Engelandvaarders are those people who were able to leave The Netherlands and arrive in England.
Volunteers have read the formal interviews 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.
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 and 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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My father was one of 7 children, member of a close, but huge family.
With 6 boys and one girl, my gram was thought to be busy with her family full time.
In fact, she was one of the members of a network of family members who were almost all members of the resistance.
The house was large, had entrances in the front and back, a large cellar (with it's own entrance) and could be entered, especially at the back, unseen from rather far away because of the low garden paths which were overgrown by bushes. The gardenpaths were connected in such an unorganized way that people even got lost going to their own home when they entered the area from the other side of the huge block.
And the entrance from the other side...it was near the woods.
So the house was perfect to leave and enter unseen and hide people.
Because we had a large family there was no need to involve strangers in the activities, some of the members were connected to the liasons which were connected to other liasons of other groups of the resistance.
After the war I heard many, many stories about the activities of the family, ranging from exchanging lists of people who should be deported into lists of people who were nowhere to be found, warning young people to lave the city, smuggling goods, decoding messages from England and sending coded messages to England, stealing foodvouchers and falsifying them, and helping crashed airmen to leave the area.
It is believed my father went to England with one or more of the pilots.
He never said a word about how he left, only that he was in England in 1943.
When we were in France he suddenly appeared to understand the language quite well, which was amazing, because he only spoke Dutch and English, and he knew his way around in Paris. Which was suprising as he always said he'd never been there.
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