Arnhem

On the edge of Arnhem, on a hill just outside the city’s northern boundary, Heleen Kernkamp, a nurse from Amsterdam who had been staying with friends in Arnhem when the fighting began, volunteered to help in an aid post for refugees which the Red Cross had hurriedly set up in a former school. She had known hardship in her life. Her father was a well-to-do businessman who had lost everything in the Wall Street Crash, reducing the family to poverty. But as she watched the wretched line of dispossessed persons coming towards her, ‘a pitiable moving train of suffering’, she had never seen such human misery. She could barely believe that a whole town was to be emptied – ninety thousand people in all. ‘There were men, women and children carrying mattresses, blankets, suitcases, bulging sacks, whatever they could manage. Mothers had a baby in their arms and two or three other children at their sides, crying and wailing.’ Seeing her nurse’s uniform, they turned to her in their distress. ‘Sister, I have been disabled for eight years and I can’t walk.’ ‘Sister, my husband has been sent to Germany, I have five children and the sixth is due any moment.’ ‘Sister, where are we to go?’ She had no answers and no solutions, no transport to summon up, no food to distribute. ‘I was swamped by a feeling of misery so great I felt it would choke me. I hated the Germans, who were to blame for all this.’ This bitterness would last a lifetime. Half a century later, she confessed that the sound of someone speaking German ‘gives me a physical shock’.

She was told that the German explanation for the evacuation was that the British were about to carpet-bomb the town. She thought that unlikely. Later she concluded that the evacuation was a punishment, ‘a retaliation by the Germans for the help and assistance the people of Arnhem and the Resistance gave to the British soldiers. The same goes for the comprehensive ransacking of the abandoned town during the months following the evacuation. The whole population was made to pay dearly.’

Her aid post was overwhelmed as Arnhem people poured in, queuing for hours to register their names and the addresses of friends who might take them in, and then waiting. There was no system in place to deal with them. They milled around, with nowhere to go. Her specific task was to run an infirmary for the sick, and soon she had four hundred of them – the old, infirm, cripples, invalids, those with terrible wounds from being caught in the fighting. ‘The place swarmed with people crying and clutching each other and asking “When do we leave?” and “Where are we going?”’ Her most vivid memory of this tidal wave of people washing up around her was ‘the shuffling feet and eyes full of anguish’. The floors of her building were solid with people, while outside hundreds waited in the rain on the off-chance of getting in. Many were very scared, especially those who had come from Oosterbeek. ‘It was very hard keeping them calm.’ An air raid turned distress into terror. ‘One woman clutched me with such tenacity that I could not pry myself loose from her to comfort all the others.’ Heleen had nothing with which to nurse the really sick. ‘We had to lay a totally paralysed man on a horse-rug on the bare floor, next to a woman who had just suffered a stroke, because we could do nothing else for them.’ All anyone could do was wait, in the forlorn hope that some transport would turn up. ‘Everything with wheels had been requisitioned by the Germans. We had nothing.’

In time, though, transport began to arrive, in dribs and drabs, first a private car, then a horse-drawn cart or two. The sick began to leave, packed on open carts and with no protection from the pouring rain, but away at last to Apeldoorn, where there was a hospital to receive them. Those who looked back could see that Arnhem was no longer theirs. Germans were ransacking private houses and hurling furniture and household effects through windows. With her hundreds of charges gone, Heleen joined teams who went down into the shattered town to search for anyone who’d stayed or been left behind. A house-to-house search uncovered eighteen people trapped in an air-raid shelter with a blocked entry. But moments of elation like that were rare as she tramped the dead streets, surrounded by destruction. Oosterbeek was the same. She went there secretly with a girl who was taking food to three British paratroopers hiding in the cellar of a heavily damaged house. ‘One of them had a bullet wound in his arm which caused him much pain. Alas, I could not do much for him. As for the once peaceful village on the banks of the Rhine, with its pretty church, grand houses and well-tended gardens, it was now a mess of broken-down vehicles, weapons, clothes, empty tins and containers, rubble and glass. Not one house, she noted, was complete or undamaged.