Children Against Hitler by Monica Porter

Author:Monica Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY/Military/World War II
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
Published: 2020-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Hortense Daman – A Grocery Delivery Girl With Fresh Eggs and Hand Grenades

The Daman family was central to the life of their community in the small Belgian town of Leuven, 25 kilometres east of Brussels. Stephanie Hortense ran the grocery store on Pleinstraat – a narrow street of terraced houses – which was a neighbourhood focal point, and her husband Jacques was a respected master shoemaker who worked at the Bata factory in Brussels. They had four children of whom the eldest, their son Francois, was a career soldier with the Belgian army as well as an accomplished athlete and equestrian. Their three daughters were Bertha, already married and with a child of her own, Hortense, and the youngest, Julia.

Opposite the corner house, which was both their store and family home, and across a square, was the guardhouse at the entrance to the big Philips electrical factory, an important local industry. Stephanie’s grocery business regularly supplied lunches for the workers there.

The Damans’ comfortable middle-class existence in this Flemish–speaking region of Belgium was dramatically altered by the onset of war. Francois was 26 when it broke out in 1939; Hortense, the sibling to whom he was closest, was half her age, at 13. Belgium had suffered horrendously from German aggression during the Great War and nobody really trusted them to honour Belgium’s stated desire to remain neutral in this new one. So it came as little surprise when Germany invaded their homeland in its grand sweep of the Low Countries in May 1940. Francois immediately became active in the Belgian Resistance.

Along with millions of others from the Benelux countries and France, the Damans became refugees and headed west to escape the blitzkrieg, on those dangerous roads clogged with desperate fleeing families and prey to Stuka dive bombers. After two weeks’ exhausting and demoralising travel on foot, they arrived in Lille on 29 May. But it was the end of the line. A German Panzer division had beaten them to it and an officer informed the Belgian refugees that their country had surrendered, the fighting there had stopped, and they had to return home. The Germans laid on trucks to return the Flemish-speakers to their homeland (they were considered culturally closer to the Germans and therefore more worthy), while the French–speaking Walloons were made to trudge back under guard.

When the weary Damans at last reached Leuven and their house, they were shocked to find it derelict, with the roof caved in (the result of artillery fire during the short-lived defence of the town), and looted of virtually every last item. It was a devastating sight. Equally alarmingly, they found that the Philips factory across the square, as a key manufacturing installation in the town, was now occupied by the German army. The earlier Belgian sentries in the guardhouse overlooking their home had been replaced by German soldiers. For the remainder of the war, the daily lives of the Damans would thus fall under the close scrutiny of the occupying authorities, which would have no small consequences for the hazardous activities in which they would soon engage.

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