“I was not afraid. When it comes to your life, you are not so easily afraid. Especially because you were already familiar with death, because we died anyway! Of starvation. So that didn’t mean anything to us.” In Utrecht, Frans Melein was confronted with war and resistance at an early age. Also at home. Both father Melein and his two brothers were in the resistance: “I had to do very dangerous things. You had seen a clock, but no clapper and it was the same in the house. When I lay in bed they walked all over me. The bedroom window was always open, because if they fled, they could go out through the bedroom, over me.”
“Once, when I came out of the bedroom, I saw all kinds of vouchers: green, pink, blue… Don’t forget that, those colors were so beautiful! When I got out of the toilet I had to face the wall to the bedroom, it was locked. I wasn’t allowed to see that, dude! Because I didn’t know they did that, commit robberies and steal receipts and stuff.” Frans is full of stories about his childhood in Utrecht. He would leave before he was ten years old.
At the end of 1944, Melein goes with a children’s transport, by ship, to the north of the Netherlands. Frans leaves from the Oranjekerk in Utrecht together with his sister. “Scary? You don’t think about that. The upstairs neighbor says to me: ‘Frans, you go to the farmers. And then you won’t get hungry again’. I didn’t know where Drenthe was at all! I knew nothing. I had never heard of Smilde .” Frans’ sister is placed in a foster family. The young Frans himself was ‘more difficult to maintain’: “I was a slut”. It was the beginning of a series of wanderings along several foster parents in and around Smilde.