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By Root 1127 0

fighter-bombers strafed Dutch trains and roads. Whatever the shortcomings of Allied bombing policy—and its cost in Dutch lives—it is hard to exaggerate the surge of hope and excitement which every passage of the Fortresses, Liberators and Lancasters gave to the occupied nations beneath their wings. Theodore Wempe thrilled each time he saw aircraft and told himself rapturously: “They come! They come!” People stood on their roofs waving, and often thinking enviously of the Allied pilots flying home to lunch in freedom. In those days, Holland was an intensely monarchist country. Fierce argument persisted about whether their queen should have chosen exile in 1940 or should have remained to share the sufferings of her people. But Netherlanders were much moved when Allied planes dropped leaflets showing pictures of their little princesses, living in exile with the rest of the royal family. On Queen Wilhelmina’s birthday, some people set out their washing in Dutch national colours, provoking German soldiers to clatter angrily through the streets, tearing it down.

Transcending everything, there was hunger, the hunger of a nation. In every community in Holland, everyone knew the collaborators and black-marketeers, for these were the only people who were not starving. The German commandant of the concentration camp at Amersfoort celebrated Christmas Day 1944 by cancelling all food for the inmates, and holding an Appel lasting from 7 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. amid the snow of the frozen parade ground. The guards’ Christmas geese were hung upon the wire to mock the captives, until they disappeared into the German kitchens. Some food supplies were dispatched to Holland by the International Red Cross, but the Nazi authorities proved obstructive about distribution. Dutch people recalled that in 1918, when German and Austria were starving after their defeat, German and Austrian children were sent to Holland to be fed and cared for. Perhaps some of those young fugitives, they thought, had grown up into their persecutors and tormentors of 1945.

Petty deceit became a way of life—stealing cabbages and carrots from gardens, seeking to deceive a shopkeeper into supposing that he had already been given your ration coupon. City families waited weeks for their turn to hire a small handcart. Then they walked miles into the countryside on Hongertrochten—hunger treks—to find farmers with whom to barter furniture, sheets, clothing for food. Some country people found the opportunities for exploitation irresistible—accepting a gold ring for a handful of potatoes. The city-dwellers of Holland harboured lasting resentment against farmers who enriched themselves amid their nation’s agonizing privations.

By January, the daily ration had fallen to 460 calories. “Those who are hungry shout,” observed a Dutch newspaper bitterly on 30 January, “but those who are starving keep deadly still.” A profound silence had fallen over Holland, as people huddled in their houses, avoiding the smallest unnecessary activity to conserve energy. Schools were closed by lack of heating. Industrial and commercial activity was at a standstill. Only Germans, and their Dutch creatures, continued to use vehicles. Garbage piled in the streets, swarming with rats, because there were no means of collecting it. When civilians had exhausted supplies of pulped sugar beet, they began to eat tulip bulbs—140 million were consumed that winter. “Take a litre of water,” suggested a local recipe, “one onion, 4–6 bulbs, seasoning and salt, a teaspoon of oil and some curry substitute. Brown the onion with oil and curry, add water, bring to the boil, and grate the cleaned bulbs into the boiling liquid.” The outcome was repulsive, but possessed some vestiges of nutritional value. Jan de Boer, one of nine children of an academic living in the Hague, saw an ill-nourished horse defecate in the snow outside his home one morning. He was astonished to behold a passer-by descend from his bicycle and poke through the steaming dung, searching for undigested morsels of corn, which he ate as he crouched. A Dutchman