This undoubtedly affected my mother and I didn´t get much attention as my two older brothers really were a handful. 

Telling this, I feel a bit vulnerable, as this attitude of withdrawing in silence has been both a protection and a weakness that has followed me until today. When I met opposition or intense disagreement from a more powerful situation or person then I could handle, I automatically went into ´survival mode,´ and I became silent and quietly withdrew. On top of this, there was the psychological damage caused by WWII as well as its aftermath.  As an adult, there were times that I felt paralyzed and could not do anything or utter a word when I should have done so. This silence has troubled my marriage and has caused somewhat adverse reactions with people I worked with. I was not always so easy to be with either. I say was, because I know that God has healed at least some of these effects of WWII and its aftermath. I also experienced the positive impact of the difference in church structure. As a Protestant, I was a leader but didn´t have anyone to be responsible to. In the small circle where I worked in, I was a well known Mr. Counseling. Now, as a Deacon in the RC Church, I work in a structure, and I have people above me. This has given me a new inner rest.

My parents worked with the German invaders of the Netherlands. They invited an Austrian soldier to celebrate Christmas 1942 with us. I still remember how, while we were singing Silent Night, Holy Night, he cried and said,

There was just no talk in our family about WWII. I discovered some facts when I returned from Thailand in 1975. My mothers’ anger against the injustice of poverty that she suffered in her youth had made her very determined not to be silent anymore but to do something about it. Together with my father, she became an active member of the NSB, the National Socialistic Beweging (= Movement). It became a political party and received positive impulses from Nazi Germany. In January 2015 I was allowed to look in the Criminal Justice files of my parents. There is nothing I could find what he did there. Mother collected money for the party. I only recall one photo of my father in a black uniform, in a photo album of my uncle, Matthew. According to him, my father had a position in the NSB in Amsterdam.

A Jewish family lived on our street. They had a boy my age. My parents didn´t say anything negative about him or his parents and allowed me to play with him. One day when I wanted to play again with my friend I discovered that they were gone. I still remember how standing on the top of my toes, I looked from the street into their living room. I saw that the breakfast table was set. When I went a day later, it was still the same. I told my mother: “my friend seems to be gone.”  I still remember the sadness in her eyes. It told me that something bad had happened. She simply said: “ Yes, they are gone”… My parents became soon very disillusioned with the Germans. In 1943 my dad was able to become a Lord Major in Sas van Gent, a small town on the border with Belgium. This enabled him to back off from involvement with the Germans, and he became very protective of his village. Whenever a raid by the Gestapo was planned, the Lord Mayor of a town was informed. He made a note of any action that was coming and put that on his desk. He knew that one of his employees had contact with the underground forces and would inform them.

I witnessed one evening, how two SDers (members of Sicherheit Dienst, the German Security Service) came to our house. My dad told me to “hide in the bathroom and lock the door.” Just before I closed the bathroom door, I saw how my dad took a pistol from a drawer.

Thirty-five years (!) later father finally told me what happened that late afternoon with the two SDers: they came ´to set up a trap to catch the information leak.´ Dad played along, but they never found out that it was him who leaked that information. The political situation in September 1944 became tense. My parents decided that it was better if Mom, my three-year older brother Rien and I, moved to Germany, as they expected an uprising and my parents, still considered to be Nazis, could be a target.

Traveling in Germany was not that safe, to say the least. We were attacked by Allied planes and then had to jump out of the train and hide in the ditch. Somehow we were able to continue our journey. We were assigned to a farm in Mesmerode, a village in the area of Hanover. I went to a local school and picked up my first German. One incident is still clear in my mind. We were playing in the meadow when a British fighter plane spotted us.  I guess now that the pilot must have lost his wife and/or children in a bombing raid in England because he decided to shoot us. He came in low. My then ten-year-old brother Rien hid behind a birch tree. Later we found a row of bullets in that tree. Our German friend tried to run home but was shot in the hip. I just watched again frozen, unable to move. Then I saw my friend fall and also noted that the plane wasn´t giving up. It made another round and headed back to where I was standing. I started running home, screaming. He missed me somehow, and he came back yet another time. Before the bullets could reach me, I stumbled into the arms of my mother who pulled me into safety.

We celebrated Christmas 1944. Mother received two goosenecks from the farmers’ wife: “Here, you can boil soup of that…”. Mother thanked her and took it upstairs. There was a big stone oven for heating. The fire was burning. Mom threw the goosenecks in the fire as she said: “There, boil your own soup from those necks.” Years later we were still laughing about this. I will always remember the taste of the delicious ´plate cakes with blueberries.´

The bombings were getting closer. A yellow glow was visible at night as  Hannover was burning. A British bomber was shot down, and the wreck landed in a field not too far away from our village. I went to look also. We could even get into it. The big window at the back fascinated me.

The Germans were losing the war. The Russians were getting closer. Mother decided to go back to the Netherlands.

We arrived in a small town at the Dutch/German border and were assigned to live in a house where we could sleep in the attic. One evening the siren warned that planes were coming. Mother was ill. She couldn´t go to the safety cellar and said:

I was shivering with fear. Mom started to pray the Lord´s Prayer. After two or three sentences she just talked to the Lord as if He was there. As she prayed for our protection and for peace, a deep calm came over me. I noticed how my shivering had stopped. This was my first memory of what I now call “Powerful Peace.”

A memory surfaces: we were transferred to a larger town. A horse-drawn cart with coal was on the way to the local gas factory. My brother Rien ran to the wagon as he noticed that one of the gunny bags was torn and some coal was falling out. He picked up some of the coals that had fallen from the cart and brought them home. The next time that this wagon came again, he was prepared. With a bucket in his hands, he enlarged at a hole in one of the bags so that even more coal would drop. This time he had a full bucket. When my mom saw that, she made him stop, she told us that she was afraid that the police would catch him.

We went by Army truck to Groningen. A British plane spotted us, made a turn to shoot us. The alert driver noticed the danger, pushed the gas pedal and raced towards what I call a ´tree cathedral´ (a piece of the road which trees whose branches left and right touched each other). We got there just in time. We jumped out the truck and crouched behind the trees. As the plane roared over our hiding place, we were invisible to the pilot. That was a narrow escape.

We were again assigned to a tiny home in Hoogkerk near the city of Groningen. My father had resigned from his job as Lord Major and found out where we were and joined us in Groningen.

It was early April. Within three months I would be eight years. The last days of April ´45 were tense. The Underground had come now ´above ground.´

A memory:  I observed how two German soldiers in an officer´s car, drove towards our small village. A Dutch member of the underground forces shot at it. The vehicle roared back in reverse gear as one German started to shoot back and they got away.

Unbeknown to me, my father had left the beginning of May on a bike with wooden tires, over the long ´Afsluitdijk´ (connecting Friesland with Northern Holland) and went to Alkmaar (the cheese town). He stayed some time with an aunt until the first wave of the expected revenging would be over and then he turned himself in. After he had left, a Dutch soldier came to our small cottage to arrest my father. I was standing on the road. He walked up to me, drew a pistol and put it against my head above my ear and said:

I froze, couldn´t say a word and gave a death scream. My mother came running out of the house, shouting ugly words at him. She pushed him with her bare hands away from me. I still recall her shaming words. He walked away, with his head bowed, her words had really hit him, but I had ´died´ inside and became even more silent than before. This depression lasted until I was twelve. This incident was buried until 1972 when I was a missionary in Thailand.

We were taken to a concentration camp set up on the grounds of the Sugar factory. After some weeks my brother and I went to a government-children home in Groningen. There I had a fateful encounter with a pedophile. I have never forgotten him.

 We were transferred from Groningen to a castle in Haamstede in Zeeland in the South West of the Netherlands.  One day I walked into the pre-school part of the children home. In a glass cupboard, I noticed a toy car, with my name written on the bottom: FOR TÉO.  I recognized my name as in was not Teo, but Téo. I thought that my father must have made that toy for me, while in jail.  A staff member saw that I had taken the toy and she pulled it out of my hands.

she said and forcefully put me outside the room. I was steaming with anger. I had heard her talking to another lady about that she had to go to the dining room in the cellar. I raced down, knowing that there was a cupboard with an ax.  As she came down the round-castle-tower steps, I was prepared: standing on a chair, I was ready to hit her on the head. I still remember the rage in my body. Luckily an older boy saw me and understood what I wanted to do. He pulled me from the chair, took the ax out of my hands and hid it behind his back, as the lady flashed by, not giving us any attention. He saved me from severely hurting her.