Arnhem

Piet Huisman and his family, meanwhile, had managed to cling on within the Arnhem boundaries despite the German threats. They had been forced out of their own home, but not far away, on the edge of town, were the buildings and compound of what had been an agricultural and folklore museum. A shanty town was growing up there, to which the Germans must have decided to turn a blind eye. His family found a place in a barracks, among a display of antique Dutch sledges. The living was hard. ‘There are ninety-three people in this one building,’ he recorded in his diary, ‘and we each have a two-and-a-half-metre space on the stone floor. It is very cold with no heat. Later we got some straw to lie on and found an old wood-stove for cooking. We don’t have a lavatory so everybody goes outside in the woods. At night we take turns at guard duty in case of shells and firing. The Germans still say that if we dare to go home, they will shoot us on sight.’ But a defiant Huisman did just that. He needn’t have risked his life. When he got to his house, it had been ransacked. As he sneaked away, he was shot at, but the bullets narrowly missed him.

Life in the barracks and the camp spreading outside it continued in its hand-to-mouth way for more than a month. There were constant scares. The SS searched the camp for British paratroopers still evading capture – ‘we have some hidden in the woods and others are in the tombs of a cemetery. We take them food every day.’ One day, the German police came, selected twenty people for slave labour and took them away. Another day, a member of the Resistance who had been harbouring British evaders was captured and executed outside the barracks. All the men in the camp were made to watch as he was put up against a wall and shot.

Finally, the Germans moved in and closed down the camp and sent the Huismans and all the other occupants there away. Arnhem was now entirely sealed off, a ghost town. From that point, it was methodically and thoroughly plundered by special salvage detachments sent in by the Germans. These ‘gangs of robbers’, as Heleen called them, stripped every home and sent the spoils by train to Germany. What they didn’t haul away, they vandalized. They used antique clocks for target practice and rubbed treacle between the strings of grand pianos. Sheets and clothes were torn to shreds. People who returned after the war found their homes had been used as stables and were strewn with horse manure. Many inhabitants who came back were struck by the absence of birds, as if nature itself had turned its back on these desolate ruins. The once busy and thriving Arnhem was ‘a sombre, brooding place, full of horrors,’ wrote one observer, ‘a town of the dead. And no birds. It was deathly quiet. Even the sparrows had flown away.’⁵

One of the most tragic outcomes of the failed Arnhem expedition – sadder even than the 1,500 dead airborne combatants and the 6,500 who went into captivity – was that the people of the Netherlands, far from being freed, were made to suffer grievously for eight months until their liberation. They were left behind – in the lurch, some might say – as the focus of the Allied drive into Germany shifted southwards. Come the spring of 1945, an air and river assault would finally cross the Rhine, but 40 miles upstream from Arnhem. The due-east direction of this thrust bypassed the larger part of the Netherlands, leaving it firmly and oppressively in German hands for the duration of the war. Denied food supplies, close to twenty thousand people starved to death, and those who lived survived on foraged tulip bulbs and boiled nettles.

It always bewildered and impressed Arnhem veterans when they returned to the Netherlands for regular post-war reunions that Holland’s misery was never held against them and their failed mission. At what became annual events of celebration, they were as fêted as they had been when they marched as liberators along the roads to Arnhem in September 1944. Yet, as one ex-paratrooper noted, ‘We did not achieve our wartime objectives and lost the battle. In the process we destroyed their town and villages and forced the inhabitants to experience their “Winter of Hunger”. Yet every time they greet us, nothing is too much trouble and their gratitude for our efforts has to be seen to be believed.’ ⁶