13. December 1944: Cutting down trees for fuel

After the shooting of her husband by the German soldier, Mrs. De Bruin moved to a house just beyond the ‘Gooische Boer’ in Bussum. There was a wooded area next to her new house. To keep warm in the winter, and, more importantly, to cook food, you needed fuel. 

Source: https://www.historischekringbussum.nl/images/2016/DeLaatsteLoodjesTVE2016.pdf

Dick and I went over and found ourselves a nice little tree that would do just fine. It was thin enough to cut down with a normal hand saw, but thick enough to give us a reasonable amount of wood. Just when we had sawn, with great difficulty, through half the trunk, we saw two men with a large dog approaching on bicycles. Quietly, without appearing to have seen us, they leaned their bicycles up against a fence. We took no chance and fled with our axe and saw. We jumped over hedges and hurried through gardens and only stopped to hide in the cupboard of an empty garage of a large villa. 

We didn't dare return to our little tree until the next day. In the meanwhile somebody else had finished off our work and left behind only the stump.

The three Duterloo boys and their father approached the issue of trees a little better than we did. They lived around the corner at 1 Vladimirlaan. A couple of relatively large Linden trees stood in front of our garden along Prins Hendriklaan. One evening, between dusk and the 8 am curfew, they managed to fell one of those trees with an ax, saw it up, transport the wood home and hide it all from sight  This was quite an achievement!

(Anton Duterloo was one of my classmates. I met his older brother Hero, who was in hiding at the time, quite by coincidence in Sweden many years later, in 1955. The Dutch light cruiser ‘De Zeven Provincien’ lay anchored in the middle of the harbour of Stockholm. A friend had invited me to come on board. I was taken to the ship in a motorboat manned by naval cadets. After climbing up the long gangplank and having officially greeted the flag flying from the stern, I noticed to my astonishment that the officer at the head of a row of sailors forming a guard of honour was none other than Hero Duterloo.)

In December, the Wehrmacht held manoeuvers in Bussum. Groups of armed soldiers worked their way through gardens and along the houses. Most were very young. Dutch citizens had been ordered to stay indoors. We watched it all from within. A couple of recruits had gathered in Adrian Zanen’s garden. One had just pulled out the pin of a hand grenade, when an officer unexpectedly addressed him. Distracted, the recruit forgot to throw the grenade away, and a moment later his hand was blown off.

By then, newspapers were reduced to just one page due to the shortage of paper. Most of the news was related to the war effort. According to the German propaganda, German armies were advancing with great success on all fronts. But if you followed the frontline on a map, you saw precisely the opposite was happening. We soon learned to read between the lines, a skill that I still use today. Not only the number of pages of the newspaper diminished: in the winter of 1944/45, the page size became smaller too. Eventually, after all was said and done, there was just half a page.

Although I was unaware of it at the time, this must have caused a certain problem at our house. In 1943, I started collecting interesting war news. I still have quite a few of those half page newspapers. When toilet paper was no longer available, people started using newsprint. With eight people in our house, as well as my hobby, demand must have been much greater than supply. 

It's unlikely that we'll ever find out how Mother addressed this issue.