War story: Part II

By Jack Krayenhoff

A measure was announced which made us uneasy. Hitler had not hidden his views of the Jews as a despicable race, but his plans for the ‘final solution’ were not known at the time, so when all Dutch were required to fill out a form stating how many of their grandparents were Jewish, we became worried. ‘Oh, don’t worry’, the nazis said, ‘just an administrative measure. It’s only that we like to have accurate statistics. And we want them to be complete, so if you don’t submit your declaration, your telephone will be cut off’. That was a pretty stiff penalty, before the days of Email and texting, for refusing to make a statement that after all was nothing but the truth, and what can be wrong with telling the truth, after all? So most Dutch complied.

But we shouldn’t have. It did not take long to see which way things were going, for soon an announcement came, in the papers and on posters on walls: Jewish school teachers and university professors were no longer permitted to teach. This caused great indignation, especially among the university students, and as all my three brothers were university students, our whole family was closely involved in this affair. In protest, many students went on strike, whereupon the Germans said, ‘OK, from now on, only those students may attend university who first make a declaration of loyalty to our regime.’ Most students of all universities but one refused to comply, whereupon the Germans simply closed those universities, and ordered the students, as all non-essential workers between 17 and 40, to register for labour in Germany, to enable more German men to be drafted into their army. 

Of course the students wanted to avoid this, and many went into hiding. The Germans now started to conduct so-called razzias (an Italian word for ‘plundering raid’) in unexpected places and at unexpected times, whereby groups of people were contained in a space from which there was no escape, like a moving train, or a concert. Every single man from age 17 to 40, who could not prove he was irreplaceable in his job, was taken and shipped to Germany. Many students were caught that way. I myself escaped this danger by having my I.D. card expertly modified to show that I was 16, while in fact I was 18 at the end of the war.

My three brothers and one sister could not use this device because they were all older than me. Moreover all four joined the ‘resistance’ or ‘underground’, which made it necessary to assume completely new identities on their I.D. cards, including a statement of being indispensable in their jobs. They began to lead a shadowy existence, in which nobody knew their real name or address (in the resistance groups this was universal practice, so that, if anyone got arrested, he would be simply unable to betray his co-workers, even under torture). Nobody, my parents included, knew where they were staying. Occasionally they might suddenly show up at our home, but only rarely and just for a day or so, because home would be the first place the Gestapo would check if they were looking for them.

My father was in charge of the Utrecht office of the National Department of Waterways. In the fall of 1944, when the Allies had liberated the southern part of Holland, below the Rhine, the Naziwanted to flush them out by piercing the river dikes on their side. For this they needed data that only my father’s office could supply, and in the process my father got to know their plans. It so happened a telephone line that had escaped the Nazis’ attention connected his office with that of his colleague to the south of the Big Rivers. Via this line he was able to connect with the Allies and keep them posted about the Nazi plans.

Evidently somebody at his office had betrayed him, for one evening after 8 o’clock, which was curfew time, there was a heavy banging on our front door, with cries of ‘Aufmachen! Schnell!’ This could only mean one thing: somebody was going to be arrested. Not knowing about my father’s activities, I thought they might be looking for me, for I myself had been printing, in a hidden room of a very old house in the old city, news bulletins made by (illegally, of course) listening to the BBC, and distributing them. These were a great morale booster to the Dutch, because the German news was completely unreliable. I opened my bedroom window, clambered down a drain pipe into the back yard and from there to the neighbour’s yard and house. I waited till it was clear the Germans had left, returned home, and found it was my father they had taken.

This was very bad news indeed. The Germans had the habit that if their prisoner was easily proven guilty of sabotage, he would be executed, but if there was some doubt, he would be shipped to a concentration camp in Germany, with a very dubious outcome. (In fact, by this time two of my brothers had been arrested and

 put in a concentration camp; one survived the war, but the other did not. This did not come to light until after the war was over. My third brother, whom the Gestapo was trying to catch very hard for spying, had succeeded in crossing the lines and made his way to England for training, to be parachuted back into Holland to further organize the spying network.)

Now my father’s skin could only be saved if he had a credible story to explain the evidence against him. But he had a disposition that made it impossible for him to lie. Fortunately the investigator assigned to his case was a realist, who saw there was no doubt which side was going to win the war, and that after the war he might well find himself in the position my father was in now. By that time it would not hurt to know a Dutchman who would witness in his favour. So he might ask my father, ‘Herr Krayenhoff, how do you explain that the Allies seemed to know exactly where and when our engineers were going to blow up the dike?’ And when my father started to stammer, he would come in with ‘Of course, what you wanted to say was, “Did you consider the possibility that the Allied code breakers knew exactly what the coded instructions of your headquarters to the Corps of Engineers were?” and my father would say, “Of course, of course, that’s what I wanted to say!” So this, and similar things my father ‘intended to say’, became the investigator’s report, and his conclusion and recommendation was that my father should be released forthwith. He was, and to our delighted amazement, two months after his arrest, the doorbell rang, and there he stood, alive and unhurt! And indeed after the war, when the investigator stood in the dock, my father became a witness for the defence.