THE SCARRED OAK. William Walraven
Why couldn’t he play with Nico, or why couldn’t Nico come over to their place? He questioned his mother repeatedly.
“This day of all days, you stay home, and Nico stays home also. To stay home one day a year isn’t too much to ask, is it?” his mother frowningly replied.
“Why don’t you play a game with Johann?” his father called out from the living room. “That will keep you busy for a while.”
“I’m reading!” Johann shouted back. “And I don’t want to play with him anyhow.”
This was all right with Eric because he was not too crazy about his older brother anyhow, and he knew that in no time, they would be in fights. So he just as well had to make the best of it that day.
In the winter, John had afternoon shift twice a month. Martha, after the children went to sleep, enjoyed the quiet evening sitting beside the warm kitchen stove, reading her history books, which she loved. In the evenings, she always wore slippers with a large “pom” on top. If she sat very still, a small mouse would come through a hole in the corner and nestle itself in one of the poms.
When she told Eric about this, he did not believe her. So she said, “Okay, Eric, this evening, instead of going early to bed, you can lie on the couch, but you have to be very still.” After some time, very boring to Eric, a mouse came out of the hole. It was twitching its head nervously in all directions to make sure that the surroundings were safe. Then it nestled itself in one of the poms. Eric was amazed at the sight, and he watched it a for a while. The next thing he heard was his mother telling him to go to bed. He must have fallen asleep and had moved.
Martha told John about it. He was not particularly crazy about having mice in the house, and when after some time more mice visited the kitchen, he closed the hole with cement. That was the end of the visiting mouse.
Chapter 2
It was early May 1940. Eric woke up at the break of dawn. It was a crisp morning but promised to turn into a beautiful spring day. He lay there, daydreaming, while listening to his brother Johann’s deep breathing beside him. He finally got up and opened the window and looked down at the street to the crossing of his and the Main Street. It was very peaceful, except for Willem’s chicken rooster across the street, informing the neighborhood that he was awake. Eric was looking across the street, trying to find the rooster, when his right eye caught a movement at the crossing. When he turned his head, he saw a soldier in a strange green uniform crawling around the corner and, with his short automatic machine gun, looked up at the flat-roof house across from him.
At that time, he noticed Eric and very quickly pointed his gun in his direction. Eric had no idea what was happening and just waved at him. The soldier took a few seconds and then made a sign to someone to follow him. Soon two then three and then more followed around the corner. Eric watched for some time the passing of the soldiers until an eardrum-breaking racket from the very low flying German bombers made him jump back from the windowsill and run screaming into the upstairs hallway.
His mother rushed to him; grabbed him and his brother, Johann; and calmly but quickly helped them down the stairs. In the meantime, she tried calming them down while explaining that war had broken out. Eric was about six years old at the time, and the only airplane he had ever seen was a small two-decker high up in the sky. These big bombers must have scared the living daylights out of the whole district. Maybe this was the intention of the Germans, because except for a couple of shots fired and a few Dutch soldiers killed, the war—or better, the resistance of the Dutch forces in that part of the country—was over.
After the first wave of airplanes passed over the village, the sound changed to the noise of armored vehicles and thousands of boots of the marching German soldiers hitting the Main Street in the direction to the close by city. This marching went on for hours.
The children had quieted down by now, and after Martha made sure it was all right for them to go outside, Eric grabbed a quick sandwich and ran down the street and joined Nico and other children at the corner of the street to watch the soldiers marching by. He didn’t know what war all was about, but for the children, it was exciting. They waved and saluted the soldiers, and some of them smiled and waved back. One of the soldiers pushed a small puppy, which must have been a couple of weeks old, into Eric’s hands. He took it home and showed it to his mother. She immediately noticed that the puppy was covered with lice, so she washed him with warm soap and water. She dried him in a towel and gave him back to Eric. After some discussion with Nico, they called him Prince. This puppy grew up to a beautiful large shepherd and, besides Max, the horse, became Eric’s closest friend in many adventures during the wartime years.
When marching subsided, an uneasy calmness came over the people. They clustered together, discussing this abrupt event. One family, thinking that the Germans would take all the food supplies, went with a big round washbasin to one of the village bakers and had it filled full of loaves of bread. This gesture exploded the villagers, and everyone rushed to the stores, buying everything they could lay their hands on, not realizing that the food would spoil without the availability of refrigerators or freezers at that time in the homes. The only cool place was a very humid basement with dirt floors, where potatoes and apples, besides preserves, were kept for the winter months. The result was that after a week or so, most of this food ended up in the garbage. However, this incident made the war a reality and was the start of a nearly five-year-long cruel World War II.
The Dutch Armed Forces, however small, fought bravely for five days against the overwhelming German forces. These few days gave England time for their defensive actions and allowed the Dutch queen and her family to escape to England. After a few days of fighting, the Germans demanded that the Dutch surrender. If Holland didn’t surrender, they would bomb and flatten one city at a time. The German high command kept their word. They bombed Rotterdam flat, killing roughly thirty thousand people, and promised to come back the next day to give Amsterdam the same fate. Holland surrendered. Within weeks, a large part of Western Europe fell to the mighty German masters.
After Holland surrendered, the first item on their forever-growing list was the confiscation of all radios (TVs were not yet in existence). This was easy because in Holland, a radio was a luxury item, and consequently, everyone possessing a radio would pay taxes for it. It was only a small task for the Germans to obtain these lists. Everyone on this list was notified to deliver their radio to the nearest specified location.
Eric’s father, noticing that the German soldiers didn’t inspect these radios, dismantled the inner radio parts, tightened a rock in the inside chassis to give it some weight, and got his name off the list. He mounted his radio in an old couch in the kitchen, and all through the war years, it was never discovered. Many evenings after the children were in bed, some of the trusted neighbors supposedly played cards in the kitchen but were actually listening to Radio Orange, the voice of the Dutch queen in England. Also, coded messages were transferred back and forth from the Dutch resistance group.
Another proclamation forbade anyone from being on the roads after 8:00 p.m. Only people with special permits, like coal miners or anyone going to or coming back from their jobs at night, had to wear a yellow band on their left arm, permitting them on the roads. If caught, it meant automatic prison or, worse, being shot on the spot. Naturally, this was no problem for the inventive Dutch people. Holes were made in private hedges, and fences were torn down in their backyards, which made an effective network of new communication roads. Also, local resistance people used this network for a quick getaway during the many razzias held by the Germans. Many of the Dutch National Socialistic Party members collaborated with the Germans after the surrender of Holland and became the Dutch’s most fierce enemies. They worked closely together with the German Gestapo (short for Secret State Police) and the well-known SS. Through this trash of Dutch people, thousands of fellow Dutchmen (Jews and resistance members alike) found their dead in one of the German concentration camps or were shot instantly.
The first few years of the war didn’t change Eric’s life at all. The world and its problems seemed to go over the heads of the village children. His first love was still the farm. Except for plowing the fields, which was done with a single blade plow pulled by Max and where