It is very important to Erik Dijkstra to remind us of the ‘forgotten strike’. From Hengelo, Haaksbergen to Heerlen, half a million Dutchmen stopped work in 1943. He wrote a book about the how, why and consequences of those few days of massive resistance Strike for life and death and made an eponymous three-part TV series. He was there on Monday night Khalid&Sophie to remind us of the first broadcast that same evening. Khalid wondered why this strike was not compulsory at school, and why there was no national day of remembrance, as was the case for the February Strike (1941) in Amsterdam. An explanation may be that this strike was something of the province. Villagers who had sometimes never seen a German soldier in the war years before the strike, protested.
The reason: the Wehrmacht called on all former Dutch soldiers to report for work in Germany. They already had “our machines and materials,” says a descendant of a striker. “Now they also wanted our men.” The employees of machine factory Stork started: they stopped work on April 29, immediately after lunch. Telephonist Femy Effrink then called all factories to – “spread the word” – to call on everyone to strike as well. Farmers, shopkeepers, municipal officials, at the peak, a large part of the country was flat. Painful to think now, afterwards, safely and in peacetime, that it was possible to offer national resistance when Dutch fathers and breadwinners were threatened with being called up. But how many Dutch fathers, mothers and children had already been taken away without a revolt?
By the way, there was another telephone operator, Gré Hekket of the Dutch Railways, who called on all station heads to strike in a telex. She was betrayed, the NS management handed her over to the occupiers who captured her. She survived, but refused to ever travel by train again after the war.
Tree trunks on the road
Erik Dijkstra makes a nice tour of all the places where the strike left traces in people’s lives. Starting in Marum, Groningen, where Foppe de Jong (93) never spoke about that one day in 1943 that would mark his life. Shortly before his death, he still tells his “horrible secret” about the Marum mass murder in May.
There was already dissatisfaction among the miners in Heerlen before the strike. The occupier had taken away their Sunday day off, the workload was too high and they had already had to hand in their carrier pigeons. In Nieuwe Pekela, orthodox Reformed people hung out with communists, they took the NSB mayor out of the town hall and threw him into the canal. In Blauwhuis, Friesland, the strike is remembered as the milk strike, farmers emptied their milk cans in protest.
Reports of the strike reached Hitler, who ordered a strong response before the uprising spread to Belgium and France. Hanns Albin Rauter, the highest SS man in the Netherlands, had to put down the strike. He did this by having not too many but just enough people – strikers or not – shot or arrested on the spot and then shot.
Similarly in Marum. There, German technicians had encountered tree trunks on the way to a military position. Foppe de Jong remembers that, at the age of 12, he stood by the road to ‘take a look’. He had been bedridden with tuberculosis for three years, he says. “I also wanted to experience something.” Being arrested, that seemed like something to him. His father sent him away, only to be arrested a little later himself, along with fourteen other men and Steven, aged 13. Boyfriend of Foppe. He had put those trees on the road. But I, says Foppe, I had thought of it.