THE SCARRED OAK. William Walraven
had parachuted around the city of Arnhem, sixty miles to the north, to protect the important bridge over the Rhine River. Fighting was heavy, and loses on both sides were high. In the late seventies, a movie, A Bridge Too Far, was made about this battle. The once-proud and fearful German Army was crumbling. The chaos and pitiful sight of a defeated army was breathtaking. Hordes of dirty, exhausted soldiers stumbled by. Trucks, horse-drawn farm wagons, or even wheelbarrows carrying wounded soldiers pushed by dead-tired comrades as they passed through the villages over the German border. It was a sickening sight. Eric remembered the beginning of the war when the German forces marched through the village while singing marching songs. An older soldier pushing a wheelbarrow stopped right in front of Eric to give his exhausted body a rest. Eric noticed that the badly wounded soldier in the wheelbarrow was very young. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old. Eric’s heart jumped in his throat.
This boy was not much older than he was. Eric walked over to the wheelbarrow and took the hand of the young soldier in his hands. A weak smile came on the dirty and painful face of the youngster, followed by a tear that slowly ran off his right cheek. When the older soldier resumed the march, Eric held on to the hand and walked beside the wheelbarrow until the next street, feeling sad about this young man, who was his friend for this short duration.
When the stream of retreating soldiers ebbed, an eerie peace fell over the village except for the sounds of the exploding grenades coming closer, sounds from the Allied forces, who were now in full force pushing forward. Within a few days, the mortars came whistling over the village and exploded over the border on the German side. The village children, being used to and having grown up during the war, quickly learned that as the grenades gave off a whistling sound, they were still in their flight path but that as soon as it changed over into a kind of murmuring sound, they would fall flat to the ground. That was the sound of a grenade coming down. In no time, they became so used to these sounds that Eric and his friends played soccer at the village soccer field while the grenades whistled overhead. Only a couple of times was the game interrupted, and that was when the sound changed and they had to fall flat to the ground. When a few exploded in the village, it was high time to run home.
Martha was already with the other two children in the basement when Eric arrived. Utterly upset that her son was playing soccer in this dangerous time, she gave Eric a slapping on his head, which baffled him. While blurting his lungs out, the only defending words Eric could bring out was “But…but they were still whistling!” After the barrage of mortars stopped for a while, the explosion in the village had killed a few people and an older nun in the convent practically next door to Eric’s. The nun, who was tired of constantly moving from her bedroom to the basement, was killed right in her bed. A shell fell through the roof, went through her body, and lodged without exploding into the basement floor.
On September 19, 1944, Eric woke up very early in the morning. Something had interrupted his sleep. The daylight was breaking through, and all the indications were there that it would be a sunny day. For the last couple of days, all Germans had left the village. Half awake, Eric heard the sound of running footsteps. Quickly he jumped out of bed and ran to the open bedroom window to find out what was going on. Leaning over the window, he noticed some movement at the corner of the street some fifty yards away. It was a strange-looking soldier with a rifle in his hands, ready to fire. He nervously looked around the corner, observing within seconds everything the experienced mind of a front-line soldier possibly could detect.
Eric remembered that this was practically the same scene he witnessed at the start of the war four years ago, except that these were possibly Americans. Quickly Eric pulled back, his body shaking with the excitement not only from what he just witnessed but also by instinctively knowing the danger he’d been in from the nervous finger of the ready-to-fire soldier. He realized that this was the first American soldier in his village because for the last few days, the villagers had known that the Americans were breaking through. Very carefully, he took another glimpse down the street. Now he saw more soldiers running from one hideout to the next.
Full of excitement, Eric woke up the rest of the family by shouting, “The Americans are here!”
In no time, he got dressed and wanted to run outside, but Martha quickly got ahold of him and warned him that it was too dangerous to go outside now. Eric was too excited to listen but was stopped short in his tracks when at once all hell broke loose.
The whole hillside on the north end of the village was covered with heavy American guns and tanks shooting at will over the village and into Germany. In seconds, the whole family ran for safety into the basement. The thundering noise of the heavy guns were ear-piercing. Martha, sitting beside John on a wooden bench, prayed loudly, a rosary was gliding through her fingers. For a moment, Eric, who was sitting on a big bag of potatoes, closed his ears with his fingers and thought about the wounded young German soldier and hoped that he was not on the receiving end of the mortars. For an hour or so, the shooting went on, but then except for a few guns, it stopped.
About a half hour later, the door of the basement swung open, and Willem shouted, “Come out. We are liberated! The Americans are here!”
Outside, the streets filled up with outrageously happy villagers. All over the village, the long-hidden Dutch flags were hung outside windows. People were shaking hands with one another, and it was perfectly normal for the young ladies to kiss every American soldier they could get their hands on. Soon the roaring noise of an American tank came rolling down the main street, already covered with flowers, followed by a whole stream of tanks.
Eric walked alongside one of the tanks and looked up with admiration and the highest respect to the tank commander, who was in control of this huge noisy machine of war. The tank commander waved back at the happy, well-wishing villagers, and when he discovered Eric, he took something out of his pocket and threw it to him. Not knowing what it was, Eric picked it up from the street, and while watching the commander, who tore off the wrapping paper and stuck it into his mouth, Eric did likewise. It tasted sweet and minty. After some hours, when Eric ran home, he mentioned to his mother, “These Americans have funny candy. You can keep on chewing, but it never gets less.” It was the first chewing gum Eric ever tasted.
For days, the festivities went on. Dancing in the streets, the singing of the Dutch national anthem, and the noise of the drunken villagers gave the Dutch people a time of blowing off the anger, frustration, and depression they had kept inside for nearly five years. No one went to work. The days became wilder and wilder after the liberation. Constantly, the resistance movement, with bands on their arms with the letters “OD” (which stood for “resistance movement” in Dutch), drove trucks and cars, loudly blowing their horns through the villages and cities, followed by hysterical, screaming people to pick up not only German collaborators, their girlfriends and wives, but also innocent people. Someone had only to point a finger at you, and you were branded. Some innocent people in small communities never out lived the shame that was put on them.
Even Eric’s father was pinpointed. One afternoon, a loud, horn-blowing car, followed by hysterically shouting villagers, stopped in front of the house. Not really understanding what was happening, Eric’s parents ran to the dining room to look out the window. At that moment, rocks were thrown through the windows, and one rock cut Martha’s forehead. One of the ODs came into the house and showed Eric’s father that he was on the list of people to be picked up. Both men knew each other very well, and after they both discussed the situation, they decided that it must have been a mistake. Instead of going with the waiting auto, John promised that he would go the next morning to the city hall, where the OD headquarters were located, to clear his name. When the OD person went outside without Eric’s father, the bloodthirsty crowd hurled more rocks through the windows and destroyed beautiful vases and pictures and his mother’s pride and joy, the china cabinet with all the crystal once hand-ground by John in his younger years.
It took a couple of pistol shots in the air for the OD person to calm down the crowd and explain to them that this was all a mistake. Only when they drove away to his next victim did the crowd follow them, but they had left Eric’s family in a state of shock. It took John only a couple of minutes the next morning to clear his name, but it took many years for the whole family to be fully accepted again by some of the villagers.
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