An Interview with my Grandmother (By Proxy)
“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”
— Charles R. Swindoll
As you may have read by now, my interview is not like most others. I was not the one to personally conduct this interview. My father was, about two years before I was even born. However, because of this, I am now able to hear my Oma (the Dutch word for grandmother) speak to me and tell me her life story from beyond the grave. The interview was several hours long, so I learned boatloads of new information about my family. This interview has given me a new perspective on my relatives and on history. It truly was an incredible experience to sit and listen to her talk with her lovely voice, and it was a labor of love to transcribe it and clean it up.
I think it is so important for humans to gain as much perspective as possible. Perspective allows us to think of the actions of ourselves and others in more complex ways. With perspective, we start to understand other people’s emotions and motivations. We see how different events from the past shaped our world, and we can see how future events might affect it. This interview offered me a brand new perspective, one of a woman who was only in her 20’s while the horrors of WWII played out. It was incredible to hear how different things were back then, but also enlightening and a little frightening to realize that a lot of things haven’t really changed that much.
One thing that really fascinated me was hearing all the times where if things had played out just a little differently, my family as I know it would not exist. The professor who set off a chain of events leading to Jenny enlisting, the luck of never being near a bomb during an air raid, the boyfriends who didn’t make the cut, etc. It really lead to me gaining a greater understanding of how my family came to be.
The only thing that I wish I could change about the interview is I wish I could have been there in person. Maybe in another life. For now, I will take it for all that it is worth and I hope that her story may enrich other people’s lives as well. Perhaps someday one of my descendants will come along asking me for an interview… If that’s the case, my only hope is that my life will have been fulfilling and interesting enough to talk about.
Some information to know about the interview
To make the interview easier to read and to ease the burden of trying to find something specifically, I have broken it up into eight different sections.
Family Background and Early Childhood in Eindhoven
Growing up in Berlin
Adolescence in America
University and Beyond
Making Her Way Back to Europe
Assisting in Holland
The End of the War and What Came After
Meeting Her Husband
There are a fair amount of names given in this interview and they can be easy to confuse. I will list the most important names here for you to refer back to.
Jenny de Vries: My grandmother, and the one being interviewed. Her Maiden name was Broekman
David de Vries: My father, the one doing the interview
Annie Goedhardt Broekman: Jenny’s mother
Anton Broekman: Jenny’s father
Meyer Goedhardt: Jenny’s grandfather, Annie’s father
Bertha Goedhardt: Jenny’s step-grandmother
Bella: Jenny’s aunt, Annie’s sister
Willie: Jenny’s cousin, Bella’s son
Matti: Jenny’s cousin, Bella’s son
Saar Broekman: Jenny’s aunt, Anton’s sister
Jaap: Jenny’s cousin, Saar’s son
Tox: Jenny’s best friend
Willem: Jenny’s eventual husband
The names Oma and Opa are thrown around a lot. They mean grandmother and grandfather, respectively. Most times, when Jenny uses them, she is not referring to her own grandparents, but instead to my father’s grandparents, her parents.
Tante means aunt.
Family Background and Early Childhood in Eindhoven
[David de Vries] Okay, let’s go back as far as we can. What were your grandparents named? On your mother’s side?
[Jenny de Vries]My grandmother was Jenny Goedhardt. I never knew her. She died when my mother was 13. My grandfather remarried when both his daughters got married or were engaged to be married to a woman called Bertha, who was a cousin of my real grandmother, and that was the only grandmother on mother’s side that I knew. And I never knew until I was about… I think about nine years old that she was not my real grandmother. We had a picture in the dining room of this older woman who was always called Oma Jenny. And I think by the time I was eight or nine- I can’t remember exactly how old- I started getting curious about who Oma Jenny was. And I asked my mother and she said, “Now since you asked, I will let you know that she was my mother and that your Oma in Hengelo is your step grandmother.” And I said, “well, why didn’t you ever tell me that?” And she said, “well, there were all these fairy tales about bad stepmothers and I didn’t want you to think of your grandmother in that way. And so I waited until you were old enough to ask.” As my mother said, she was very fond of the grandchildren. She was married to my grandfather when all of his grandchildren were born. This was the only grandmother we ever knew and I barely knew about Oma Jenny.
[DdV] What did Meyer (the grandfather) do?
[JdV] Well, I’m not quite sure. I think he had a sort of a wholesale business… and he traveled quite a bit for that and it was a very thriving business. Buttons and laces and trimmings and that sort of thing that he would sell to retail stores. He also owned the movie house. It showed silent movies that he had bought. He was quite a well-to-do man until he invested in a factory; a lace factory. Actually he was going to invest with a couple of other people and they backed out at the last minute or something happened there. There was a family feud, I don’t know exactly what. And so he started this factory on his own knowing very little about it and lost most of his money in that factory because lace trims and you know, embroidery and that sort of thing went out of style. That was part of it. People weren’t using it anymore. I can remember that my mother had, in her linen closet oh, it must’ve been half a dozen or a dozen cotton petticoats with this eye lid embroidery trim at the bottom. So that was part of her dowery and never worn because dresses got short and they were out of fashion and the factory really didn’t go very well. And then I think in the crash, he lost his money. But Oma was brought up in a household that was really quite well to do. They had a big house. After they moved out, it was bought by a physician who used it both as residence and office space. There was a bakery and when you turned that corner, you’ve got this wonderful smell of baked goods and bread baking. That whole corner was bombed away during the war. I remember when I came to Hengelo during the war still and I saw that corner. My heart just sank because I thought, oh God, there’s just nothing there.
[DdV] So were you a religious family?
[JdV] No, except Oma Jenny was and as long as she lived, there was a kosher household. That ended the minute she died. That was the end of it. Bertha, I guess was not religious. I don’t know, she didn’t mind, but… She came in a number of years after Oma Jenny died and Opa abandoned that immediately. Oma told me that Opa would say never he was as hungry and food never tasted as good as on Yom Kippur. He wouldn’t really flaunt his irreligiosity but nonetheless he married another Jew. Yeah. And another German. He was very pro German. He was a great Germanophile. But of course they lived so close to that border. I think they were the only Jewish family in town. And so he sold the synagogue. They had no need for it. They were the only family so they sold it. Your Opa, My father- Anton- was a great favorite of his grandfather, I guess because he was his name sake. He took him regularly to the synagogue. He went every Saturday with this grandfather.
[DdV] Oh now wait, I thought that he was irreligious?
[JdV] Your grandfather was irreligious, but my grandfather was not. Opa Prince died just before my father was 13, the age of the bar mitzvah. My grandfather, who was very liberal, a very broadminded man, said if you want to, you know, have a bar mitzvah, you can. At this time, there was school held on Saturday. He never went to school on Saturday because he always went with his grandfather to the synagogue. His father said to him, “now you continue going to go to the synagogue on Saturday and will be bar mitzvah’d if you want to, but if you don’t continue going to the synagogue, you’re going to go to school on Saturday. Like everybody else. You’re not going to get a day off.” At which point your grandfather, My father said I don’t want to go to the synagogue anymore and I don’t want to be bar Mitzvah’d. So he was never bar Mitzvah’d. So he went to school on Saturdays and I don’t think ever darkened the door of a synagogue again.
[DdV] Huh? Why do you think that was?
[JdV] I don’t know. I would say my father was anti religious or anticlerical. He did not like organized religion. And it may be partly because they were sort of looked at askance (his family) by the Jewish community for letting a gentile marry into the family.
[DdV] So tell me more about your father, Anton.
[JdV] He was a cut up and class clown sort of. I think he also was very short until he was about 16. after he grew, they didn’t make pants long enough for him that would stay on his waist. So he got teased quite a bit. I don’t know how many inches, but he grew almost to his full height. And he was five ten or five eleven. He grew so fast that he lost all of his fat. They fed him steak every day in order to try and fatten him up and everybody was jealous because he got steak and they didn’t and he couldn’t look at another steak. To him it was punishment because, you know, he’d had enough of it, but he was unusually skinny and in fact I have some pictures of him as a young man. And he was, you know, he looked consumptive. He wasn’t, but he looked consumptive, he was just an extremely skinny young man. When Opa graduated high school, there was conscription in the Netherlands at the time and he was drafted into the army. This was in 1913. And he did his year service. And then war broke out in 1914 and they mobilized the troops and it meant that he couldn’t get out after his year. So he decided, if he had to serve, he would go into officer’s training. So he went into officer’s training and he was stationed after he got through, I think first up in the north and then he got stationed in Hengelo and I think his father knew my mother’s father through business. And when Opa was stationed in Hengelo, I think my grandfather, as I heard the story, went up there and talked to my other grandfather and said, his son was stationed there. And that’s how they (my mother and father) met. He was in the army and he started calling on my mother. He had heard about her. And he was 21 and she was 19 at the time and they fell in love, and they wanted to get engaged. And my opa in Hengelo was very much opposed to this.
[DdV] Why? Why was that? If he knew opa’s father…?
[JdV] Yes, but he thought he was a little beneath him socially. Furthermore, here was this consumptive looking young man, still very skinny, very skinny, 21, had never done anything except go to school and be in the army. He did not think this was somebody who would provide properly for his daughter, and so he tried to break up the engagement. And my mother ran away from home, stole out one night with her suitcase, took the train and went to the Hague to… No, first she went to Leden. I guess he was still living in Leden at the time. And she got a job as a temporary mother’s helper. This was an agency that would help families where, say, the wife was sick or something. She knew nothing, next to nothing about cooking or housework because her sister never let her in on anything. They always had a housekeeper and a maid. And then after Oma Jenny died, I think Bella was at that time 19, so she took over as housekeeper there. So she knew nothing about it. It wasn’t really a job for her. But I think she had a couple of these jobs and then- I don’t know exactly when the family moved to The Hague- she moved with them and she got a job as a telephone operator with a, with a government agency, a temporary sort of wartime agency. I think it was called the crisis center and there were about three or four operators who were really receptionists and while they weren’t receptionist in the sense that, that they were out in public, they would answer the phones and connect them through. And she enjoyed that job very much. I think they were either three or four young women there and they became good friends and they had a nice time.
[DdV] So, she (Jenny’s mother) had gone off on her own. Did she have any communications with her father after that?
[JdV] I think very little. She’d gotten engaged. She had not gotten married, but she was living with her future in laws. And that’s why she and opa’s sister’s side of the family became such very good friends. They were much more than just ordinary sister in law’s. So Opa’s parents took this girl in. And of course one of the reasons that she could do this was it she had trained for a job. It gave her some independence. She knew she could earn her living, which not every young girl of good family in 1914 was able to do.
[DdV] But then I assume that Opa’s parents must’ve liked her a great deal.
[JdV] Oh yes. Oh yes. And, my oma really became a second mother to a young woman who had not really known her mother all that well.
[DdV] So your father… had he started working for Philips at this point?
[JdV] No. He actually fell in love with movies and cinema… he decided that he might want to become an actor. He did not have a steady job at this point. He had been engaged to my mother for five years now, living together and such, and they didn’t want to wait any longer to get married. But she said that she wouldn’t marry him if he became and actor, so that put an end to that really quickly. That’s when he found a position for a clerical job at Philips. He couldn’t type, but he somehow got the job. They got married. They moved to Einthoven. And so he started off small, but he obviously must have impressed a number of people. He started off in the office. But this was a new company at the time. They made electric light bulbs. That was what they started with. And people who started in there who were any good all moved up very quickly. Opa used to say, you sort of had to bend your head down, put your arm up, or they’d given you another raise as you crossed the courtyard. It was just one of these spaces where people just made very rapid advancement. One of his best friends later became an executive vice president of the company. He used to stop in at their house. Oma and Opa were always short of money on the 15th of the month. They would borrow some money from him, pay it back on the first of the month and then on the 15th of the month borrow again, it just kept going back and forth like that. There was a great housing shortage because Einthoven was a tiny village before Philips came there. I remember in school, most of the other children there were Philips children. I remember one day they wanted to know what my middle name was. I said I don’t have a middle name. “Well, what’s your Saint’s name?” I didn’t have a Saints name. They just couldn’t understand. I ran into the house. I felt so deprived. All of these children had at least three names and I only had one name. I remember some days they would talk about “our dear Lord,” and I went home to my mother and asked, “Who’s that?” I had no idea, no religious background. I went and saw all the pretty things in the church, but I had no idea. I don’t think the word God or Lord had ever been mentioned in our house.
Growing up in Berlin
[DdV] Any parting shots on Eindhoven? What was the next major move in your life?
[JdV] Oh, I was very happy in Eindhoven. I was just six years old when we left. I just remember it as a very happy time. My life changed dramatically when we left for Germany, which must’ve been around June or July of 1927. I think the first thing we did was to go on vacation because Opa had been there for a little while. We were living right in the center of Berlin, and it was a hot summer and Oma would drag me around. We have to go looking for houses or something to rent. Well this was in 27, it was just the end of the German inflation. There was a kind of a housing shortage. And as foreigners, the only thing that we were allowed to rent, were really very high priced places. Oma did not want to live in an apartment. And then we looked further out in places. I just remember that as a miserable summer, getting dragged around Berlin having to look for houses. And I think what was the finally the deal was that Opa had talked to the Philips office in Eindhoven and said, “Look, we can’t find any place to live, and the places that we can find, we can’t afford. Philips decided that if we could find a house for sale, they would buy the house and rent it to Opa. So there was a house in Schlafmanzee that was still under construction. Philips bought the house and we were the first people to move into it. So there I was ready to go to first grade, but I didn’t speak any German. And Oma and Opa sent me to a kindergarten where I picked up German very quickly. Oma got the first grade teacher at the school to tutor me after she got through with her work day to teach me what one learns in first grade so that by the time that April rolled around, I would be ready to go into second grade. So I never went to first grade.
[DdV] So you never really learned to read and write Dutch?
[JdV] No. I taught myself to read Dutch. We used to get a Dutch newspaper delivered to us every day and it had a little strip in it, a mickey mouse strip, and I wanted to read that strip it had. I started reading it and of course, reading it out loud, making some mistakes. I would be corrected and after a while, I was able to read Dutch. My grandparents, both grandparents always sent me Dutch books for Christmas and for birthdays. So I had a good selection of dutch children’s books that I read and I just taught myself. But I never did learn to spell it. And the spelling at that time was extremely complicated in Dutch. It was not at all phonetic. They’ve tried to get it more phonetic through the years. Later on we had a maid, Martha, whom I remember with a great deal of pleasure who was originally from Poland. She was very bright and picked up our Dutch quickly. I used to sit in the kitchen and read to her my Dutch books. She went everywhere with us. She would’ve come along to America if that had been possible. But at that point the German immigration quota was full and I couldn’t bring her along. I was very fond of Martha.
[DdV] So what was school like?
[JdV] I started in second grade and in Germany they had this system where it was four years of elementary school and you had the same teacher going through. But unfortunately for the first year. I still had the teacher who tutored me and I liked her very much. I can’t remember her name, but I liked her some reason or other. She left after that. And then we got a new teacher and I didn’t like him at all. And he didn’t like foreigners. He may also have been antisemitic, but the fact that I was a foreigner was enough. No matter what I did… I remember I really was very good in German, not brilliant in arithmetic, but very good in German. I had this thing for languages- I could not get an A, which was a one in Germany. Sometimes he would ask a question. I’d be the only one who raised my hand. He would say, “oh, nobody knows the answer?” Well, Oma started to notice that I wasn’t doing any homework. And she said, “well, don’t you have any homework?” I said, “oh, well, I never get called on anyway, so why should I do it?” And I think she went to school, complained. And the reason why I couldn’t get a one in German was that, according to him, no foreigner could get a one in German. He got into a railroad accident. Only broke a leg or something. But we had a substitute teacher whom I adored. So I was so sorry when he recovered and came back. But he was a lot nicer to me after he came back. And I think it was partly because Opa arranged to have Philips donate a radio set to the school. Anyways, we had a car and the chauffeur belonged to the firm. It was a big buick with the fold down seats in the back, that kind of thing. It was a company car, but Opa had complete use of it.
[DdV] So you guys were living pretty luxuriously?
[JdV] Yes, we definitely enjoyed our time in Berlin. I had many friends in the public schools there. I also saw some of my first theater there. Oma and Opa were always out to the theater. They saw every new show that came around. It was a very vibrant time. I think the first thing I ever saw was a children’s performance of Dr Doolittle. But first grown up show I ever saw was a musical called White Horse Inn. Very popular. Big Stage. Lots of nice songs in it. And I just loved it. Martha took me. I was always begging Oma to take me to the museums. Oma always said you’re not old enough yet. Oma didn’t want to go to the museums. She was not particularly interested in art. “When you’re older, you won’t appreciate it yet,” which is of course is the wrong thing to do when a child begs you. I really wanted to go to those museums. I had no idea what was in them, but I really wanted to go.
[DdV] So what do you remember of the political climate there? Do you have any vague recollections?,
[JdV] I can remember that the last year that we were there we were, we were always kidding- the Germans voted on Sunday so that everybody could get to the polls except those who worked on a Sunday, but they could get there sometime- that almost every other Sunday there was an election. But, you know, I’m not quite that often, but it seemed like that. And people really started kidding about that. I noticed very little but when I went to school, there were students who came in from Charlottenburg (more the city than the suburbs) who would talk about, “there was another street fight last night.” You know, they didn’t dare go out at night because the communists and the Nazis were fighting each other. Then an edict came out that people were not supposed to wear political pins in school because it was too inflammatory. So it was mainly the communists versus the Nazis. Most of the intelligentsia didn’t really take the Nazis terribly seriously. In fact, I know there were relatives. Oma had lots of relatives in Berlin. I remember Oma Jenny was German and she had a lot of those cousins living in Berlin, one of whom was a good friend of hers. And the others were people that we visited once a year. And then all the other cousins were there, they were quite well to do. And they would say, oh, just let him get in. And in three months he’ll be out. That he’s an Ignoramus. Or, “Oh, he’s saying these things, but he doesn’t mean it seriously.”
[DdV] They were, speaking of Hitler?
[JdV] Yeah. They just didn’t see what was coming and they didn’t think that what he wrote in Mein Kampf he really meant, you know, about the extermination of the Jews and all this other stuff. They just didn’t take him seriously. They thought, well, you know, this is just propaganda. And once he’s in…
[DdV] Do you think that the utter humiliation that Germany suffered at Versailles created a desire for a scape goat? They wanted somebody to pound on?
[JdV] Yeah, definitely. That had a lot to do with it. Then the inflation… Then when they were just getting out of the inflation period and things were getting better came the worldwide depression, which hit (The United States) in 1929 and hit the rest of the world in about 1930, there was a tremendous amount of unemployment. There was this desire for a strong leader. Because the Weimar government was set up institutionally to be very weak. The real weakness is that every party- I forgotten how many parties there were in parliament in the Reichstag because anybody who got a vote got in. The post World War Two constitution of Germany says you have to have at least five percent of the vote to get in. Which makes people much less liable to vote for splinter parties, extremists, because it’s, it’s a vote that’s just thrown away because they know they won’t get to the five percent. So they’ll come to two others. And then that has been, I think, one of the reasons that the president German government is so much more stable than the Weimar republic ones. It maintains a kind of a centrist view.
[DdV] What about your parents, how did they view the situation?
[JdV] Oma didn’t want to see it for what it really was. She was in her element in Berlin. She really was. This was a young woman who had been born in a small town in Holland where things were very restricted. What you could do, where you could go, you know, that sort of thing. She rebelled against that then ended up in another small town. Eindhoven at that time, really was still a very small town. She really found herself in Berlin. When she came to Berlin with the dancing and the good dressmakers and, and a theater- she loved the theater. She had a good household. Employees with whom she could leave me. She had a ball, she really had a ball. It was just a wonderful time. So she wanted to believe that everything would stay the way it was. Whereas Opa really saw what was really going on. I think I overheard that Opa had always kept the car filled with gas in case they would have to flee across the border. He had his suspicions and he had talked about it in Eindhoven where they wouldn’t believe him. The greatest part of my awareness politically came from Martha. She had a sister, an older sister, who was a member of the Communist Party and had in one of the later election’s been elected a member of the Reichstag for the Communist Party. So Marta was always very aware of the election, watching the election results. She always voted social democratic. But it made me aware, because we, I spent most of my time with my dad as did she. She must have been frightened of the Nazis as well. I mean, because the communists were their main enemies. She was very interested that they did not get power. During that time that when, all this propaganda against the Jews came out, I once asked my father what does it mean to be Jewish and am I Jewish because I had no traditions or religion or anything.
[DdV] So your family didn’t celebrate anything?
[JdV] We celebrated Christmas, not religiously, but with a Christmas tree and all that sort of thing. I knew nothing and the only thing I knew was, and this was of course extremely wrong, being poor or lower class meant being Catholic. There were no Catholics that were wealthy. I later realized that one of my father’s best friends from his first days at Philips who became one of the vice presidents of Phillips was Catholic, but he didn’t flaunt it in the way. There were the little girls who taunted me because I only had one name, so I got this peculiar idea of the Catholics.
[DdV] You guys did eventually leave Berlin? When was that?
[JdV] In January of ’33 we left, the furniture was moved out. We moved out and it was shortly after that when Hitler came into power. We left just before, and I can remember my mother crying the whole way. I think we, I think we went through Cologne and I think we spent the night there. I do remember my mother’s sniffling the whole way. I remember passing by these advertisements, posters on walls and on street corners saying things like “don’t buy your groceries from Jews, avoid them like the pests they are.” My father pointing to those to my mother and saying, “that’s what you’re leaving, stop your crying.” That was our farewell to Germany. So then we got to Belgium. I was enrolled in the German school in Belgium. They had given me some French lessons but I didn’t know enough French to go to a French school. I didn’t know how to write Dutch, so they couldn’t send me to the Dutch school. They decided to send me to the German school there. Still, half the lessons there were in French. I didn’t like that at the time. They did arithmetic in French, which was another hurdle. Arithmetic was not my best subject and then to do it in French… Well then Opa got offered a job in the United States. Phllips and never been in the United States. And this was only half a year after we had been in. Belgium. Well, he had to start up a new company there. They had a contract with GE and Westinghouse. They would not market light bulbs or radios, which were the two big things in the United States, GE and Westinghouse would not market them in the European market. They, of course had competition in the European market from some of the telefunken and Siemens and so forth. But they had started an x ray division and in fact had an invention that they called the egg, which was a portable x ray machine and one of the Phillips scientists had developed that. And Philips had the patent on it. Well, x rays were not included. So they decided that they would start up an x ray company to get their foot in the door in the United States. And opa was chosen to do that. Quite an honor. He was going to go to an English speaking country. He was in seventh heaven. Furthermore, he had two brothers in the United States. Oma was already very happy. Anything had to be better than Belgium. By this time I’d forgotten all the English I had ever learned in, you know, a year of school in Germany because I’d had to learn French and I had to start Latin in that school. So I knew no English. Oma knew very little English. Oma said she had to have new dresses to go to the United States. Nobody in Belgium couldn’t make them. Opa said go, you go to Berlin, you get yourself a new dress. And she did. And so she was there for about 10 days, I think.
[DdV] And this was in ‘33?
[JdV] Yes. Hitler was in, the Reichstag had already burned. She came back completely cured. I think that this was one of the best things Opa ever did was to say, you go back. She said it was a different town than when we had left in in January. And this was May I think, and the changes were just like that. People were afraid to talk. There was fear in the whole city and it wasn’t what it had been. The Berlin, she loved was no longer.
[DdV] What happened to all of her cousins. I mean, do we, do we have any idea? Did they survive?
[JdV] A lot of them immigrated to the United States. Many of them had money and they got out. I believe some of them didn’t however. Obviously, we wouldn’t have had any more contact with them if they didn’t, so I don’t know any names. Anyway, I got an evening dress, I remember that. My first flight, we flew from Amsterdam to London because we were taking an Ocean liner, the Aquitania. We had to get to Southampton. It was quite exciting.
Adolescence in America
[DdV] How did you adjust going to English after having been speaking Dutch, German and French?
[JdV] Well, Opa decided the way we would learn English the fastest is to go to movies. And the movies were air conditioned. So every day we went to the movies and we started out with Radio City Music Hall and I think that if you went in before 1:00, it cost forty five cents or something. You’ve got that whole big stage show and the movie. That was very entertaining.
[DdV] So where did you go once you got to America?
[JdV] We spent the first bit in New York, but then we moved to Chicago. There was a boarding school there that I was sent to. This was not a happy time in my life. I was not able to speak the language well at this time, so I had a hard time in classes. I was also not able to communicate well with anyone. I could not seem to get it through anyone’s head that I was allergic to milk. European children never drank milk, that was a very American thing, so I never developed a tolerance for lactose. Any time they would give it to me, I would break out in hives. They would try and treat them by scrubbing me down, it was just awful. The saving grace I had was my babysitter/tutor, Dorothy. My parents hired this young woman who had just graduated from the Chicago Art Institute and remember, this is ’33, the depths of the depression. She didn’t have a job, but she had a car. She lived on south side Chicago and would come in everyday and tutor me in English and some history and she would talk to me and take me places. She, I think, was the person who really awakened my interest in art. Remember, I told you I had always wanted to go to a museum in Berlin and Oma said I was too young. Well, Dorothy took me to the art institute. I just fell in love with the arts. She’d take me to the world’s fair and she took me to the Museum of Science and Industry and took me to a football game at the University of Chicago. Well, I was expecting what I new as Football because my father used to take me football games when we were living in Eindhoven. At one time he was the manager of the Philips team. Well this was before the Philips team was such a big team, but he was the manager and he would travel with them and he would take me sometimes out to the football field So that what I was expecting and there I saw all these people milling around, bumping into each other and I didn’t know what was going on. And I said to Dorothy, “when are they going to start?” She said they had been playing for a while. That was my introduction to American football, which I then realized wasn’t like Dutch football, which was called soccer here.
[DdV] So you were in Chicago for the summer because of…?
[JdV] The big AMA convention… Because it was a world’s fair there. And they were going to have their first exhibit of the Dutch x ray machines and things. And so by the time September came around, we moved back to New York. My English was getting better all the time. It was still not perfect, but I could understand and make myself understood. Because I was learning it at a young age, and also because I was hearing it mostly from my friends and from movies, I never developed an accent. I did alright in school, but I never excelled. The class that I did do very well in was German, naturally. My parents, I think, took just as long as me to adjust. They were very disappointed in the American theater when they got here. What the objection was, was the star system. I think they went to see “Wilderness,” which I think was a new play at that time. The lead was wonderful, but the small parts were terrible. Everybody else was just really kind of substandard. And they were used to the Reinhart productions where he had a production company. Every little roll was perfect. And they were just terribly disappointed in it because they were used to having every part filled by somebody who might be the star in the next show, but who had a minor part in, in this one. But the American star system, they didn’t like. I think it’s gotten better. I think the American theater has gotten better and I think this is one of those things where the regional theater is really great because you don’t have the stars. You get much better acting. But that was a great disappointment to them. They still went to the theater, but not the way they had before.
[DdV] What about you?
[JdV] I would go by myself into New York, take the train and go to a matinee on Saturdays. Anything Catherine Cornell was in, I would go and see. I loved her Romeo and Juliet. Basil Rathbone was in that.
[DdV] So Opa would take the train in everyday?
[JdV] Yes. He would take the train. Oma was trying to get her driver’s license and she had been taking driver’s lessons. She flunked the driver’s test a couple of times and they told her you need to hand a 10 dollar bill in with your test. She was very much against that, she was mortified at the thought of buying a civil servant.
University and Beyond
[DdV] (New tape) Okay, we’re back on June six, 1996 and we last left off at your graduation from high school. So why don’t you start basically with what happened after high school?
[JdV] Well, at that time, there were some big changes going to be made at Philips. Philips was going to downsize the American operation and that meant downsizing your Opa. And they had offered him a job back in Einthoven, but Opa didn’t want to go back. And he said, I’m in America and I want to stay in America. He also told them that there was going to be a war and they said, oh, nonsense. They wouldn’t listen. He said it was very foolish of them to downsize in America. But they didn’t listen to us. He was right, but they didn’t listen. And so he left Phillips. I think they made him a fairly generous severance package. And he also took his money out of his pension fund and transferred it into dollars because he wasn’t going to leave any money in Europe because he didn’t think there was going to be any Europe left. He was positive that there was going to be a war and he didn’t know what would happen to the money. And so he took any insurance, anything that he had in Europe and transferred it here. Meanwhile, I had always thought I wanted to be a doctor and. I wasn’t quite sure whether I wanted to be a psychiatrist or a pediatrician. But I wanted to be a doctor and the only college I applied to not knowing anything about colleges at that time was Cornell. I said I wanted to be premed and I didn’t get admitted.
[DdV] And do you think that that was because of your sex?
[JdV] Partly. I think because I had applied for premed- they didn’t approve of women in medicine while also my grades weren’t all that great in high school; and what happened was that there were some nasty person up in Albany who reviewed our latin 4 exams because we really did have a very poor teacher and marked them all down considerably, which really took my grade point average down. So with Opa going to be changing jobs and not knowing just what he was going to do I said, I’ll go to secretarial school. And I did for about a month in new Rochelle. I commuted up and down. Took typing and took some shorthand and was very poor at both. I met a young woman there who had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin, but she lived in New Rochelle and she was taking some typing in order to get a job, you know, that was still the time, “but can she type?” And she said to me, why don’t you apply to University of Wisconsin, you’re sure to get in. And so I went home and we talked it over and decided that I was going to go to the University of Wisconsin, which I did. And got in. And so in September I set off by myself to Wisconsin just on this woman’s recommendation. I went all by myself. I didn’t have a room. It really was something because, you know, here I was 17 years old, just barely 17 years old and doing this. But, you know, I had insisted, no, I didn’t want my parents to drive me out there or anything else. And of course the only way to go that time was by train. It was a long trip. Anyway, I enrolled at the University of Wisconsin and since I wanted premed, although I had by that time really decided I wasn’t going to go into premed because that would be too big a burden on the family to put me through medical school to. And Opa had always been very discouraging because he worked in the x ray field. He sold x ray machines and went to all medical conventions and every time he asked a doctor, “my daughter wants to be a doctor” and they would discourage it terribly. One of them said, “let her get a pair of pants,” you know, this sort of thing. That was the way it was at that time. And so I decided I would go into medical research. So I had declared that I would go to be a chemistry major. Well, disaster struck the very first semester in chemistry. Also the advisor there tried to talk me out of it. I ran up a lab bill for breakage that was unreal, unheard of in the history of the University of Wisconsin. I was a real butterfingers. Kept dropping test tubes and I finally also decided that I sort of had reached my end in math and didn’t want to take all that math I had to take with chemistry. Furthermore, I decided that what I really had wanted in medicine was the contact with people, and working in a laboratory wasn’t my thing. And so after a semester I dropped the chemistry and I floundered. I took some speech courses because I was very interested in the theater. And I was taking French on the recommendation. I’m a great one for going on recommendations. One of the clubs that I joined was the international club and there was a young woman there who was an undergraduate but a few years ahead of me and I think she was of German parentage, she wasn’t American. She had been born here. But she said to me one time, “You know German.” She said “You could get out of these freshman courses if you took a German language exam and they would place you out of the language courses and you could get into a literature course and you get into something much more interesting than the regular freshman courses.” So I took her advice and I took the language exam and I passed and even though I hadn’t used the language in years, and I got into a survey of German literature class; had a very good professor and enjoyed it tremendously. I suddenly decided that here I knew the language, but I was too young to have known any of its literature when we left. And then I might as well know something about the literature. So I really enjoyed that course and I think I was going to take some more. Well, anyway, my sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin, I just felt out of it by that time.
[DdV] You weren’t feeling like taking the classes?
[JdV] This was in 39. I graduated high school in 39. The war in Europe had broken out. I was worried about my relatives in Holland and here I was in isolation in the middle West where nobody could have cared less about what was going on Europe. They just didn’t care. This was, you know, they were in the middle of the United States. Nice and safe. They weren’t even on the coast. Most of them had broken all ties with the old country. I had nobody to talk to and I felt so lonesome and so out of it. And I guess nowadays- I didn’t realize it at the time- I was depressed. I was clinically depressed. I stopped going to classes, I stopped doing things and I went to the counseling center a number of times and you know, I was terribly upset. And finally I wrote home and I said, I want to come home. And I didn’t finish that semester. And the counseling center said it was fine. Then Opa came and got me. And when we got back at that time, we were living in an apartment in Riverdale and they didn’t know what to do with me there. I had one year of college and an unfinished third semester. And I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. So they decided to have me take a battery of tests at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken who were pioneers in doing this sort of aptitude testing. So I took a whole day, there was an Iq test, there were vocabulary tests, there were a spatial relations tests, etc. Etc. When we finally got the report, it said, well, there isn’t really one direction in which should go. They said I was intelligent and that I should definitely go to college. But, you know, there wasn’t just one career I was perfect for. I had very good spacial relation perceptions, which was high on people who went into engineering. I was very high in that for a woman, but about average for a man. And they said it’s, it’s a career in which you, would be competing almost completely at that time with men. They said, well, if I went into medicine, I would make a good diagnostician. I could put two and two together.
[DdV] So what was next?
[JdV] So then we decided that and I should apply to NYU. They let me in the second semester as a first semester sophomore. Because I had lost all of the other things that I had in Wisconsin- I got credit for my freshman year- and I went in really as a special student that was not a degree candidate much against your Oma’s wishes, but I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I said I just want to take some courses that I feel like taking. I took an art history course survey and had an excellent teacher who got my interest sparked. I took another german lit course, I continued my french because I wanted to do that. And I guess I took sophomore english. No math, no science. No history- I had sort of been turned off on history- and I did very well. I had a straight A average at the end of that semester. And so I went in for another semester and I took more german. I took more art history. They had a requirement of either psychology or philosophy. I was interested in both. So I took both. No math, no science, unless you call psychology science. But anyway, at the end of that first year at NYU of course all hell broke loose in Europe, 1940. Holland was invaded. And it was just at the time of my final exams, but I was so glad I was home. I was so glad I wasn’t in Wisconsin with these people who couldn’t have understood what I was going through
[DdV] Were you in contact with Willie, Jaap and the rest of the family?
[JdV] Sure. They were not cognizant of the coming storm. But the invasion came, lasted five days and then the occupation. And in the first years, we still had the ability to correspond, before America entered the war, we could write letters to Europe and they could send them, but then after we entered the war, you could only do it through the red cross. So anyway, I continued on my merry little way and then decided at one point that my father was spending all this money for the tuition and that I might as well get a degree after doing all this work and I was doing so well and I had already fulfilled most of the requirements except for science. They didn’t have a math requirement. I had had one semester of chemistry and that didn’t fulfill it. It had to be a year. I didn’t feel like going into the next semester of chemistry. So I decided to take biology and registered as a degree candidate with a major in art history, much to the disapproval of your grandmother because “what do you do with a degree in art history?” And Oma was, the practical one in the family Opa kept saying “anything she learns, it’s not lost.” And I minored in german and I took that year of biology. That really was something. Botany was okay. When we got to a zoology and we had to start cutting up things- we had these shroud cloths that we had to dip in formaldehyde and wrap up the carcass of whatever you were doing. I went out and bought a pair of rubber gloves. Everybody laughed at me. My lab partners who were mostly boys. I thought this was the craziest thing. I said I don’t want that smell of formaldehyde on my hand. It was just before lunch that we had the lab. And I didn’t want to touch those creatures either. I was the most popular person after a day or two, they were asking me to get their shroud cloths for them. Anyways, I passed.
[DdV] So you passed. Now, tell me about living in New York at that time. You’re still living up in Riverdale?
[JdV] Well, the first year or two, I think the first year I was in Riverdale. And then the apartment we were living in in Riverdale had a bus that went to the subway, went to the end of the IRT line and at rush hours It went to the end of the subway, because that stopped I think at 205th street and the IRT went to 247th street. So you had to take that bus to the subway and back from the subway. Opa said, we’re going to get drawn into this war. And when we do, there’s going to be gasoline rationing. And when there’s gasoline rationing, that bus may not run all the time. I want to live within walking distance of the subway because we won’t be able to drive our cars. And you know, etcetera. And so that most of my last couple of years at NYU I commuted from Queens down to Washington Square.
Finding a Calling: Making Her Way Back to Europe
[DdV] What do you remember of Manhattan?
[JdV] Not a great deal at that time. I just remember never feeling insecure. After I graduated I used to go down to the siemens institute down below the battery, which was for merchant seaman and on Tuesday night was Dutch night. And I used to go down there by subway, ride home at 12:00 at night, I think that’s when they stopped. the seamen did usually walk us to the subway because they didn’t think that the battery was a very safe place for women to be alone. But we would take the subway, it’d be a group of us. Some of us would separate at certain places. I’d walk home from the subway which was about two blocks- and I never felt insecure. Now I don’t think I’d do that today. I don’t think any mother would let a young woman do that today. My memories of Manhattan, I are not very vivid. I worked there later after I graduated. Actually the summer between my junior and senior year, I was taking some summer courses to make up for a couple of requirements that I had missed. And I got into an argument with my political science teacher who insisted that the United States was the only country that had a written constitution. Comparing it to Britain where every law is part of constitutional law where there’s no real written constitution. I went home and I said to Opa, “The Dutch have a written constitution, don’t they?” And he said “Yes, it’s called the basic law.” So I went to the consulate and I asked for a copy of the basic law and they said, “Well we don’t have it here anymore. We, just opened at the Netherlands Information Bureau next door and they have a library and all our books have gone into their library. But you can go there and ask for it.” So I went and I asked for it and they gave me a copy. Of course I couldn’t read it, but I went to the professor with it and had the proof in my hand and then he said, “But that’s just a little country.” Something like that. Result was that I had the highest grade in the class, which was a b plus. I think it would’ve had an A. I was so mad. Oh boy. But you know, he didn’t like being challenged like that. Anyway, when I went back with the book, they said they’d like to talk to you. And that was a man by the name Bart. He was the head of the library and he wanted to know why I wanted the book and I told him that was going to college and what not. He asked didn’t I want to work for them? They were trying to set up a news file and would I be interested in working for them. I said, “Well, I’m going to summer school.” They said, “Do you go all day?” And I said, “No, I go in the mornings.” They asked would I come and work for them in the afternoon? And I said yes. It was the first time I ever earned any money. I bought some clothes for myself. It was exciting. And I started to set up a fIle for them.
[DdV] And the primary purpose of this was what?
[JdV] So that we could get at news articles quickly. This would be files from things that have been published in the newspaper or if somebody wanted some background material on the resistance movement, they knew where to find it. They asked me would I stay and I said, no, I’m one year off from my degree and I want to go and get that degree. And they said, when you’ve got the degree, come back, you have a job anytime. So then, I graduated in 42. I had taken mechanical drawing in high school. I rather liked it. I decided I’d try my hand at that and at Philips, they needed somebody to do some tracing. But by that time Philips had set up a company here. And they didn’t hire a opa back, I don’t think. I don’t know whether he was offered a job back or not. Whether they never asked him or whether he refused. I don’t know. I never went into that with them. So they hired me as sort of apprentice draftsman. I decided I really didn’t like that job. And so after I finished the project that I did, which was tracing bricks for an oven kill, I quit and I went to the information bureau and I said, “You still want me?” And they said yes. So then I started my working career.
[DdV] And where was the office?
[JdV] In Rockefeller Center. In the holland house of the Rockefeller Center. And that’s where the dutch club was. That’s where the consulate was. The Information bureau was up there. So it was a very nice commute from queens. And I worked. I set up the file for them and I was lord of the file. Now I’ve constantly gotten into trouble with one person, Mr. Laurens. Mr. Laurens was one of these people who refuse to come to me to ask me for material, but he rummaged through my files and being lord of the files, I didn’t like that because he messed them up at times. So the two of us didn’t get along at all. And I was getting pretty sick and tired of it. I did some library work there. I also did some translations for them. They were publishing a book called the Netherlands and they had various people writing on different subjects on music or art and architecture and some of them just couldn’t write english. And so they wrote their articles in dutch and I translated them. I think it was even mentioned in the book.
[DdV] That sounds interesting.
[JdV] So anyway, in came my old friend Tox, no wonder I didn’t recognize that name. Tox is a nickname of hers. Her real name is Rachel. We went out and Oma found out that they had put her up at a hotel in Washington square; that you she just come from dutch guiana, Suriname. She had managed to sneak out of Holland aboard a ship and make it to South America. Then she hitchhiked her way through part of Central America, then the Caribbean, and finally made it to the States. Oma heard that she was going to try to go to England and said that’s ridiculous. She said, stay here for the night, go tomorrow, check out of the hotel and come and stay with us. So she stayed with us until she got a message that she was needed by her employer, a shipping company, in England. I think she stayed about six weeks. She really would have been broke if she’d had to stay at the hotel. I mean, it was ridiculous. Anyway, we got along so well. And Tox said, why don’t you come to England too and I said, hey, that’s a good idea. I’m going to see if I can get a transfer to England. I’m just about fed up with the office here. Anyway. And so I went in and I said, I want to quit. And I think first he offered me a raise. And I said, no, I don’t want a raise, I want to quit. He said, would I consider a transfer fee? People who could speak and read Dutch, even though I didn’t write it very well but could speak and read dutch were at a premium at that time for the dutch government and in New York. And the nice part of it was because I was working, I was still dutch and I was working for the dutch government. I didn’t have to pay any tax. So I said, yes, I’ll consider a transfer. He said, would you like to go to Washington? I said, oh no, I don’t want to go to Washington. How about San Francisco? I said I don’t want to go to San Francisco. I think he offered me Australia as well. And I said, no, I don’t want to go to Australia. He said, well, where do you want to go? I said, I want to go to England. And he said, are you mad? I said no. He said, they’ll contact the office in England and see if they need anybody. And they did. And the office in England said, send her over. They quoted a salary that I thought was much too low, but they said it was a decent salary for England. And again, I did not have to pay taxes and so it was arranged that I would go to the information bureau in England and then it was a matter of waiting for a ship.
[DdV] Were you talking with your and father about this?
[JdV] I had told him about it and he never put one obstacle in my way. I appreciated this very much. A friend of theirs talked to me and said, “how can you do this to your parents? You’re their only child and you are going to go into a war zone.” And I said, “it’s not my fault and I’m the only child. And if I were a boy they would have no choice.” I was pretty callous. I now realize having been a mother myself and having had children what great courage it took for them to let me go. Really great courage. So, it was a matter of waiting around. At one point I got notified there’s a ship, but it’s leaving from Halifax, Nova Scotia. You are to take the train to Montreal. Wait further notification in Montreal. Oma and Opa had very good friends in Montreal. So I stayed with them for, I think it was a day, two days, two nights. The ship ride itself was very tense. It was of course strict black out. Absolutely no smoking on deck at night because they said that you could see the tip of a cigarette at sea glowing for miles. We always had to have our life jacket with us. There were frequent lifeboat drills. We had these rafts besides the lifeboats. We had three meals a day and we had afternoon tea in a good British fashion. I wrote letters home and mailed them when we got to England. We weren’t of course supposed to say anything about what ship we were on. After what felt like forever, we finally arrived. We got off the ship in Bristol.
[DdV] (New tape) So you had just gotten off at Bristol. What was next?
[JdV] My group and I had to go find a place to stay. We were put up in a hotel for a little while but we finally managed to get a nice little apartment outside of London. We had about a week or two weeks of nightly bombings, but they weren’t the heavy ones. They were incendiaries. And I was very proud of myself. I discovered an incendiary bomb in the church across the street. Lancaster gate was a square around the church and everybody was busy. And I was out looking and I said, look, there is something flaming in there, in that church, I see a light flickering. And in they went and sure enough an incendiary had gotten through the roof and had landed on one of those big beams. And it was smoldering up there, but they were able to get it out and nothing happened to the church. And I felt that I saved that church. We were very lucky. Nothing happened to us. I slept next to the window. I used to sleep like a log and we were very near Hyde park and all the Anti Aircraft guns were in Hyde Park and you had these great big balloons to keep the planes up high. And the windows would just rattled when those guns went off. I slept through it all. One night Tox woke me, she thought things sounded so bad and so close that we should go downstairs. And I remember her waking me and I got the most peculiar sensation. I looked at this person sitting on my bed and I said, who are you? I was so completely out of it. I didn’t even recognize Tox.
[DdV] You weren’t drinking were you?
[JdV] Not at all. She said, come on, get up, the windows rattling next to you. Now we’ve got to get down. And so we went downstairs where we had a jolly time talking to people and I think that’s when I discovered the incendiary bomb. Then when we were out one night towards the spring, there was an air alarm and we all went down to the downstairs apartment of the land lady and the landlord and there were all of us who were living there at the time were there. And we sat and we sat and we sat and once in a while we’d hear something and then we wouldn’t hear anything, but there was no all clear. After a while we’d all gotten very tired. And the people who lived below us was a couple who had a child who they had just brought back from the country because British children were all evacuated to the country. They thought it was safe. they had this child with them, little girl, about seven, I think at the time. And we all decided, well, we’d go back to bed. We thought it was something wrong with the all clear. We woke up the next morning- and Tox always got up earlier than I did because she had to go down to the city. So she had a longer ride. And I said to Tox, did you hear the all clear and Tox said no. By the time I left I heard the all clear. Well, when we got to the office, they were talking about the V1’s the pilotless planes, as they called them. The rockets that had come over. And from then on, you know, we had fairly regular air raid alarms and the office, we all were supposed to go down to the air raid shelter, but after a while it just got to be ridiculous. And so what they had decided to do is they didn’t give a general air raid alarm anymore. They were able to track these rockets and they gave an alarm along the track, with bells and that sort of thing. Then you knew that they were tracking your way, because work wasn’t getting done with these raids. They also moved all of the anti aircraft out of London because they discovered it didn’t do them any good to shoot down the rockets in London. They will do just as much damage as if they just let them fall. They put all the anti aircraft out near the coast to try to get them to fall on open land.
(Unfortunately, a good chunk of the interview here is lost. It starts back with her talking about joining the Dutch Red Cross)
[JdV] I had joined up with the Dutch Red Cross and we had sort of weekend training and that sort of thing. We had driving lessons. I flunked my driver’s test; the British were really tough with their drivers. They still are apparently. What I had to do- and I’m still not good at- backing up, not only back up around the corner and into a portal but all sorts of things. Well I flunked it. So I never did get to drive in the army, although I did do some driving later on in Holland with somebody else sitting next to me. In the summer we went up for a week’s training in Wolverhampton. This is where the Dutch had their camp.
[DdV] What was the objective of the Dutch Red Cross at that particular point?
[JdV] Well, at that particular point we got some more time training, but what they had thought was that Holland would be liberated in one fell swoop. They knew that there were thousands of Dutch in Germany in forced labor camps as well as people in concentration camps, if there were any of those left. That there were other refugees in Germany and what they saw was an assault on the Dutch border by all these refugees and by the Dutchman returning home who might be carrying disease. We were supposed to set up camps to catch them at the border. Delouse them, give them whatever was necessary, have people there who would direct Poles or Russians eastward instead of westward. We were really supposed to sort of be receiving camp for that. Well, of course, none of that worked out because Holland was not liberated in one fell swoop. At the time of the invasion, I was home with the German measles.
[DdV] You’re speaking of D Day?
[JdV] Yeah. Somebody in our office had contracted German measles and I swore that I’d had them as a child. I guess I got them again. The thing was we had just all been revaccinated and I thought I was feeling so terrible because of the vaccination, but then I started breaking out in a rash and they decided no, this was the German measles. Once the rash came I felt much better, but there I was all by myself in the apartment, no radio, and my landlady was kind enough to bring me a radio so that I could keep up with the news. And I was there for a couple of days.
[DdV] You had known that the invasion was coming soon?
[JdV] We had suspected, but we didn’t know. One of the things that did make me suspect is that I was often late to work because the Finchley road is one of those main north south roads and the bus was often late because I would stand there and just see these convoys going by; trucks, something was moving into the south coast. So we knew something was coming, but nobody knew when. We were just hoping that it would be soon.
[DdV] And of course you are all having a wonderful time speculating about it, too.
[JdV] Nobody really knew. And if they knew, they wouldn’t tell. I went back to work. We were just waiting for them to get to Calais. That’s where the V1’s were supposed to be coming from. Well, they did get to Calais, but we still got hit by V1’s. They had moved them up to the Hague. It didn’t get much relief. It gave some but not much. And then towards the end of the summer, all of us who were in the Red Cross got called up to go to Wolverhampton, leave our jobs, leave our places.
Assisting in Holland
[DdV] So this is summer of ’44.
[JdV] Yes. I went to Wolverhampton. They put me in the paymasters office. I had a college education, therefore I should be able to do math, which had always been my weakest subject. And there we were and they didn’t give us any help at all. There we were working with pounds, shillings and pence having to take percentages of those, deduct that from salaries. Finally the word came in the middle of the night. Get your things together. We’re going. We got our things together.
[DdV] Had Holland had been liberated?
[JdV] Only the south of Holland. Part of the south of Holland. Zeeland. I believe by the British. So we finally got the word and as I said, middle of the night, we all scrambled into the cars and we waited and we waited and we waited. But the next morning we got off. We had our own vehicles with us. We were no longer Red Cross. I forgot to tell you that right in the middle of our training, word came out that the British would not take us across because Holland had not been liberated. They were not going to take a bunch of women that close to the front lines unless they were under military command, at which point we were given 24 hours to say whether we wanted to become part of the army, the women’s Auxiliary Corps or wanted to quit. We did not want to do that. Well, I think all but one or two stayed until the next day British ordinance came and we got outfitted. No weapons. We were noncombatants in case we were taken prisoner. We left out of London and set sail; the worst storm on the North Sea hit us. Everybody’s sick. I was seasick but I couldn’t walk because I couldn’t get a shoe on and somebody brought me some bacon and eggs. And you should have heard the moaning and screaming. Who’s got bacon? And you know, they were all there. We were three high in these hammocks and they were all sick and I was trying to enjoy my bacon and eggs. They were just cursing me because they all felt so sick, so I finally decided I would try to get something on and I would just hobble on one foot. I put some socks on and I hobbled and I found that there were a couple of other of us who were still up. The crew had their dining room near the prow and they were so happy to see somebody up that I was allowed to sit there the whole time. I would get fed there and nobody objected because the crew was perfectly fine. They gave me their rum ration- which I didn’t even like, but I couldn’t refuse it because that was such a privilege- taught me to play cribbage, which I don’t know how to play anymore. They were very nice to me.
[DdV] How long did it take you to cross the channel?
[JdV] Well, it took us a day to cross the channel. After we landed we were told we were going to go to Brussels that night. We weren’t staying overnight. We had a motor escort, you know, motorcycle escort with us who didn’t know the road. We had blackout. They started lining up and, you know, everybody had their own truck, but I didn’t have a truck. I was told that I was to go in the back of a supply truck which had crates which could move, which could fall on me and kill me. And I said, I don’t care what you do to me, but I am not getting into the back of that supply truck. I said, shoot me right here for insubordination, but I am not doing that because just a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine got killed in the back of a truck. He was a photographer and he was with the navy and they had put him in the back of the other truck that had some torpedoes in it. One of them came loose and killed him. I’m not sure that exploded. It just killed him with the shear force. So I wasn’t even going to be killed in Belgium. So finally, they let me get into one of the ambulances, which was nice because they were heated. And we drove and we drove and we drove and we hadn’t had any supper. And then finally we also drove with real blackout, which they didn’t use on the continent. Finally we got one of the motor escorts to go upfront and say we were hungry. Could we break out the k rations? And we finally got to do that. And also some people needed to make a pitstop. Well, we got into Brussels at about 12, 12:30 that night. Found that we were in an apartment house completely unfurnished. Only had mattresses and so we had to drag a mattress and find a room and put the mattress on the floor and roll out our sleeping bags. And then they were going to take us over to the men’s barracks to give us supper. And a friend of mine and I decided we were more tired than we were hungry and we would stay behind and sleep, which is what we did when all of a sudden I got awakened and here was a strange man shaking me awake. And there were two men and they were from the Dutch barracks and they had said they had heard that two girls had stayed behind because they were so sleepy and they felt so sorry for us. They brought us food and then they were disgusted that we had to sleep on the floor. That wasn’t right. And they said, well you come over tomorrow and we’ll organize some beds for you.
[DdV] Did you ever run into people you knew?
[JdV] Yes, I did. In Wolverhampton I ran into two brothers. They were twins, but not identical twins. But I discovered that they were from Hengelo, that their father was a doctor who lived around the corner from my grandfather, that my grandfather’s backyard abutted their backyard. And they were classmates and friends of Matti’s (her cousin). And they were the ones who told me that Matti was alive. And that Willie (another cousin) was alive, that they were well hidden and they expected them to survive the war because he said we were looking for Matti. We wanted to take with us when we escaped from Holland and we couldn’t find him, but then they did give me the name of Matti’s best friend and they said if you need to look for them, go ask there. They know where he is, but they wouldn’t tell us.
[DdV] This is interesting because at this point you didn’t know if any of your relations were alive or dead and you probably might have feared the worst. So that must’ve been an incredible relief to you.
[JdV] Well, it was. And so when they said this to me, that they were so well hidden that they couldn’t find them…
[DdV] It made you feel better.
[JdV] Yes. But, you know, coincidences like that happened all the time.
[DdV] I’m sure you wrote back home a lot.
[JdV] Yeah, sure. I did. Anyway, we finally did get to Brussels, as I said. And there we put up at the marketplace and what we did was we went to the soup kitchen and we got whatever they had for the day- big containers- went to the marketplace. We had our certain clientele there who would come with their little things because they couldn’t cook and they were put up with families and they couldn’t cook so they’d come with their containers. And we really had a hard time not bursting out laughing because they will tell us what we cooked was so much better than what the soup kitchen cooked. Oh. And you were just getting it from the soup kitchen. It was a matter of not havving to go to the soup kitchen. But this was different. This was just for them. And, and we cooked so much better and we’d say, well thank you. We spent a lot of time cooking this. So we would do that. And then we would drive back again in the afternoon, every once in awhile. Nothing ever hit us. We were still getting shelled, it was close to the river and every once in while a shell would fall, the Germans on the other side of the river, a shell would fall in there, but nothing ever happened to us.
The End of the War and What Came After
[DdV] And so generally, what was the feeling in the countryside of the people? Were people optimistic? Are they hopeful that it was almost over.
[JdV] I think so, yeah. They felt like they knew the end was near. They knew that and by that time they were free. They were all almost free enough to start complaining and of course the people who really lived off of the land hadn’t suffered all that much. That’s where eggs became so precious to me. We would exchange eggs for cigarettes. I mean, we would exchange the cigarettes and they would give us eggs and sometimes they’ve got ridiculously high prices for those eggs. I mean, started off with two cigarettes for an egg and then they went up to five or six. It was just ridiculous. They, we’re getting very spoiled. I met a very nice young British marine there who was stationed in another town, but then he had come to a canteen there and we had met and we dated quite steadily. Named Clinton. That was his first name. Clint actually his name. He was so cute. He used to come bicycling from another town and he’d bring me a little bouquet of flowers. We were around the same age in our early twenties and he really was very nice. I was reminded of him by one of my unit mates that I met at the reunion. But then he later got transferred. I got transferred. I think the marines went up to northern Germany, went into Hamburg. And then on the big day I had my birthday on May fourth, 1945. I went to, Eindhoven to spend it with the Feinbergs. I hitchhiked back. We hitchhiked all the time. We were staying in rooms above a restaurant. It was sort of a hotel restaurant and we were staying in rooms there and there was this counter and it was just full of presents for me. Tox had sent something. My parents had sent some books. And I was just looking at all of those things from being so pleased because it had come in the day when a woman came running out from the back where the family lived, threw her arms around me and said we’re free! I said, well, I can’t believe that. So then I went upstairs and there was a group from the unit sitting around listening to the radio. I said, somebody just told me that the Germans had surrendered. “Can’t be true. I haven’t heard a thing.” And then it came through the radio.
[DdV] How did that woman hear before the radio?
[JdV] Well, she must’ve had a different station on. That’s all I can think of. We had a champagne party. The next day, I was supposed to leave early with the children’s transport. The first one that I ever went with to England, taking some of these children back to England. These were undernourished children. They were so pitiful and just wanted some proper food and rest . After I was finished escorting them, I caught a ride to Hengelo. This group took me along. I always had a couple of kit bags full of food for if I found a family; to give them something. I got to Hengelo and got to the middle of the town, to the block where I had stayed with my grandparents and that whole corner had been bombed away. My heart sank, but I got out and I went and I looked. I had been told to go and ask somebody at the hospital and for some reason I just wasn’t quite sure where the hospital was anymore. And I walked in the other direction. I turned around and walked in one of those shopping streets and I see a sign, the Red Cross sign and lists of Jewish survivors. So I rang the bell and I told him what I was doing, that I had just come in and that I was looking for my family to see if they were still alive, and the woman got all excited and she said they just came back into town. They’re fine, and she was going to explain to me where it was that they were staying. And then she said, “oh no, I’m coming with you.” I want to see Bella’s face when she sees you.
[DdV] Where had they been hiding?
[JdV] They had been hiding with friends of my Aunt, just around the corner from where they lived. Two little old ladies, old maids, until a bombardment came and their house was damaged and they didn’t dare stay because they were around the corner from where they had lived all their lives. People would have known them. What they did was they bandaged mark as if he had been hit and they got, in Borne, which is just a town or so over. Really a village. They found refuge with a farmer there. They were supposed to be Amsterdam refugees and Mark said it bothered him to live that lie. The farmer who harbored them said “I don’t want to know who you are, as far as I know, you are refugees from Amsterdam and that’s all I know. That’s all I want to know.” Anyway, we meet up with my relatives and have just a wonderful night together. I stayed with them that night.
[DdV] (New tape) Okay, let’s, let’s pick it up from where you ran into Matti. What was your feeling when you just walked into this place not knowing how to find him but there he was in front of you…?.
[JdV] It was just fantastic. You can’t describe feelings like that.
[DdV] And how did he look?
[JdV] He looked fine. They didn’t suffer any hunger. They were on a farm and they had plenty of food. In fact people from Rotterdam would come to try and get food there and towards the end they were sort of running a soup kitchen for the people from Rotterdam who were really starving. He took me on his motorbike… and don’t forget that the last time I had seen Matti, he was 15. I was 16. But he hadn’t changed that much. We went riding along and I said, “I didn’t know you could ride motor bikes.” “It’s the first time I’ve ever done it and the trouble is I don’t know how to break.” That made me feel very secure. He said, “I’m just going to take my foot off the gas and you put your foot down and we’ll drag to a stop,” because, you know, you had to go down from the dike to the house. I went there and they said I could stay because where else was I going to stay until they came? A lot of people hid out there. It was a wonderful hideout. There was only one trouble. He couldn’t go outside except sometimes at night out behind the house.
[DdV] Why not?
[JdV] It was such a small village that any stranger would have been noticed and people never knew whom they could trust. It might just be somebody who would say folks have somebody living with them. Um, they were millers. They had a mill and they would ground grain. And so they were quite well to do. And in fact that house on the dyke was beautiful and Dick Volk (the owner of the house) was an engineer. I think that Jaap (a cousin), I think he later took over the mill. I don’t know whether he stayed with it or not. Willie had already left by the time I got there. I had expected to see him and his fiancee. They had taken off to her home and then later to Hengelo and had gotten married. So I hadn’t seen Matti and I knew that Willie was all right. There seems to have been a scare about a week or two or three before the surrender. They had had a raid there and they were arrested and Matti and some of the others were brought up to Utrecht to be interrogated but he got away with it. They didn’t realize what they had.
[DdV] They didn’t think he looked Jewish?
[JdV] Well, that was part of it. And the thing was, Dick Volk was a big wheel in the resistance there. And I think that’s who they were looking for. I’ve heard that story before they were looking for resistance people. If they weren’t looking for Jews, they didn’t recognize them, you know what I mean? So anyway, that was a scare, but everything turned out all right. They did their part. After that weekend of catching up, I went back to Utrecht and I think that next Monday our unit was moved to Amsterdam. I was sent ahead to the house where we were going to be, which was a very nice house near a park. Beautiful section of town and a big house. Beautifully furnished. It had belonged to a family de Vries, a Jewish de Vries.
[DdV] There are Jewish de Vries’s.
[JdV] Oh yes. de Vries is a name where you can’t tell by name whether people are Jewish or not. You can only tell by first names. And they owned a department store or a clothing store, but in a very good, elegant women’s clothing. I don’t think they had men’s clothing, but it was a well known store that time on the kulverstraat, which now is such a sleazy street, but then had some really nice stores on it. The person who had been put in to the de Vries store to run it- the Germans would put one of their own in the Jewish stores- had also taken over the house. Don’t know what happened to those de Vries’s, whether they went into hiding of what, I don’t know. They didn’t show up after the war. So I don’t expect that they survived. She (the German) had taken over the house and had been in the United States for a while. But that whole area, they had evacuated all those houses because most of them were occupied either by the Germans, by the SS or by Germans like her. But she had kept waving these American papers at them as if she were an American citizen and they didn’t look too clean and they looked more closely and they saw that these papers have been from long ago and she was not a citizen. And so she got thrown out of the house and it was assigned to us. We found racks of clothes in the house with price tags still on them that she had stolen from the store. And it was a lovely house.
[DdV] So these people that had owned this business and this house were probably lost in the Holocaust?
[JdV] Probably. Yeah.
[DdV] Didn’t that feel really spooky to just see that these houses after it was all over whose owners would never return?
[JdV] Some of them came back because this was the first house I stayed in and then I got transferred to a unit that did nothing but children’s transports. And I got transferred to that unit which was about three houses down from that house. That was a family who had been in the United States and at some point they came back and we were still in the house and they were complaining about what the house looked like and you know, this sort of thing. And actually I think they had very poor taste in furniture to start with, but the Germans had been in there before and it got me so angry because these were people. I think he was a diamond merchant. He had spent the war and comfort in the United States. Hadn’t lost anything, was going to get his house back. It just didn’t look the way it looked when they left in ’39 and they were grousing about it. That sort of thing got to me at that point. I thought you’ve got your family, you’ve got your health and you’ve got a roof over your head. What are you complaining about? Before I moved to that other house, I asked around because I still hadn’t found any of the Broekman’s (her fathers family). I had found Oma’s family, I hadn’t found Opa’s. And the only hope I had of finding them if they were still alive were a couple of my grandparents close friends from Einthoven, Seev and Smaar. They lived in Bloomingdale. And somebody said, well, we can drive you pretty close to there. So there I was with my kit bags as usual and they left me off. I didn’t know this was a Sunday and on Sundays there was no public transportation at that time. I started following signs to Bloomingdale. I think I must have walked for an hour, but I finally found it and I remembered the street and I remembered what it looked like and I found the house of my Tante (aunt). I rang the bell and she answered the door and of course I was immediately dragged in. And she had a daughter who was about six months younger than I was Anneke. Ani for short. And they had a younger son, Jaap. I asked whether they knew anything about my family were upon Tante burst out crying. And I thought, Oh my God… Ani said they are two houses down from here. Her parents had separated during the war. He was living with someone else, two houses down, a former neighbor. What an intrigue that was. That was one of my most traumatic days, it seems that Oma had first stayed with my Tante and then had made herself impossible and I believed that. I went to go see her (her grandmother, Saar). She looked awful. Oh God. She was so thin and had these swollen ankles, which meant edema, which you get from hunger. And she had also been ill. She had terrible ear infection, couldn’t go to the hospital, didn’t have any treatment. Anyways, she told me a story about a German raid. They came looking for radios and there they had this house full of people who all looked quite Jewish. And a radio, which of course was illegal because they could listen to England. And what they did was sit Saar in a chair, put the radio down on the floor, put a towel over it, and started doing her feet (pedicure). And the Germans never suspected a thing. She said, “well, I’m busy with a client.” They surely weren’t looking for Jews. They were looking for radios. But the radio was under Saar’s feet.
[DdV] What was such a threat about having a radio?
[JdV] You could listen to the English news and see how badly the war was going for the Germans. And a lot of messages got sent over the radio. The BBC had programs in Dutch and French. They would say these perfectly meaningless things like “Bart ate an apple,” and then they’d get some news and some music and then you get another meaningless phrase like that. But these were messages to the resistance. And, and of course they told how badly things were going for the Germans. So no, you weren’t allowed to listen to the radio except I think they have some that could only get German stations or something like that.
[DdV] Did you ever go to The Hague?
[JdV] That area was very heavily bombed. Actually it was a mistake, the bombing by the Americans. They were aiming for the V1 sites that were across the water. What happened was the navigator had his map upside down and so they dropped their load on a residential area, so there were an awful lot of people there who were homeless. A lot of them got into those vacant apartments and houses.
[DdV] Where were we? You mentioned you oversaw transporting children?
[JdV] Yes. I had found my father’s family, then I was transferred to this other unit and was in charge of Children’s transports.
[DdV] And you were transporting children to England?
[JdV] Yeah. And back again.
[DdV] For purpose of…?
[JdV] Restoring their mental health, but mostly to get these malnourished children fed again; there just wasn’t enough food in Holland. It was hard to distributed in such a way that the children would get it. What happened in England was that the Canadian Red Cross sent over the food because England didn’t have all that much and they usually put the children up in former prisoner of war camps, Sheffield and other places. They came with their own teachers. Sometimes their own doctors, sometimes their own minister. They were in these camps for about six weeks getting built up and then they went to English families for two to three weeks where the families took care of them; they took wonderful care of these children and just loaded them down with things. So when they came back, they all had bicycle tires. The English families would buy bicycle tires for them because the Dutch have bicycles, but had no tires for them. So when they had fully recovered, I would escort them back to Amsterdam and then to their hometowns. So anyways, I did that for about a year until somewhere early in 46. They stopped the children’s transport. By that time there was food in Holland so my job was really at an end.
Meeting Someone Important
[DdV] And you had been stationed in Amsterdam.
[JdV] I’ve been stationed in Amsterdam this whole time and I met your father there. The way I met him was that Tox had come over to Amsterdam from London and I got permission to live somewhere else. Tox and I got an apartment, third floor, two little rooms and a very makeshift kitchen, but kind of romantic. A very old house. And she had gotten that through a friend of hers who had the rent on that house. But when we were in London, I kept complaining that all these people who asked me out, were all so short. I wished I could meet somebody who liked me and wasn’t so short. Tox said, “I have a friend who’s tall enough for you, but unfortunately he’s engaged to be married and he’s probably married by the time we get to Holland. That was your father. Well, we got to Amsterdam. We shared the apartment. Your dad and his brother, Uncle Dolph came to visit Tox. They had been- not Dolph so much, but your dad and Tox- they had been playmates when they were children. They grew up in the same neighborhood. And they had a kind of a street club there. Somebody had given them an empty house and it was sort of a clubhouse there. The kids and the teenagers in the neighborhood would gather there and that’s how she knew him. So they had come to call on her and I had the most awful cold. I was in bed with a cold, with a red nose and I just felt terrible. So that’s when I met your father for the first time. But they came back; or at least your dad did.
[DdV] What was your initial reaction?
[JdV] Well, my initial reaction was I liked them both very much, but I just felt terrible because I looked so awful and wasn’t feeling well. I’d really come home with a doozy of a cold after a transport. We found out he was no longer engaged to the girl he had been engaged to. So he was free and he came back again. He was only up in Amsterdam for the weekends. He worked in sales as a traveling salesman for an electrical company that sold electrical appliances but also all sorts of fuses, electrical supplies really to electricians and to stores of course.
[DdV] And he had a degree in engineering or…?
[JdV] Well, he had a technical school education as an electrician except that he always said he had two left hands. He was not a very good electrician. But he had learned how to draft very well because he had worked for his father. Now your Opa de Vries owned- along with someone else- an electrical installation bureau. He was the representative of some of a french elevator firm and Opa did electrical installations and also had a relationship with a firm in England. They imported something from England. I can’t remember what it was. And that’s how both your dad and Dolph spent time in England. He went to Pittman College, which is near Russell Square. In fact, I passed it at one time. It was really a school that taught english to foreigners. And he went there. He got a diploma there. So he knew english. Dolph also went to France. Willem (her eventual husband’s name) balked. He didn’t want to go to France. He didn’t speak french very well, but he could speak english quite well. He had also been in Holland at an automotive school but he never did anything with it. He had worked in his father’s office at some time, but he couldn’t be part of the firm because the two partners that made a contract that only one son could enter. And of course he, being the youngest son, he was out. And Dolph wanted to do it, obviously. But anyway, he was at the time working in Arnhem. He had been a sergeant in the Dutch army. He avoided going into the army for quite a while because they didn’t have his address in Arnhem; and they kept sending letters to his father, which my father-in-law opened and then called and said, “there must be some mistake. I’m in my seventies and I never served in the army. I bought my way out of it.” This was possible in the 19th century. You paid somebody else to do your army service for you. “Well, of course we don’t mean you. Do have a son?” “Yes, I do have a son. We’re not talking to him.” And one time Oma de Vries got on the phone and she said, we’ve quarreled. We don’t talk to each other. I don’t know where he is.” Of course he’d come every weekend.
[DdV] So this was all patently not true?
[JdV] Not true. No, but they were trying to keep him out.
[DdV] Because why? Because he wasn’t gonna make any money?
[JdV] He had already wasted so much of his life, you know, all of these people were in the army and nobody got anywhere.
[DdV] Yeah. Particularly for people of your generation. It seems like there was a whole window, a very important window for developing what you’re going to do for the rest of your life that was basically taken away.
[JdV] Yeah. So he didn’t want to go into the army. Anyway. They finally did catch up with him. The time I really got to know your dad was when he had come to visit us one time, must have been in December. He had come to visit a number of times and Tox said, “I’m going to be away over Christmas and Jenny doesn’t know how to light the stove.” We had a potbelly stove for heat and Tox always did it. “She’s going to be here alone”. And your dad said I’ll come and light the stove for her. So I waited and I waited and I waited in the cold and I was the only one in the house. There was a couple living downstairs and they weren’t home. And so I was there all by myself and nobody came. So I thought, well, I’m going to try to start that stove. Well, I got the house full of smoke and your father finally showed up. Must’ve been around 1:00. He had been out the night before, so he’d been sleeping in. But he did get the stove lit for me. That was the time we really got to know each other. We started going out and then he came regularly on the weekends and we went dancing a lot. We both liked to dance. We had a very good time, got closer and closer.
[DdV] So what else did you guys like do?
[JdV] Dance, read, talk.
[DdV] He was a big reader?
[JdV] No, in fact he never read, but I had some english books and he was interested in those and I think I persuaded him to become a reader. In fact, when Dolph heard about it he said Wim (his nickname)? He reads??? I said yes. And he enjoyed it. So I converted him to reading. What else did we do? We’d go to the movies. Did you like american films? Yeah.
[DdV] What were his dreams at that point? What did he really want to do? What was he thinking about doing?
[JdV] I don’t know. I really couldn’t tell you. No. He was trying to stay out of the army.
[DdV] He didn’t sound like he was blinded by some driving ambition.
[JdV] But most people weren’t at that time. It was a time for survival. I think he would have liked to have established a good position for himself with his firm. It was a time of scarcity. It was a matter of survival. Anyway, the army finally did catch up with him and he was stationed in Haarlem, so he could still come up every weekend. It’s not far. And he was a sergeant. Dolph, very cleverly, never rose above private so he was not called back.
[DdV] Did you like Dolph?
[JdV] Yes.
[DdV] Good sense of humor?
[JdV] No, not particularly. No. he wasn’t as nice as your father. Your father was very much like his father Dolph was very much like his mother. Opa de Vries was a very easy going person, kind of philosophical, liked to read. Loved music. Your dad was the one that he would take along to Saturday afternoon concerts. The prices were cheaper and, and Dolph was never interested in going. Your father loved it. He went to the youth concerts, but he also liked going with his father to the normal concerts. Dolph didn’t particularly care for that. And his mother didn’t care for music. She just thought it was noise. Oma was the practical one. Opa was the dreamer. So anyway, we started off- your father and I- saying, “we’re just good friends. We’re not going to fall in love, we’re just good friends.” I think had been burned by love once. I had been a little bit singed a couple of times. And, and I guess your father wasn’t ready to commit to anything either, so we had decided we would be good friends. And here comes one of my exes, Dicky Vardeman into play again. We had a party one night at the house and Tox was there and Dicky came and your dad and I. I guess dicky and I flirted outrageously. We knew it didn’t mean a thing, but we did. Your father was in a peculiar mood when we got back to the apartment and I said, “what’s wrong with you?” And then he said, “well, the way you went on with Dicky…” I said, “well, we’re just friends. And then he said, “I think I’m in love with you. “
[DdV] Just like that?
[JdV] Like that. Yeah. From then on, I was sort of in love with him too. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was. And from then on we decided we were in love.
[DdV] And when was that? Do you recall when that conversation happened?
[JdV] I don’t know, sometime in March or April of ’46. Then in August, I went back to the United States. I was owed a trip by the dutch government. They brought me over, so they owed me a trip back. I think at that time we had decided that we wanted to get married. I was taken on a visit to his family. He met my Oma Saar and the rest of my family in Holland. He wrote a letter asking for my hand in marriage to my father and we were going to wait. I was going to get a job. I had been applying to law school at that time and I was accepted at NYU law school. But I decided I wasn’t going to do that. I was going to get a job and work for a year and save some money and all this sort of thing. I think it was Opa who said to me, if you’re going to get married, don’t wait a year, don’t get a job, go back and marry him. So after having been home for not all that long, I went back.
Hey, you made it! I hope you have enjoyed this! Dank je!
