War Stories of Occupied Holland, by Toni Pyl

Part 3

The Germans also took over the school for living quarters so the older primary students had to go to a high school further away. The younger children were taken in by a kind English lady who offered her living room as a classroom. However, that came to an end when her husband managed to escape to England and as a consequence the woman and her children were carted off to a camp for foreigners.

The juniors then had to attend the high school as well and the building became very crowded. War actions always frightened me very much. We often heard rumblings in the distance at night, while search lights scanned the horizon and a faint red glow would paint the sky in the direction of Rotterdam.

The airport nearby was transformed into a fake one; the Germans went to a lot of trouble to achieve that. Canals were dug and lights installed which on moonlit nights, would be turned on. A couple of wooden planes stood near some buildings but only one allied plane came to investigate and drop a bomb in all those years. That happened in the daytime while my sister was sick in bed with Chickenpox. A window shattered and glass fell all over her bed but she wasn’t in it thank goodness as she had got up to get something.

One night we heard an allied plane fly backwards and forwards before suddenly going into a dive. My mother tried to distract me by talking loudly but I listened to the plane and sure enough a bomb whistled down and shattered another window. We ran in panic to my grandparents’ house which was nearby but we didn’t get a warm reception and were sent home smartly as they were already in bed.

However, a few weeks later it was their turn when a bomb came down in their friends’ garden nearby. All the windows in their friends’ house were broken as well as the furniture in their sitting room. My grandparents’ windows were broken too – all thirty of them and they were very upset and almost in tears when we went around the next morning.

Incinerator bombs were used. The ordinary type caused no more damage than a hole in the roof and a blackened wall and could be thrown out of the window (we were taught how to do that at school). The phosphorous ones were the bad ones, we heard that some came down in houses burning the furniture. When the remnants were thrown outside they would start burning again when it rained.

Some weeks later we found pamphlets in the street with an Allied Message saying ‘Bombs falling in this area are meant for the Germans!’

Then there was the Black Out. I used to get furious with my mother who sometimes switched the lights on in our bedrooms when it might be seen by a plane.

The Black Out almost cost my mother her life. A little boy was staying with us and called out one night that he wanted to go to the toilet. The door of his room was near the top of the stairs and in the dark my mother misjudged the distance and fell down the stairs gashing her head badly. My father leapt out of bed and turned the lights on in spite of my screaming protests.

The next morning the doctor came and sewed up her head with no anaesthetic and she suffered bad headaches for a long time after that.