A Street in Arnhem by Robert J. Kershaw

Author:Robert J. Kershaw [Kershaw, Robert J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Non-Fiction, War & Military, World War II
ISBN: 9780711037540
Google: o-e8ngEACAAJ
Publisher: Ian Allan Publishing
Published: 2014-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Siege of the Street

Cellar life: the Dutch

The two figures writhing beneath the dirty blanket in the dark stuffy cellar in the Pietersbergscheweg could have been mistaken for casualties. But the gasping moans suggested pleasure rather than pain. When they were exposed to the light everyone was shocked. The cellar was just south of the Hotel Schoonoord and barely 250 metres from the advancing German line on the street. It was a place for the wounded, not love. Whether interpreted as lust or love, the scene anywhere else would be regarded as normal, but in Oosterbeek under siege the norm had become the bizarre.

Doctor Gert van Maanen was treating the wounded here, and his 17-year-old daughter Anje described the reaction: ‘Daddy is furious and he sacks the girl.’ Many of the young Dutch girls had developed a crush on the paratroopers, but Anje felt this was beyond the pale. ‘I don’t know what has happened to them both,’ she confided to her diary:

‘But I wonder whether they have gone mad. Fancy, making love in a hell like this, they must be mentally disturbed.’187

Yet they were surrounded by hundreds of people trying to kill each other outside on the streets just beyond the confines of the cellar.

Nine-year-old Wil Rieken lived only 250 metres further east at No 178 Utrechtseweg. Her father Johan ran the bakery and had confided to his family that ‘it is going wrong’. There was little point relying on structural support from the corridor any longer – it was time to shelter in the cellar. ‘It was a very old house,’ Wil recalled, ‘with a good cellar, but it was full of bakery things.’ It had to be shared with the grocer’s family, a mother and two daughters, from next door. Like many of the street’s inhabitants, they had now to intimately cohabit with relative strangers, which could prove embarrassing.

‘The thing I felt very ashamed of, being a little girl, was to go to the toilet. There was just a little bucket or something and it was placed under the open steps leading down. I do remember I had to go desperately and finally my Dad said he would stay in front of me and that no one could see; but for me, the worse part was that they could hear! I felt ever so upset.’

She felt ashamed, being the first to admit she was a ‘Daddy’s girl’. Nevertheless, Wil did derive comfort from her straw play-dog Bota, and had been clutching him for five days now. She would do so until the end – indeed, he is around today. The young girl, like everybody else in the cellar, had no idea they were on the front line. The vanguard of the assaulting German soldiers from Möller’s SS Engineer Battalion 9 was only a few streets away along the Utrechtseweg.188

‘My parents had their bedroom on the same level as the living room and there were two big windows facing south,’ tactically advantageous when the house was engulfed in fighting.

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