“It’s very strange, but on the day of the Disaster we overslept,” says 81-year-old Annie Both-Slinger in Waters. ‘We didn’t wake up until half past eight. A cousin came in, he had been flushed our way. We put him in my parents’ warm bed. There are a few more outside, he said. A woman with a broken leg was picked up with a wheelbarrow.’
In 1953, the largest Dutch natural disaster of the 20th century occurred. A severe northwesterly storm accompanied by a spring tide causes unprecedented flooding. 1,836 people die.
Show seventy years photographer Robin de Puy, who grew up in Oude-Tonge, where 305 victims fell, and poet Maria Barnas in Waters the deep traces left by the flood disaster on the survivors and their (grand)children. De Puy: ‘We have tried to make a loving document without covering up the pain.’
It has long been difficult for the people who experienced the disaster to talk about it, says De Puy. The motto was: don’t talk about it and work hard, then you will forget it. “Someone said: sometimes I secretly cry.”
De Puy believes it is important that their stories are heard now, all the more so because the threat of the water still persists and is even increasing. “I hope this book brings comfort to these people so that they no longer have to be alone in their grief.”
Some of the people portrayed did not sleep the night before their meeting with De Puy and Barnas. The stories they then told touched De Puy deeply, she says. Like the story of Ina Mackloet-De Korte, who was resuscitated by her brother as a child. Coincidentally, he knew how to do it because it was in the back of his school diary. Or the story of Bart van Kampen, who was recovering corpses at the age of 17. De Puy’s images and Barnas’ words made their shared experiences visible. “Where one person had seen a man float away on a bed, the other had seen him pass by.”
What De Puy remembers most is the resilience of those affected. She tells about Jo Tanis-Meijer who, as a 3-year-old girl, sitting on her father’s arm, saw how her mother, sisters and brother drowned. “She went through that grief and yet managed to create a life for herself in which she can also feel happiness.”
Robin de Puy and Maria Barnas: Waters. Hannibal Books; 57 pages. Available from January 24.