Book tells wartime experience
“They were no heroes, they simply survived.”
This is the conclusion Waikanae resident Anne Geelen has come to upon researching her family history.
Despite being held at Amersfoort concentration camp in the north of Holland during World War II, Anne’s grandfather, paediatrician Nicholas Heybroek was allowed to send and receive letters.
Correspondence between Nicholas and his wife Caroline, who was also a doctor, while raising their family through the ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944-1945 and between the Heybroeks’ future son-in-law Alexander Geelen and Mieke Heybroek show what life was like for the average citizen during World War II, something that Anne believes has not been written about much.
“The letters are about really ordinary sort of stuff during the German occupation. There was a lot of stuff between him and his wife about the practice and how to keep it going.”
It is these accounts that Anne has curated together into a book.
Alexander’s letters were to Mieke Heybroek while he was studying at Delft University.
“His letters to Mieke while he was studying, while he was hiding, while he was a forced labourer in Germany, and when he escaped to return to Holland attest to another aspect of the occupation,” Anne wrote in the book’s introduction.
“That’s why I called it We Were No Heroes because they weren’t part of the resistance, they weren’t part of the army, they weren’t trying to do anything heroic, but they wrote down the things that happened to them.
“I didn’t do any interpretation, the book just starts with what they did.”
Letters from Alexander talk of him filling his time while in hiding by fixing a grandfather clock’s mechanics and creating jigsaw puzzles, glueing a picture on to 3ply then fret-sawed into many small pieces.
Caroline’s letters talk of concerns over the weight and health of her friends and family.
“Vegetables are freely available again — lovely because at once there is an oversupply. But the price!”
While these anecdote accounts are somewhat tame compared to accounts from soldiers fighting in the war, the book shows what life was like for people who were neither Jews or resistance people.
Despite not being Jewish, the accounts of this family were not always easy.
“At 8pm we still didn’t know what to do . . . because we had enough bread with us for about a week we were independent,” Alexander wrote on March 3, 1945 about his escape from a German work camp.
“After some discussion about the options we decided that we would still go but quickly without making much fuss and without making any farewells.
“We were on the run alongside a ditch and couldn’t continue because the barbed wire was now so close to the ditch that you could no longer go along it.
“After two kilometres climbing over barbed wire we could’ve gone further but the way didn’t look very easy.
“Then we decided to check out the way forward.”
Put together by Anne, this book of accounts from World War II is an interesting read about what life was like for nonJewish and non-resistance people, the people trying to live their life caught up in the middle of a war.