Arnhem

The Dutch were distraught. Anje van Maanen had been exultant at the arrival of the British soldiers and, when a stranger among the jubilant crowd celebrating on the main street of Oosterbeek had suggested that the Germans might well be coming back, she had dismissed him as drunk or mad. Now she wasn’t so sure. She and her brother Paul watched from their attic window as khaki-clad airborne soldiers who earlier had been parading openly through the town began showing signs of nervousness. They were hugging the cover of buildings, avoiding crossing the road: ‘All very strange.’ Four Tommies, as she called them, had taken up residence in what had been a German slit trench, and she took them some tea. Two were washing and shaving and another was pulling on his pipe. They seemed relaxed enough. ‘Is Monty coming soon?’ she asked eagerly, and they replied, ‘Within the hour. We’ve just heard it on the radio.’ They told her that the Airborne had captured the bridge at Arnhem and were now simply waiting for XXX Corps, the spearhead of the British Second Army, to relieve them. She wasn’t totally convinced. ‘We can hear guns in the distance. Clearly, the fighting around the bridge is still going on.’

As if to confirm this, she saw wounded soldiers being driven into her street and taken to the Tafelberg Hotel, where she knew her father was running a field hospital to help the British. Earlier she had shuddered and screamed at the sight of German corpses in the street, ‘their dead eyes staring at me’, and now the carnage was continuing. ‘I don’t dare to look at the jeeps passing our house carrying the wounded. Suddenly, we hear a whistling noise above our heads. Bullets! We are being fired on and we are scared. It must be a German sniper firing from a tree or a rooftop. We hide.’ Her father came home with tales of treating the wounded and urged her to visit one young soldier, whose birthday it was. ‘I promise I’ll go but I’m embarrassed, and I never do, which is sad because he died.’ That night, as evening fell, so did the optimism of the day. ‘There is more shooting now and we have a queer feeling that things are not going as well as we hoped. The great army is not here yet.’ The family stared into the distance from the rooftop and could make out lights on the road from Nijmegen to Arnhem. ‘We think that must be Monty. But we are also a little bit afraid. Outside, the shooting is louder and getting nearer.’

In the morning, the news was no better and, if anything, worse. Apparently, the Dutch resistance groups had been told to take off their orange armbands. ‘The situation is still too dangerous for them to come out in the open. Better to wait until all is safe. We are terribly disappointed. This must mean that things are not going well with the liberation. Are we going to have the Germans back again? Oh no.’ Anje’s anxiety was not allayed when she spotted coming down the street not Germans but ‘very strange figures with trolleys, bags and suitcases. They look like beggars. Who are these people?’ She went to the front door and was told they were refugees fleeing from Arnhem. ‘I think to myself, how ridiculous. They must be out of their minds. But more and more appear – young couples, old tired women and men. And they are all carrying things or pushing prams. There are weeping kids too.’ She was gratified to see the Tommies climb out of their trench to help – ‘they are such gentlemen.’ The stream, though, seemed endless, as now were the jeeps passing on their way to the Tafelberg with wounded lashed in pairs across their bonnets.

The refugee situation hit home when family friends, the Aalbers, arrived in the street with their bags and asked if they could stay. Their house was on the outskirts of Oosterbeek, but there had been fighting and they had taken fright and left. ‘They look terrible, exhausted and almost mad with fear. Over tea at the table, they tell us how they had a little British tank in their garden which was firing at Germans on the other side of the railway track. The Germans fired back and set their house ablaze and they had to flee through a rain of bullets, climbing over the gate and creeping through gardens.’ All this was a shock for Anje, the more so when she was sent to her room to pack in case she had to flee too. ‘I thought we were free, that the war was over. The future had looked so perfect. I just couldn’t understand it. I was devastated.’ Upstairs, she crammed a cardigan, new black shoes, socks, stockings, underwear and a toothbrush into a small bag. ‘I also put in my little box with a few jewels in, but Aunt Anke takes them out and says it’s better to put them in the safe.’