You could hear the laughter of welfare worker Gerrit Poels when “the authorities acted idiotic again,” says his wife Angelique Poels. “Then he did not immediately comment, but first started laughing very hard.” For example, when someone he assisted first had to go through administrative hassle to get a provision from the municipality. If you need help now, you should get help now, thought Poels.
According to that motto, he always went to work himself. The Tilburgse Poels, also known as ‘Pater Poels’ – he was a retired priest – ran a crisis shelter for the homeless until 1990. Anyone could just walk in and out; there were only basic rules.
After 1990 Father Poels became the ‘Broodpater’. Until he was 88, he delivered free bread to people who needed it throughout Tilburg. He did this at night, so that the needy need not be ashamed.
In his 2009 book on Poels, A foolish existence, Arjan Broers described the tight schedule of the Broodpater. Seven days a week he went to bed at half past six. At one o’clock in the morning he got up. Then he hung his bike full of bags of bread and cycled for hours through Tilburg to hang the bags on doorknobs of houses. Then he collected leftover bread from the baker for the next night, and then sorted it at home.
will of the father
Poels grew up in Berg en Dal, near Nijmegen, in a poor family with seven children. His father was a village policeman and very strict with his children. “Before the war and during the war, there was no escaping the will of the father,” Poels said in a 2014 interview with producer/director Joost Van Der Werf. “And that will was: if you could study well, you would become a father, brother or sister.”
So happened. As a twelve-year-old boy, Poels was sent to Tilburg where he became an apprentice to the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, a congregation within the Roman Catholic Church. He was terribly homesick for home there. And here, too, the regime was strict. Poels was bad at it. “At the end of the novitiate, my parents gave me a watch,” he recalls A foolish existence. “They must have saved for a long time, for they were as poor as Job. The next morning we had to show our presents to the new superior, and he decided what we could keep. I had to leave that watch behind, he sent it back to my parents. Incomprehensible.”
In 1954 Poels became a priest, after which he started teaching Dutch at the minor seminary. In the course of the sixties he heard from an acquaintance that an aid center was being set up in Tilburg. He wanted to commit to that. He did so to such an extent that he was already in charge of it when it opened in 1968. A year later he retired as a priest. He believed that the church should be closer to the people.
Everyone welcome
The emergency center grew into the crisis shelter Huize Poels. It was an unprofessional organization, without permits, subsidy, business plan. “We had no meetings, nothing was discussed, there was no policy,” says Hans Opbroek, who shared the directorship with Poels for years. That was typical Poels: he had no use for authority and bureaucracy. The people could be helped without better.
Everyone was always welcome in Huize Poels: addicts, victims of domestic violence, psychiatric patients. “He was unconditionally ready for all people who were homeless for whatever reason,” says Opbroek. “It was sometimes difficult for us. If you had just kicked someone out with seven colors of shit in your pants for misconduct, you started a new shift in the morning and he was admitted again. It was not always easy for us to fully understand and live through Poels’ philosophy. It took me years to master it, but I always admired it immensely.” Foster daughter Nienke Poels: “People don’t come for nothing, he always thought.”
Poels said goodbye to Huize Poels in 1990, when it had to move to another location and the reception center grew out of its jacket. Gradually more rules and bureaucracy also came into play. Poels didn’t like that, so as Broodpater he started helping people in a different way.
Strawberries
Why Poels was so eager to help, he himself was not sure. Daughter Nienke says that he was a “sensitive man”. He himself always said that he thought it might be because of his own “dents,” which made him understand how powerless and sad people could feel. He suffered one of those dents when he felt so displaced among the missionaries.
Another he suffered in World War II. “What he saw then made such an impression on him. That has bothered him all his life,” says his wife Angelique, with whom he raised six foster children. “During the bombing of Nijmegen he lay flat on the street. And the bodies were piled up in front of his house in Berg en Dal.” There was heavy fighting in Nijmegen and the surrounding area in 1944 during Operation Market Garden, an Allied offensive against the Germans. The students of the missionaries had been temporarily sent home because of the operation.
Poels lived in Tilburg for the rest of his life. Father Poels was known and loved there. “He was engaging and intelligent,” says Johan Willemse, who was a coordinator at Huize Poels. “A real language virtuoso too. He once said about the residents: ‘Not all strawberries go to the auction.’ When outsiders heard such expressions, they could be shocked. But the residents even knew it was a joke, or meant to put things into perspective.”
Although Poels was a very sweet man, according to Willemse he could “set very hard boundaries”. For example, if he saw someone drunk harassing a woman in the house, he would just throw him out on the street. “But it was never a final goodbye.”
A version of this article also appeared in the May 20, 2023 newspaper.