8. The Occupation between January and August 1944

The evening curfew started at 8 pm and you had to make sure you were indoors before then. I would sometimes visit my friend Adriaan Zanen after supper to do homework together. He lived at the corner of Brediusweg and Paulus Potterlaan. 

In the winter it would already be dark by then. Usually I would cycle over. Like all other bikes, mine had a dimmed lamp giving off just a little beam of light, just enough for oncoming traffic to see the cyclist in time, but wholly inadequate for the cyclist himself to see where he was going. For safety reasons, I always made sure I stayed on the cycle path.

One evening, I accidentally rode my bike right into a group of people standing outside a German military nightclub. I shouted, "What stupid idiot just stands on the bike path?"  

The reply came back in German, accompanied by a kick in my behind. I realized I had ridden into a group of German soldiers chatting up some local girls.

One day I was working in the vegetable garden when I heard the distinctive noise of an approaching V1 flying bomb. The sky was overcast and there was nothing to see. 

Suddenly the motor stopped, which meant the flying bomb had started its downward glide. Knowing it would soon hit the ground and explode, I crouched against the wall of the caretaker's building, making myself as small as possible. 

I don't know what happened to the bomb, because I never heard an explosion. Presumably it simply flew on ahead and made a soft landing in the marshy Naardermeer without exploding.

Adriaan Zanen and I often took long walks through the moors and the woods between Huizen, Blaricum, Laren and Craayloo. Later, when leather for shoe soles became scarce, we had to stop these wanderings. 

Eventually the situation became so bad that our shoemaker would resole shoes only on prior payment of not only money and ration coupons for leather, but also food for him, which was in extremely short supply.

In our apartment above the bank we had a large pantry with built-in cupboards. Long before the German invasion, Mother had started to stock up and continued to do so until everything was rationed. She always tried to replace whatever we consumed with new supplies so nothing would go bad. 

This turned out to be very sensible and we benefited greatly. The difficulty, of course, was that nobody knew how long the war would last and how long our food supply would need to last. 

In the last 'hunger winter', we had almost nothing left to eat.