The Nazis are coming! Henk DeGoede’s mother received the dreaded call from a friend in town, and she immediately alerted her two elder sons, Henk and Siem, who were out working in the field. The brothers, and Kars, the farm helper, dropped their hoes and sprinted to the family bulb barn next to their home. They dashed into the secret room. The Nazis are coming!
Once the men were inside the hidden space, Henk’s younger brothers burst into action. From inside the barn, they locked the makeshift door to the secret room and quickly shoved hay bales and equipment in front of the sham wall to hide the men from the workspace of the barn. The secret room filled with the musty stench of three young men who had rushed off the fields in the middle of a hot day, damp soil and field mud still sticking to their sweaty skin and clothes. The hint of sweet, fresh hale bales mixed with the oily odor of the tools and bikes surrounding them. Their breath came in shallow, rapid puffs. Would they be discovered?
It was dark in the small room. A few tiny streams of sun slipped through cracks between the boards on the outside wall. The men were behind the tenth split door, at the very end of the long, single-story bulb barn. Each of the doors had a window on the upper half, which opened into a separate stall inside the barn. Rows of metal mesh shelves lined each side, filled with bulbs dug from the fields after the blooming season. The outside door was normally left open to allow air and light into the room so that the tulip and daffodil bulbs could dry from the fresh air that found its way through the wire mesh.
But these days the ten doors on the outside of the barn were closed and locked. There were three split doors near the road, then a window for the barn’s central work area, then two large doors next to allow entrance for a car or the plows, followed by seven more split doors, each with a window on the top half. The family had agreed: the story to be told was that the bulb-drying season was over and the outside doors needed to be secured against potential bulb thieves.
Pa would tell Nazi soldiers that they were welcome to inspect the contents of the rooms from the inside of the barn. No, he would say, I am not sure where the key is at the moment. Would have to ask my sons who used it last. Why not follow me into the barn and I will show you the rooms from inside? Hopefully, the soldiers would believe the illusion that the farmer needed to protect his bulbs by keeping exterior doors locked.
It was all part of the family’s war plan. Inside the barn, at the end of the stalls, a false wall had been placed across the narrow end of the last stall with a small door in its corner, transforming the tenth stall into an undetected small room. The new wall was blocked with hay bales, crates and old farm equipment with a small doorway to be covered with a small stack of hay bales once the men were safely inside. The other nine stalls along the wall were filled with the shelves of bulbs, along with miscellaneous shovels and other stored farm tools. The inquisitive soldiers would hopefully not notice that there were ten doors outside, yet only nine corresponding rooms inside.
The three young Dutch men crouched in the room, careful to avoid knocking down one of the six bikes the family owned, or the jars of Ma’s vegetable and meat preserves, or any of the other precious items stored in the tiny space. Such items, if found, would be seized by the Nazi army but were necessary for the family’s survival through the winter. The three men were careful not to talk, to sneeze…or even to breathe audibly. They must not let their mud-covered wooden shoes clump on the stone floor. They must keep their presence secret in this tiny hidden room at the end of the barn. The bikes, the glass jars of food, and especially the young men themselves were valuable commodities, not only to their family of sixteen, but to the soldiers searching to feed their troops and to add to their number of combatants.
It was 1943. Although the Third Reich had already occupied the Netherlands for two years, Henk DeGoede and his family had not felt the effects until last year. Their bulb farm was on the outskirts of Anna Paulowna, a small farming village on the northern edge of the country near the Noord Sea. The war seemed so far away…strange stories coming from the cities. Nothing the hardworking family worried about much.
Then it came to their countryside.
Henk remembered his initial impression when the planes first roared by, dark metal with the black swastika on the tail. His younger brothers and sisters had waved at the pilots, marveling at the wonder of these sinister machines…until Ma and Pa sternly admonished them. Then came the ominous stories of blasted dikes, flooding in other farming areas, stolen livestock, people disappearing. Groups of bedraggled travelers suddenly came on foot from the cities, hoping for food and shelter.
Eventually, the Nazis entered the family’s personal space, their idyllic piece of the Dutch countryside. Their farm. It was not enough for Pa to grow food for his large family and to run his successful bulb business. Not enough for Ma and the girls to keep the house and clothes clean, to process the food into daily meals, to can the extras into jars for the winter. The Nazis wanted things. Now every Dutch farmer was expected to “share” their livestock and preserves, even their older sons, with the Regime. Life had changed. Pa needed to protect his family, his food from the garden and the orchard, his cattle and pigs.
The younger children thought little of the significance and danger of the war. Their lives remained one of daily chores, playing tricks on each other, the bossy older children taking care of the younger ones, and the normal boisterous family meals around the long wooden table. Henk, however, noticed the deep worry lines on his parents’ faces each night after dinner as they huddled in the hall to talk on the phone with neighbors. He could hear them gasp as they learned about approaching troops and their atrocities toward Dutch citizens. Henk, one of the oldest boys, noticed and listened intently.
As the war crept insidiously toward their farm, a plan evolved. Ma and Pa sat the older children down after dinner one evening and described urgent changes to be made immediately. Food, livestock and fighting aged men had to be protected. Preparations for the DeGoede family war survival plan were to start the next day. Everyone had a job to do.
For the next two days, Henk and his older siblings followed Pa and Ma’s instructions, working furiously to prepare. The younger children could not understand Ma and Pa’s short tempers and curt commands, but the older siblings knew that the soldiers would be in their midst soon and they were anxious. They built a new “pigpen,” a large wooden box placed near the garden and fruit trees, placed in a shallow pit in the ground. It was covered with the pile of straw previously used to keep the tree roots warm during the icy, blustery winter. The result was a large mound of sound-deafening hay that would hopefully mute the snorts and squeals of the pigs. The younger children were told to cut squares out of the rolls of landscaping cloth and cover the inside of the windows later in the evenings. Ma and Pa knew it was important to keep the light of their one lantern hidden from nighttime wanderers to avoid attention to the family home.
The main workspace of the barn was filled with clutter and the remnants of several ongoing projects meant to distract the curious inspectors. Laundry hung from beams that crossed from the bulb storage side to the opposite bare stone wall, necessary during this wet season when the clothesline was useless to dry the heavy work pants and flannel shirts from the men and boys. On one side of the large central work area worktables held piles of broken trays needing repair; bulb sorting tools and trays lined the opposite wall. A stack of wicker baskets teetered in the corner, along with a chair, extra reams of wicker, and a box of glue, ready for someone to fix the holes that allowed bulbs to escape. Projects for the cold winter months…distractions.
Most importantly, the family prepared the secret room. The older boys made the wall with the small door. Ma supervised the older girls with the transfer of the family bikes and many of her jars of preserves to the secret room, leaving a small collection in the house to be confiscated if “needed” by the soldiers. The dozens of other precious jars stored in the secret room, along with the hanging bacon and bags of wheat and potatoes, were crucial to feed her children through the winter.
And thus, the family’s routine changed. Suddenly. They kept the façade of a farming family business during the day. The boys were out in the field digging bulbs, pulling the hoe behind the work horses to prepare new planting rows, repairing equipment and sorting the bulbs in the barn. The girls washed the laundry on scrub boards, peeled potatoes, and prepared vegetables for dinner, and made butter and buttermilk with the churn. They swept the house and prepared the meals throughout the day for their large family.
But there were many changes. The family kept the mandated curfew each night. Friends did not join at the dinner table as before. Church dances and youth activities were canceled. As the Nazi soldiers cut down the dwindling supply of wind-breaking rows of trees for their own use, they enacted a law preventing local citizens from doing the same. Firewood was then forbidden, but necessary to keep the woodstove fueled for heat and cooking. After dinner, therefore, the older boys often ventured out stealthily, in the cloak of darkness, to search for wood, further and further from the farm.
Pa and other farmers would allow temporary shelter in their barns to traveling city folks who were fleeing the food shortages and violence of Amsterdam and other nearby cities. They were allowed to stay only one night to avoid the image of hiding Jewish refugees, but the sweet hay made for soft bedding and there was food. Ma often made an extra pot of soup met balletjes. The delicious odor of boiled beef, meatballs, onions, and other farm vegetables reached the hungry and appreciative travelers in the barn well before they devoured the soup at dinnertime.
During the days, each older family member was to be on high alert. Once a sentinel saw or heard the slightest hint of approaching soldiers, the older boys would bolt to the secret room, followed by younger brothers assigned to block the door with crates, haybales and farm equipment. Henk, his brother, Siem, and Kars, were prime candidates to involuntarily join the Nazi regime if found by quota-driven soldiers. When they came, Pa was to be ready to distract a stern, uniformed entourage of troopers away from the family’s treasures. Ma’s responsibility was to keep the younger children in tow, distracting them from “friendly” soldiers searching for information from innocent youth. The plan was in place.
And it worked. Numerous times. Despite that, the anxiety never subsided for the parents and older children who knew the possible consequences if the plan failed.
Henk, Siem and Kars were again huddled in the dark room, listening to the sounds of approaching Nazi vehicles. They heard Pa greet the soldiers and explain their predicament. “Ya, we worry about the little bit of food and having enough livestock for the winter…it has been a difficult year.” Then, “we have given so much to your comrades already, you can see that our provisions are low. We are still building up supplies from last month’s visit when we shared so much already.”
A door slammed and the three hidden men assumed Pa had guided the soldiers into the family’s home for the obligatory inspection. Suddenly, the voices were outside again. The young men heard Pa enter the barn, explaining to the soldiers that the rooms were meant to air out the stored bulbs. Each stall was searched, to verify his claims. The soldiers peered into one stall after another filled with stacked shelves of drying tulip and daffodil bulbs. They didn’t notice that only none of the ten outside doors had corresponding stalls inside.
The boys, the bikes, the food were all safe…once again.
Nineteen-year-old Henk heard his father’s voice drift away as he guided the group of soldiers outside, explaining to the cadre of armed men that his younger pre-teen boys helped him on the farm. He admitted that they occasionally needed help from older boys from the village if any were even available. “No,” he said, “we unfortunately do not have older boys.”
The barn was silent. The three men slowed their breathing. Henk silently began to seethe with anger. He was done. The Nazis had no right to do this. The injustice of it infuriated him. They were forced to hide like rats. He made a decision. He vowed to continue this farming charade during the day. However, he would contact Wilhelm from church tomorrow. De Nederlandse verzetsbeweging, the Dutch Resistance Movement, was searching for recruits and he was finally ready to join. He might continue to hide in this room during the day.
At night, however, he would fight.
Author: Lucinda Hauser
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