Engelandvaarders are those people who were able to leave The Netherlands and arrive in England.
Volunteers have read the formal intervieuws taken after their arrival in England and put the routes they took on maps.
I should be able to find my father there.
Problem is that the entrance to the files is not very well keyworded.
Submitted a request at the National Archives.
Before the form was submitted they wrote that the waitingtime would be 2 weeks, after it was submitted: 9 months.
That was like a slap in the face.
Well, we'll see what happens.
They will first have a look if there is something to be found.
They will report this.
Then they'll inform me about the costs of someone getting the records.
We'll see.
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Son 2 arranged to get Dad's death certificate.
We filled in the request form for Dad's records.
As we couldn't send the needed money, because the MOD requested to send it through a payment system we don't have, and none answered my mails, it was carefully enclosed with the request.
We checked the address several times and send it.
Then the wait started.
It was well before the pandemic hit us, undermined a lot of societal functions, and made us want everybody to be well and happy again.
But we now have Dad's death certificate.
But the records????
We don't have them.
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Young people went into hiding during WW2 because the Germans took them from the streets and transported them to Germany to work in the war industry.
My father was at a much desired age, so we never doubted it was one of the reasons he went to England.
Another problem was that his face was spotted at different places in town at a regular basis. The Dutch just noted it (I was told by someone in the neighbourhood), but the Germans took notice.
He became a danger for his resistance group.
So we always thought those were the reasons he left the country.
He used to say: "to free our country from the sky."
Roaming online to learn more about the resistance in a rural area nearby I found a name I recognised from the conversations between gram and other family members who were in the resistance.
I tried to reconstruct his activities during WW2 and then suddenly saw our family name.
To make a long search short:
One of the family members was a priest working at a cloister south of the city.
He had been hiding people and his cloister was also a hub in the escape route of RAF military on their way home.
He was betrayed.
The Nazies interrogated him, but as the resistance group was his own family he didn't say anything at all.
They tortured him, but the lives of his family members were far more important than to break.
As they couldn't get through to him, they shot him.
That was end 1942.
So maybe that was also a strong reason for my father to leave the country an go to England.
A long time ago someone told me dad went with one of the aircrew on the escape route and went with him all the way.
There is no proof of that at all. Or is there?
He knew the way through small streets in Paris.
He was transported to Nova Scotia in spring 1943
So he went through Europe in the winter....HOW??
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