Arnhem

Fortified in body and soul, she went to find Ken, who had, she learned, been wounded. He was in a ‘ward’ upstairs. ‘I go there and find many people I know. Ken is in a lot of pain but is terribly brave.’ And so was she, for from that point on she was an active nurse and inspiration to the wounded. She downplayed her own role in her diary and insisted afterwards that the wounded were the real heroes. But they knew the value of her presence and remembered her contribution. Reg Curtis thought she was ‘wonderful’ and singled her out for mention in his Arnhem memoir as a key member of a nursing team that worked ‘with grit and determination’ and stretched themselves to the limit and beyond. He had a vision in his head of ‘this very young-looking girl, floating by, carefully stepping over and around the wounded on the landing where I was’. He saw her bravely dashing downstairs to the front door with her brother to help bring in new casualties whenever they arrived, an increasingly frequent occurrence as, outside, the odds tipped even more in the Germans’ favour. Another wounded soldier remembered how the young volunteers brightened up the whole place. He was struck by their cheerfulness, despite this terrible situation in which their own home town and their own homes were being blown apart. He felt ‘among friends’.⁴

But, for Anje, in managing to conceal her true feelings of fear and horror from patients like him, there was a personal cost that she paid for the rest of her life. ‘I was just a young girl caught in the middle. I couldn’t really believe it was happening to me. A few days ago I’d been playing and full of hope that the war was nearly over. Now I was among the dead and wounded. I grew up so very quickly but it made a mark on my soul.’ Some of the losses were personal bereavements, shocking to a teenager. ‘My friend, Bytje, died last night,’ she recorded about a girl she knew who’d been brought to the Tafelberg. ‘A splinter hit her head and destroyed the skull. Her father stayed beside her until she died. Poor man. She was such a lovely girl and a good skater. Now we will never see her again. Another friend is here too and is severely wounded. A piece of shrapnel has gone right into her back. The doctors have given up hope. Both girls are seventeen, the same age as me.’

She did the rounds, helping where she could. ‘I go to a Tommy who has lost both his hands, and I help him to smoke a cigarette. We talk about books, England and his home and we are away for a minute, out of this hell. For a while I sit in the cellar and listen to the shells and I know it is all in vain and hopeless. I am afraid all the time. I can’t bear the noise any longer and the knowledge that every shell kills people. Upstairs I take water to two patients on stretchers. One of them says he is sorry to be such a nuisance and sorry that Oosterbeek has been so badly damaged. They keep on saying they are sorry for me. Not their own lives, but our lives, our village, our future is what they are worried about. Even in this mess. They are excellent chaps but the situation is getting worse by the minute. The English still say Monty is coming. Are they really so naïve to think we still believe that? Or do they just say it to comfort us? But I do wonder why Monty doesn’t come to relieve these poor chaps of his who have been fighting for five days and five nights without sleep, food, water? They are so exhausted. It is too much. It makes me very cross.’

The next day, Sunday – a whole week since the airborne invasion began and her world had gone mad – she was woken by enormous explosions and her courage melted away again. ‘I cry. I feel lost and alone and a little bit crazy. I don’t want to die, not now, yet we are facing death. We could well be killed in the next hour or so and be buried underneath the rubble. Daddy is desperate too for he has nothing left to treat people with and he feels a great responsibility for them.’ One of the army surgeons joined the casualties when a shell burst in the foyer and hurled him through the doors of what had been the hotel’s dining room but was now the hospital’s main ward. Curtis was scared too. ‘Our men were still doing their damnedest outside but the Germans were slowly closing in, though they had to fight like mad to gain every inch of that bloody ground. Suddenly there was an almighty explosion in a room on my right, and men already wounded once, twice even, were hit again. Some were killed.’