ].” I do not know when my ancestors moved from Germany to Holland but in our family there was never any mention of German blood.
Back to the story of Audrey Hepburn,
“After living the long months and years under the Germans,” said Audrey, “you dreamed what would happen if you ever got out. You swore you would never complain about anything again.”
Pa had an optimistic, can do attitude. But there was one thing he complained about, complained a lot. As I boy I heard a steady stream of criticism of incompetent Canadian government. He was particularly annoyed by deficit spending. He was against government subsidies except, of course, subsidies for agriculture. As a teenager I once informed him of the hypocrisy of his position and immediately received a lesson in how agriculture was different. But he did not complain about other matters, not even when hot, dry weather was hurting the big fields of cabbage he grew.
I knew about the winter of 1944-45, the Hunger Winter, but I did not know the whole story.
More than 28,000 Dutch railway workers had joined the ranks of the onderduikers after 17 September when the Dutch government in exile urged a strike. By 1 October, members of the Dutch Resistance were alerting London to the impending disaster of a Netherlands without the food that could be carried only by train. The answer received from London to these Resistance warnings: “Military interests demand that the strike goes on - till the day the enemy leaves the country.”
War is brutal.
And what did the Germans do when they were in retreat?
Everything that could be stolen… was stolen… and taken to Germany.
But the Germans were not the only problem.
… the risk that the Dutch SS in zwartjasse, the dreaded black coats, would confiscate the food…
To the west in The Hague, food had run out… The farther west one went, the worse the situation grew. Hunger had the Netherlands by the throat. And winter lay ahead.
And Opa and Oma and their three daughters, and my father's family, lived in the west. How did they and the others survive? One of the bits of information that I picked up over the years, confirmed in Dutch Girl, was that by the end of the war there were no dogs or cats left in Holland.
Perhaps like never before, the traditional arrival of Sinterklass bore special meaning on 5 December 1944… The uniquely Dutch secular celebration of Sint-Nicolass Eve preceded a 6 December feast…
I remember my time as a little Dutch boy growing up in Canada but they are not fond memories. I wanted to be a Canadian boy growing up in Canada and Dutch customs and traditions were foreign to me. In my earliest memories is an awareness that my parents were Dutch but I was Canadian.
In December, 1944 a new development brought a new sight, a new sound and a new terror to Holland. The Germans had a new weapon, the V2, jet engine powered rockets carrying a one-ton warhead. And the Germans were mass producing and launching the V1 which sometimes crash landed off target. But I know nothing about the experience of my parents. There was never any indication during my boyhood in Canada that they had been terrorized, no evidence of PTSD, and for that I am grateful.
The book reveals that potatoes were gone and the starving Dutch were eating sugar beets, which they hated. This triggered a distant memory that my father too had eaten sugar beets. I do not know if this was true. What I do remember much more distinctly is being told by my parents that as children we did not appreciate how good we had it. This I resented hearing but I was given no understanding of what they had experienced.
Ever dignified, Audrey would not repeat stories of the darkest family times when it was likely there were outbursts of temper and an intense desire to suffer alone… Volunteers in one study said, “It was their minds and souls that changed more than anything else.” They snapped at others close by, hoarded possessions, and suffered extreme bouts of depression.
A report sent from the Resistance to the Allies in London stated, “As long as hunger and cold rule, those who are in need will follow the law of life, i.e. the urge to stay alive and try to defeat every obstacle in the way. This has to be done by means which are in conflict with normal standards of morality.”
I am relieved that Mom had conditions better than most during the war. I don’t know about my father. But he never seemed to me to be someone who was hiding deep, dark secrets of doing wrong in order to survive.
… on 13 April… came a report on Radio Oranje that the president in America, Franklin Roosevelt, had suffered a stroke and might be dead. The people of Holland had always considered Roosevelt one of their own because of his Dutch blood.
Growing up, I was given no understanding of history of any kind and have no memory of FDR ever being mentioned in our home. Now I feel great gratitude for the vital contribution of FDR towards an Allied victory in WWII. I cannot imagine what the life of my parents would have been like had Germany won.
The life of Ella after the war was of great interest to me.
Finally, on 25 June 1948, Ella was called in to testify under oath, and gave a lengthy statement defending herself against several serious accusations that had been presented to the police through sworn statements and also in writing. She admitted to National Socialist activities from 1934 to 1936…
Opa Stokdijk was arrested after the war and jailed for five days. He remained a socialist, to the best of my knowledge. But I know very little of his story and I do not remember whether I learned this from Mom or Nikki. And I feel no shame or embarrassment but my mother's feelings are understandable. However, in my view, it was psychologically unhealthy to keep all this a family secret.
Apparently Opa Stokdijk was let off easy because there was no doubt where his sons stood. Were any of them part of the Dutch Resistance? It would not surprise me if my father, at the very least, aided the Dutch Resistance. Perhaps there are secrets that he never shared with anyone, not even his wife. I will never know.
The Hunger Winter survivor continued her on-again, off-again love affair with food.
Unlike Audrey Hepburn, there was nothing problematic with the relationship my parents had with food.
The war, however, had a way of jumping out of the shadows at the most unexpected moments and oppressing Audrey Hepburn.
I never observed any such behavior in our family. But, after 2008, I realized that I have no memory of Pa ever saying anything about Opa Stokdijk. Well, he did say something once. I remember a comment that whatever success Opa Stokdijk achieved resulted from the very capable efforts of his sons, not his own skills. In contrast, Pa talked about his mother in glowing terms, a strong, capable, quiet woman.
For all that she would become, Academy Award-winning actress… the war years remained all too close… The faces of Jews in cattle cars, adults and children, haunted her… “When my mother wanted to teach us a lesson about life,” said Luca Dotti, “she never used stories about her career. She always told stories about the war. The war was very, very important to her. It made us who she was.”
In 1954 my father moved our family to Canada and he started a new life. Other than a Dutch religion and some customs and traditions imposed on me, I had no connection with my past. I learned about WWII at school. But I learned a lot from this book which I appreciate. And there are other books which I have read and reviewed, as listed below, which add to the picture that I have been able to build.
I sometimes wonder if any of the Stokdijk family living in Holland have more information about Opa Stokdijk. But I have not put much effort into finding out. Stokdijk is not a common name in Holland and I may try to make some contacts through facebook.
Below are links to other reviews I have written about other books I have read which shed light on WWII.
One Step Ahead - a child's story of daring and bravery during the Holocaust by Jack Prins
I knew immediately that I wanted to read this book because of how the story connects to my own life. My parents lived near Rotterdam during WWII and moved to Canada in 1954. As a boy growing up in Nova Scotia, I almost never heard stories about their lives in the old country during those dark years. Only as an adult did I gain enough knowledge to awaken a desire in me to delve into their story. Jack’s book was helpful in filling that void at least a little bit.
No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin
No Ordinary Time captures the complexity of the time and the complexity of the man, Roosevelt, and tells a very personal story. Sometimes books are inappropriately simplistic but Goodwin does not make that mistake. The result is a lengthy book but I never felt that any of the contents were unnecessary and the material was always easy to read.
Nikki read my book report and added some interesting comments.
You wrote that you don’t think Mom and Dad had any issues with food here. I think they did, especially Mom. I remember how we were always told to eat everything on our plates and if we didn’t, Mom would finish off whatever was left on our plates after finishing her own dinner. To this day she seldom leaves anything on her plate. When she first went to Wynn Park she would tell me how much food was being wasted because the residents couldn’t finish all of their meals. She herself has asked for smaller portions but that is hit or miss depending on who is on duty in the kitchen. She gets around the problem by skipping supper and just going for evening snack but she has on occasion left some on her plate because it’s just too much. Her afternoon cookies that come with tea she saves for me to take home, of course, now I can’t get in so there may be a Rubbermaid container full. It was her little sewing box for her crocheting projects.
I read quite a while ago in the Chronicle Herald that war veterans enjoy doing jigsaw puzzles and it was noted that it was especially good for those experiencing PTSD.
Made me wonder if that’s why Mom enjoys it so much. She had cut that article out, I found it on the table one day, might still have it somewhere.
For your interest, I did the same thing Audrey’s mother did. You remember in high school I wanted to go to church with those Catholic kids who lived just past Seymour Yuill’s? I think I went once. Can’t remember their names now, Carol and her twin brother and a younger sister. When I moved to Halifax, I always went to the Catholic Church, the family I boarded with were Catholic, I remember Pa came to check them out. He didn’t like the pope hanging on the wall but everything else about them passed the test. And I married a Catholic but I was a much better Catholic than Robert was. Our children were all baptized in the Catholic Church. I think that was my teenage rebellion. I still don’t care for the Calvinistic beliefs, they don’t make sense to me.