The Drenthe Liberty Tour is cancelled. Bee One today told the organizers they canceled the event themselves. They didn’t think it was a good idea to rumble through villages in Drenthe for a week with 250 tanks and armored cars when three countries further away, death and destruction are being sown with similar equipment in a new war.
Het Gooi Bevrijd, also a liberation event with old war equipment, will continue. The organization even found two surviving veterans, a 99-year-old Brit and 97-year-old American. Whether they were still doing ‘something’ with the war in Ukraine on May 5, the reporter of EenVandaag asked the organizer, and he had some questions of his own. simple suggestions. A flag or something, something with refugees. No, the organizer said firmly. “It is our liberation.” And so it is. That was exactly the point.
That other war hung over the Remembrance Day all day on Wednesday. No speaker could get around it. Historian Hans Goedkoop spoke about today’s battlefields at the memorial lecture in the Nieuwe Kerk. After the wreath laying on Dam Square, Mayor Femke Halsema talked about the “city that moans”. The bombing of 11 May 1940 in the capital was a prelude to that in Rotterdam. By subtly shifting the focus to the battered port city in her speech, she didn’t even have to mention Mariupol and Odessa by name.
After the ceremonies we went back to Drenthe. The NOS made there the documentary Nieuwlande, unyielding hiding village† During the war years, this village near the German border was the hub of the largest hiding network in the Netherlands. Jews in hay barns, in potato cellars, under the cowshed, in the crawl space of the local church, in dens in the woods. No farm without divers, as the people in hiding were called then. After the war, the entire village received the Yad Vashem award from the State of Israel for aid provided by non-Jews to Jews.
Sprung from the peat soils
Those who watch television these days sometimes want to get the impression that the Netherlands at that time only counted heroes. In this documentary you can see that these heroes from Drenthe did not sprout spontaneously from the peat soils, they were made into heroes. The first person in hiding in the village was Arnold Douwes, a gardener from the Achterhoek. He joined the resistance led by Johannes Post. Douwes kept a diary on small notes that he put in jam jars and buried.
He writes how difficult it is to find shelter with the villagers for people in hiding. The excuses he hears: “Lack of space, talking children, or maidservants.” He especially belongs in it “selfishness.” “I do not wish my goods and God to risk my freedom for another.” And he had his tactics to break the resistance of the villagers. “To lie.” Say a young Jewish girl is coming for one night. And then send a couple and then “don’t hear from you for three weeks”. Hoping that by then people have become attached to their Jewish divers and don’t want to get rid of them. Were the villagers afraid and wanted to sell their people in hiding? Douwes gave ‘not at home’.
Now that there are hardly any people alive who survived the war as adults, we have to make do with the testimonies of the children of that time. As a three-year-old John Bamberg was housed in Nieuwlande, on the farm of the Van der Vinne family. He remembers how a lady cycled along the road past the farm and offered him an apple. In return, he had to pee. She saw that he was circumcised. That night all hell broke loose. He didn’t understand. Not then, and not yet.