Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  On May 4, a little over a week after the airlift began, German commanders in Holland, northwest Germany, and Denmark officially surrendered to General Montgomery at his new forward headquarters near the German city of Hamburg. Shortly before nine o’clock that night, a stammering announcer on a Dutch resistance radio network broke into regular programming to announce that Holland was now officially free. “Long live the queen!” he exclaimed. “Long live victory!”

  For the second time in ten days, the country went mad with joy. “I saw people dancing in the street; they were jumping up and down,” a man in Rotterdam recalled. “Honorable burghers who would never lose their composure, and certainly would never run, were now racing around like boys, hugging each other, throwing their hats in the air.” In The Hague, a teacher who had spent the last two years in hiding ventured outdoors for the first time to join his neighbors in their celebration. “It gives me a shock to see them,” he wrote in his diary. “Some are so thin that I hardly recognize them….It is terrible—their pale, emaciated faces—but the joy shines in all their eyes, the happiness for our newborn freedom.”

  In another Hague neighborhood, residents abruptly stopped their merrymaking when they heard over a radio in a nearby window the strains of the “Wilhelmus,” the Dutch national anthem, whose playing had been forbidden by the Germans. Their voices trembling, a few people began to sing, with others joining in: “Wilhelmus of Orange am I, of Dutch blood; true to the fatherland am I till death.” Composed in the sixteenth century during Holland’s eighty-year fight for freedom against the Spanish, the anthem, in the words of the Dutch writer Henri van der Zee, “expressed the longing for freedom that our forefathers had felt.” The solemnity was shattered a few minutes later, however, when a gramophone down the street started playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Van der Zee, who as an eleven-year-old boy took part in the celebration, noted that the title of the jaunty American jazz tune reflected how the Dutch “felt about the Allies. I, who had never heard it before, listened spellbound while some people began to dance.”

  Dutch crowds greet their Canadian liberators with flowers in May 1944.

  All over the country, there was dancing that spring, mostly to the music that the Canadian and British troops who now marched through the Dutch streets brought with them. Loudspeakers on street corners played “Moonlight Serenade,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “The White Cliffs of Dover,” and “Don’t Fence Me In.” The soldiers taught Dutch teenagers to dance the swing and handed out gum and candy to the children. In return, a British war correspondent wrote, “We have been kissed, cried on, hugged, thumped, screamed, and shouted at until we are bruised and exhausted. The Dutch have ransacked their gardens, and the rain of flowers which falls on the Allied vehicles is endless.”

  All the festivities, however, couldn’t mask the fact that Holland was a terribly blighted country and thousands of its people were still dying. General Alexander Galloway, the head of the British military’s relief effort, saw this for himself during a nationwide tour. “On first appearance,” he reported to his government, “the condition of the people has proved unfortunately very deceptive. Allied soldiers were greeted with cheers and bunting, and made their progress through a smiling countryside. But it was deceptive because men and women who are slowly dying of starvation in their beds cannot walk gaily about the streets waving flags.” He went on, “It is an empty country, inhabited by a hungry, and in the towns, a semi-starved population.”

  Two journalists who had just arrived in Amsterdam were besieged at their hotel by dozens of emaciated people begging for food. A doctor they interviewed told them that at least thirty thousand Amsterdam residents were close to death. In The Hague, the wife of the British ambassador to Holland, who had returned to his post after five years of war, reported to Winston Churchill about her visit to one of the hospitals there: “The babies were tragic. They looked like old men—or else they lay in a semiconscious state….Most of the cases we saw had very distended stomachs, but no fat at all on their arms and legs. Many of them were bleeding at the feet.” Her husband, Sir Nevile Bland, added his own postscript: “There is no possible doubt that undernourishment is universal and starvation and semi-starvation lamentably widespread.”

  Yet bad as the situation was, the worst was over. Thanks to a massive infusion of medical aid and food from Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, and other countries, hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens were nursed back to health over the next weeks and months. One of them was Audrey Hepburn, who would live with the aftereffects of the war for the rest of her life. Never weighing more than 110 pounds, she continued to suffer from some of the health problems she had developed during the “hunger winter.”

  That, however, was all in the future: for now, she lost herself in the euphoria of the moment. Her older brother, Alexander, emerged from hiding as an underdiver, and her other brother, Ian, who had been forced into slave labor in Germany, walked 325 miles to return home to Arnhem. “We had almost given up when the doorbell rang, and it was Ian,” she recalled. “We lost everything, of course—our houses, our possessions, our money. But we didn’t give a hoot. We got through with our lives, which was all that mattered.”

  —

  EVER SINCE SHAN HACKETT had returned to England in early February 1945, he had kept an anxious eye on the events unfolding in Holland. During that period, he had spent much of his time briefing the War Office and other government ministries about the events at Arnhem and the contributions of Dutch resistance fighters and other civilians in saving his life and those of other British soldiers. But his main focus was on seeking aid for the Dutch. In doing so, he was greatly troubled by what he saw as Whitehall’s remoteness, its seeming unconcern, and its lack of understanding about what the Netherlands was enduring.

  In late April, the British brigadier received the news for which he had been waiting: Ede and the area around it had been liberated. He arranged to hitch a ride on the next RAF cargo plane to Holland and hurried home to gather the bundles of goods he had collected for the de Nooij sisters and their family: “packets of tea (real tea!), coffee, sugar…tinned goods, clothes and other presents—and the precious letters from my family at home to my other family in Holland.”

  When he landed the next day at a military airfield in central Holland, a British Army car was waiting for him. In less than an hour, Hackett was back in Ede, his joyous mood matched by the weather. When he had left three months before, it had been gray and cold; now the sun shone, the trees were leafing out, and flowers were everywhere. But, as he noted, the changes went far deeper than the passing of winter: “A leaden pall of mourning had lain over this town when last I saw it. Now everything was as gay as a village wedding.” Dutch flags were intertwined with Union Jacks in store windows. Streets he remembered as mostly deserted were now thronged with people of all ages, “looking about them as though they had never seen the place before, smiling, laughing, shouting to each other.” Along the way, he recognized familiar landmarks: the church with its high steeple, the houses he had passed on his strolls with the aunts, and, most memorable, the post office where he and Aunt Ann had pushed past German soldiers to post her potentially deadly letters.

  “With the certainty of a sleep walker,” he directed the army driver down Ede’s high street and into the narrow roadway where the de Nooij sisters lived. He got out with his packages and stared for a moment. Before him was the white fence “whose gate I had opened so often, the shape of whose latch I can still feel in my fingers. There was the little house, with the tidy curtains to the sitting room below.” And there was Aunt Mien, standing in the doorway and smiling broadly. “There was no surprise upon her face as she came to meet me, only shining happiness, but she was in tears and laughter at the same time as I embraced her.” Then the others crowded around—Aunt Ann, Aunt Cor, Marie, Johan—“everybody laughing and crying and talking at once.”*

  Rummaging among his packages, Hackett retrieved the coffee, and Aunt Mi
en whisked it away. Soon they were all sitting around the big kitchen table, savoring it—Hackett drank from the mug that had been his months before—and the little cakes he had also brought.

  “Did you get my message?” he asked. “Did you hear about the gray goose?”

  “Three times,” Aunt Ann said. “We were so pleased and thankful.” With a laugh, Aunt Mien chimed in, “We danced a jig around the table, every time! I do wish you could have seen us. Oh, dear!”

  For Hackett, the rest of the day passed in a happy blur. Like a small boy, he embarked on a thorough exploration of the house. Everything was neat and spotless, just as before; the only difference he noticed was the location of the radio. Once hidden behind a cupboard, it now stood boldly on a table in the sitting room. On the upstairs landing, he lifted the carpet and trap door beneath, then climbed into the hiding place the family had created to protect him from the Germans. In the barn, he picked up the ax and saws he had used to cut wood, feeling again “the sharp cold on my hands and smelling the fresh pine sawdust.”

  Within minutes, word of Hackett’s return had spread through Ede, and a stream of visitors began to arrive: the pastor of the church where the family worshipped, the Dutch doctor who had treated his wounds, members of the resistance who had helped him escape. Later that evening, Hackett remembered, “we sat down together to supper again as one family and read the Bible again together after it. Everything was just as it had been before—but somehow a hundred times better.”

  At one point, he noticed Aunt Mien gazing intently at his smart paratrooper’s uniform. “What is it?” he asked. “I had a wish,” she answered, “and it came out all right. I couldn’t tell you, of course. It wouldn’t have come true then.”

  Hackett remembered how, during the family’s modest little New Year’s Eve celebration four months before, Aunt Mien had told everyone that they should wish “for what we wanted most in the New Year.” As she had said that, she had stared intently at Hackett and the darned black jacket he was wearing. At that moment, “she looked up and our eyes met,” he recalled. “With a tiny flash of an almost guilty smile, as though she had been found out, she looked away.”

  Now, on that lovely spring evening, he took her hand. “I think I knew what it was even then,” he said. “It was to see me back here in uniform, with all that would mean.”

  “Yes, that was it.” She smiled. “And here you are.”

  That night, Hackett slept soundly in the familiar little bedroom upstairs, with its treasured emblems of the love and security he had found in this house: the lace curtains, the neat white counterpane on the bed, and Sleeping Beauty on the wall.

  * * *

  * As General Galloway, the British relief official, indicated, the country towns had suffered less from the famine than the cities had; though much thinner than the last time Hackett had seen them, the de Nooijs were not starving or close to it, as so many other Dutchmen were.

  On April 26, 1945, Queen Wilhelmina returned to the Netherlands after nearly five years in exile. Her arrival was almost as unceremonious as her abrupt departure in May 1940. When she landed at an RAF airfield in the southern part of the country, there were no bands, no cheering crowds, no massed troops to greet her—just a small British honor guard and her son-in-law, Prince Bernhard.

  Liberation for most of Holland lay more than a week away. The massive airdrop of food would begin the next day. But even if she could venture no farther than the three liberated Dutch provinces, the queen decided she had been gone long enough. Her tiny retinue consisted of only four people: her daughter, Princess Juliana, who had just returned from Canada, and three aides, all of whom were Engelandvaarders. They were Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema and Peter Tazelaar, the dashing, hell-raising Dutchmen she had befriended when they had escaped to London in 1941. The third was a young secretary named Rie Stokvis.

  The composition and small size of Wilhelmina’s entourage were her idea. They were, she later said, “in keeping with the changed times….[I wanted] to surround myself with people who had taken part in the resistance or had been Engelandvaarders—‘nobles’ in the best sense of the word.” According to Roelfzema, “Rie, Peter, and I were symbols. We had…active war records, were young and of common birth. Nothing about us recalled [the queen’s] former, highly formalistic, and class-conscious surroundings, against which she nursed bitter resentment.”

  After Wilhelmina’s RAF plane landed on that rainy spring morning, Roelfzema and Tazelaar jumped out onto the airfield’s wet grass, helped push a mobile stairway into place for her and Juliana, then stood at attention on either side of the stairs. A few minutes later, the queen, dressed in a brown tweed suit, hat, and boots, appeared in the plane’s door. Taking a deep breath, she paused for a moment and looked around. Roelfzema held out his hand to help her down the steep steps, but “she ignored it pointedly,” he recalled. “Her first step back on Holland’s soil after five years of exile, leaning on someone else? Unthinkable!”

  For the next three weeks, Wilhelmina and her minuscule court took up residence in a small, stately manor house in the countryside, a few miles from the town of Breda near the Dutch border. The house, called Anneville, lay at the end of a row of beech trees. It had a curving drive, wide lawns, enormous shade trees, mounds of flowering rhododendrons, and a pond full of croaking frogs.

  Although there was no official announcement of Wilhelmina’s return, the news rapidly spread. On the night of her arrival, a guard hurried in to inform her that hundreds of people were heading up the drive. Ordering all the lights in the house to be turned on, the queen and Juliana stepped out onto the stone terrace in front. Five years before, as she had escaped from the Netherlands, she’d been deeply worried about what her people would think of her. Now she had her answer.

  The gates were opened, and a huge throng of people—cheering, crying, singing, waving Dutch flags—pushed through, all of them there to welcome her home. Night after night, the scene repeated itself: countless men, women, and children walked or bicycled miles to Anneville, where they stood in line, sometimes for hours, to see and shake hands with Wilhelmina. “At first, Peter and I reveled in the processions, standing behind the Queen in our beribboned uniforms, gazing out impressively over the multitudes,” Roelfzema wrote. “But it soon palled. It was all too intimate for bravado, too sad. From the eyes of the crowd, sunken deep in wan, pallid faces, something spoke that put our cheap vanity to shame, something between the people and their Queen from which we were excluded.” One night, concerned that Wilhelmina was on the verge of exhaustion, Roelfzema told guards to hurry the people along. Overhearing him, the queen let him know what she thought of his order. “In my garden, nobody gets pushed around,” she snapped. “Don’t you ever forget it.”

  Although she retained her queenly demeanor, Wilhelmina refused to return to her former royal way of life. To her aides’ dismay, she insisted on sharing her subjects’ frugal existence, including the use of ration cards. Farmers in the area had filled Anneville’s cellar with fruits, vegetables, and other scarce foodstuffs, but when strawberries were served to the queen on her first day there, she refused to touch them, saying, “I do not intend to eat anything that is not also available to the people.” Fearing that such meager fare would damage her health, her aides occasionally tried to circumvent her wishes, once giving her steak for dinner. She took a bite, then stared suspiciously at Roelfzema. “Captain, this is steak,” she declared. “Yes, Majesty,” he replied. When she shot back, “Is everyone in Holland eating steak today?,” he had to say no. She refused to eat any more, even when he pleaded that the farmers would be hurt if she kept refusing their gifts.

  On May 4, Wilhelmina was working in her small study when Peter Tazelaar rushed in to tell her of the liberation of the Netherlands. She jumped up and vigorously shook Tazelaar’s hand, all the while slapping his shoulder with her other hand. Soon she began the long, joyous process of reuniting with all her people.

  Her first stop was The Hague. As
despoiled as that once beautiful city had become, no one seemed to notice the ugliness that day; their sole focus was on their returning monarch. Tens of thousands of people, waving flags and carrying orange banners, flooded the streets, shouting, “Long live the queen!” As Wilhelmina’s Packard convertible proceeded slowly along the route, the enormous crowds repeatedly broke through the police lines to cheer her. At times, her car was almost swallowed up in a sea of humanity.

  According to one onlooker, this extraordinary outpouring of loyalty and affection was due to the mythical stature that Wilhelmina had assumed during the war, “synonymous as it was with liberty, pride, and Holland’s national heritage.” But the reason was more complex than that. Though Wilhelmina had indeed enhanced the country’s monarchy and history by her resolute defiance of its occupiers, she had also succeeded in another, more personal goal: to break out of her hated royal “cage” and become one of the people. During her years in London, their sacrifices and suffering had become hers, a fact they recognized. As Time magazine later noted, “War brought Queen Wilhelmina a sense of comradeship with her people that she had never known. They respected her before. They loved her now.”

  —

  LIKE HOLLAND, NORWAY WAS occupied by German troops until the last days of the war. Not until V-E Day, on May 8, 1945, did the 365,000 German soldiers in the country begin to lay down their arms in earnest.

  In the end, Norway’s fate, like that of the other occupied nations, was largely determined by its geography. Since it was of little political or strategic importance to any of the Big Three, it remained a sideshow throughout the war. Though there was a major disadvantage in that—Allied troops would not be available to liberate the country by force of arms—it also meant that Norway was not turned into a battlefield and could regain its independence without interference from its major partners.