Everybody Has a Story: Spending World War II in Holland exciting adventure

Life in Indonesia was easy when it was a colony of the Netherlands called the Dutch East Indies, and I was a little girl called Catharina Smits.

We lived in a close-knit community, and Mother had a lot of Indonesian household help, both inside and in the garden, and for the care of my younger brother and me. My father was a Dutch military physician who had specialized in tropical medicine. He was working off a 10-year obligation to the government for his education.

It was such an adventure in the mid-1920s for him and mother, who was a nurse, to take the train to Geneva as newlyweds and on to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, where they acclimatized to heat, and then across the sea to Jakarta (then called Batavia) in Indonesia. It was there that I was born in 1927 and my brother, Jan, followed in 1929.

Like my parents, I loved adventure. It was so exciting travelling all over Indonesia with them as Father was assigned to various military bases on Sumatra, Java and other islands of the Indonesian Archipelago.

But that peaceful, tropical existence ended abruptly in 1940 with the Japanese invasion. Fortunately, we had already returned to Holland the year before, in 1939, when I was 12. But we had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. At 4 a.m. on a May morning in 1940, we heard airplanes overhead, bringing German parachutists to Dutch soil. Someone said, “Now we are German,” but our neighbor replied, “No, we are Dutch and we will remain Dutch!” Soon my father was called to attend to the wounded parachutists; the less fortunate had died.

Five long years of occupation followed. Marching, singing German soldiers in our streets. I enjoyed their cheerful songs. We would run to the windows to see them, and they enjoyed looking at the girls, too. They were well disciplined, and we weren’t afraid they would harm us.

Other wartime activities were more ominous. There was a big field across town where the Germans launched their V-1 flying bombs toward London. Also, I’ll never forget a dear friend, a Jewish girl, who disappeared, and I could never find her again. And I worried for my father. The Germans spoke of locking up all the physicians, but fortunately they changed their minds.

People went hungry. My mother worked hard to find food for us. She had to ride her bicycle to the fields. Mainly we had lots of potatoes. We grew some food on our land, but then the Germans took it. I had been in a nice girls’ school, but it was torn down to make barracks for the soldiers. Now I had to walk a long way to another school, and I missed a lot of days when the weather was bad. (After the war, we were given temporary diplomas but had to pass a test later to get permanent ones.)

My father was desperate for news since all we got was German propaganda. He had a radio hidden away in an ornately carved box from Indonesia, and would secretly listen to BBC News at 7 p.m. Another source of secret information was a locally produced newspaper, and Father would exchange information with his patients. I would walk or bike through the neighborhood leaving and collecting notes, journals and papers. This was easiest in winter when I could hide them in my clothes. It was dangerous, but I knew whom I could trust. It was an exciting adventure.

The German soldiers looked attractive in their uniforms, and local boys were away — conscripted by the Germans to work in war factories — but my father was adamant that I never date a German soldier. My family once hid a Dutch man in our house to keep the Germans from taking him away. I felt sorry for one young German soldier, just 16 years old, who decided he no longer wanted the soldier’s life; he cried for his mother when they wouldn’t let him go home. I’m glad I never went with the soldiers. Our servant girl liked them, and my mother decided to fire her to avoid getting in trouble with neighbors for collaboration. After the war, girls who had dated German soldiers were punished by having their hair shaved off. There was a lot of resentment of Germans.

After the war, I went to Rotterdam looking for work, and was lucky to get a job as the secretary to the purser on a cruise ship.

Now I could have the adventurous life I had always wanted. I travelled the world to India, Greece, New York — always something new!