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WWII Oral Biography of a Member of the Dutch Underground Recorded Spring 1971 by His Daughter [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-05-01

This is a long read, but it is a fascinating story. I considered breaking it into three parts, but I think keeping it whole works better.

I don’t know how bad things are going to get here. In some ways it might not be as bad as what happened in WWII, in some ways it may be worse. Many of they ways the Dutch managed to cope against the Germans may not be available to us (hard to keep anything secret with DOGE centralizing all of our private information to build a database of dissenters). But perhaps the courage of those in that war will be an inspiration to us.

__________

When I was nineteen I graduated from High School in a town called Wassenaar (in the Netherlands), and it was my plan to go to the University in Wageningen, which was a University for horticulture, agriculture, and plantations in Indonesia. (At that time the Dutch still owned Indonesia.) I was going to go to Indonesia and work on a plantation there. (I have a degree in agriculture, as a matter of fact.) Working on plantations was a big thing then -- they paid you lots of money.

This was at the time the Germans occupied Holland (the Germans overran Holland in 1940). In order to go to a university, the Germans required that every student first spend one year in a "labor army" which they set up. This was a group of young militarized students in uniform who walked around in a goose step with shovels over their shoulders rather than guns, and supposedly all they did were public works and good things for the country, while what they really did was make airports and help in all kinds of defense or aggressive military objectives rather than doing public works for the Dutch and I knew this, and I didn't want to be part of their regimented labor army and sing their silly songs and goose-step through the streets. I felt this was like joining the German army (which it basically was, because of the work they did), and I refused to go.

My stepfather said, "Oh, but you have to go, it's important that you get your University education." When I told him I didn't want to go, he got very upset.

But with the help of his parents (who I was very close to), I was able to resist his insistence.

We discovered that if I went to an agricultural college instead, I wouldn't have to join the labor army. They (the Germans) liked people to go there because they would take those people when they were finished and send them to Germany to work on the farms there to make German men free for the army. (This is what actually happened to me three years later -- when I graduated from school, I had a notice the day before I graduated to appear at a certain station to be transported to Germany to manage a huge farm. At that point I went underground. I say "underground" because that's a translation; in Dutch we call it "dive under.") I went to the agricultural college in the north of Holland and studied agriculture.

But before I went there, a friend of mine who knew I was going to go there said, "Look, I belong to an underground organization. They have asked me to organize the Underground in the north of Holland, and I don't want to do it -- would you be willing to?" And I said, "All right, let's talk about it." And he took me to a secret meeting, and they explained to me what this particular organization was doing.

Now, most people think that the underground was shooting people and blowing up bridges, which is part of underground organizations. But there are all kinds of operations. This operation concentrated on helping people who were sought by the Germans to escape to England or Spain, often to England through Spain: Jews, students, or whatever, either to let them escape or find a hiding place where they could "dive under" as I had to do three years later.

Another one of the rules was that every man between 18 and 35 had to be involved in an "essential industry" in Holland (which included farming), or they had to report and be sent to Germany and be put to work in the factories or farms or whatever. I was over 18.

I then had three choices: I could go into Germany (as I was supposed to do), go into hiding, or go to the agricultural college, where I would be safe for at least three years.

Another thing the Underground did was to get these people in hiding food coupons, and find them something to do. Hiding like that is like being in a prison, but a prison with the door open, but you don't want to go out because you would get shot or picked up and sent to Germany anyway.

My job was to organize two provinces in the north, Friesland and Gronigen, because they hadn't been organized yet, so there would be a network of people working in these two provinces to find hiding places, to work out escape routes and find food for these people.

In order to get my final instructions, they sent me to the headquarters which was in a way-off in a farm place where you wouldn't expect anything. And I went there.

They had given me a written message to take there, which was very frightening because I had it rolled up in a small ball in my pocket on the train, and the Germans searched the trains all the time. I would have thrown the thing out the window if any Germans came, but nothing happened.

In order to tell you this part, I have to tell you something else.

There were a number of my friends in High School who were members of the Underground, but we did not know this, because in order for the Underground to work it was important not to know who was in it, because if you got caught and tortured, you wouldn't be able to tell them anything because you didn't know anything. Your best friend couldn't tell you what he was involved in. The way it was organized, you knew a few people, who knew a few people, who knew a few people. This was a chain, and this chain could be broken. If one link fell out, the whole chain of command would be lost (which in fact happened a few years later).

Anyway,one of my classmates became a German sympathizer and walked around in a Quisling uniform (we called them another name, but Quisling is best known in this country). Another classmate, a good friend of mine, said to me one day, "You know, I know all they say about Harm --that was his name -- you know what they say about him, but don't believe everything they say." I said, "Okay, I won't believe everything they say, but they say he is a German sympathizer and he walks around in a Nazi uniform."

So I went to the headquarters of the Underground movement in this far-away farm-house, ring the bell, and who should be standing there but Harm -- and this guy was in his Nazi uniform! And there I was, with my secret document in my pocket, ready to receive my instructions about organizing the northern provinces, and I thought,"Oh, God, this is the end!" It was really horrible!

But Harm took one look at my face and laughed his head off. I said, "I don't think this is very funny!" And he said, "I think that you will find that it is. Come in!" So he took me into the house and told me he was part of the Underground, playing a double role. Accepted by the Nazis as a Nazi sympathizer, he got a hold of records and all kinds of information from the Nazis. He lived in this house and made everybody think it was a Nazi headquarters, while really it was the Underground's. I believed him because I knew him, and besides, what could I do? Besides, he didn't shoot me or call the Germans, so I was safe for that time.

He gave me more instructions and two names and addresses of people in Groningen who were, as far as he knew, okay people. They were the only ones in that province who knew that there was going to be an organization set up, and they were waiting for me to get things rolling.

When I got to the city, I looked up the first name, a young man, a student, and he wasn't home. So I went to the second person, a girl, and she said, yes, I know about it (we had a password -- I've forgotten what it was). So I went into the house and we talked. I asked her about the other guy and she said, "Thank God he wasn't home, because he's a double agent informing on the other side." I was just lucky that he wasn't home because I would have believed anything he said.

All during this time that I was setting up this organization with her (and by myself), I went to school and acted like a normal person, while in the meantime we set up contacts with other people. My codename was Karl (in Holland I'm called Cajo). Nobody knew last names or addresses.

Although I got the network of the place set up, I didn't do any of the work of finding houses for people to hide. Setting up the network was difficult. You had to talk with people, feel them out, ask them questions, and you took a risk any time you talked with anyone. You can't possibly know for sure whether the guy was legitimate or not.

So I became chief organizer. The few people who knew me got to know a few other people who then did the actual work. Another branch of the organization did the stealing of the food stamps, by going to the distribution centers where they were printed up each month and raid it.

You could not get food unless you had a valid identification card. (My card, by the way, became invalid when I went into hiding, because I wasn't where I was supposed to be, in Germany.)

These raiding parties would, for instance, raid a center somewhere in the north of Holland, then the next time 'way somewhere to the south, so nobody knew where the next one would be. They would get thousands of these coupons, and take them to our branch of the organization, and we would distribute them to the people in hiding. The Germans would print up more stamps (they had to, under their own law) to give them to the people who could legally get them, so nobody was hurt in the long run. And besides, the Germans refused to admit that these things could be and were stolen in the first place.

The process of finding people you could trust and finding homes where people could hide is very difficult -- it was a very private way of testing out those who you thought you could trust.

Once the organization really got underway, there was a breakdown in communication, in the first year. I had a girl who was my courier, and she tried to get some information for me, and she couldn't. The organization was cut off. We operated on our own for the rest of that year, but at that point I had to go into hiding because I had graduated from the college.

It's only later that I found out what had happened in that year, by chance, after the war. I ran into one of my classmates who knew I worked in the same organization that he had worked in, and he told me what had happened. Harm (whom my friend knew), the double agent, was found out by the Germans and forced to play his role, but leak information to them. My friend, who worked in the headquarters, was asked to find out who the leak was. And he knew it had to be someone in the headquarters leaking the information. I don't know how he found out it was Harm, but he did, and he caught him in the act of getting ready to send a list of names to the Germans of people who worked in the Underground -- and my name was on it.

My friend tried to reason with him, but apparently he had been under so much stress and strain and pressure from the Germans, he was so confused that he ran away and my friend had to shoot him. We all three knew each other. It was a question of one classmate having to shoot another in order to protect the life of the other (which was me).

Because of this, there was a breakdown in communication. I never found out if it got reestablished, because at that point I went underground.

During my time as the organizer, however, I got to be in contact with other organizations, and this contact almost would have saved my life at one time; they let me know when the school was going to be raided for people to go to work for the Germans, so I went into hiding then, for a short while at least.

This time it turned out to be a false alarm, but a second time, later, my stepfather, of all people, wired me to meet him someplace in a totally different city. He had found out (I don't know how) that the school was going to be raided on another day, and this time it turned out to be true. I don't know how he found out, but I'm glad he did. People were so scared when the Germans came that some had jumped out of second-story windows in order to get away.

One of my friends got caught, and was put into prison for several weeks and told, every day, "You're going to be shot tomorrow at 7 am." And the next morning at 7 am he would hear boots coming to his cell and the opening of the door (he, of course, would be awake all night), and hear the Germans say, "We have postponed it 24 hours." And they did that day after day after day -- and then they let him go.

Amazingly, I don't know how he found the strength that he did, but he was not broken. He said to me, when I saw him after the war, "Having seen death so many times, and having had to come to terms with it, I'm okay, and am able to accept it, and I can go on with life." I was totally amazed at his peacefulness, at his having dealt with the total reality of death again and again, being able to face it, and managing to go on with living again.

Lots of things happened with people that were amazing. It's incredible what people can go through in a war. Women were greatly respected during the war (more so than before or since), because women had to play a role which they had not before, which was to protect their men. The women turned out to have a great deal of strength and endurance, more so than men. We decided during the war that, at the end of the war, somebody should erect a statue entitled WOMAN --which of course never happened.)

I'll give you an example of what the women were like. Germans continually searched houses to pick up people that they could haul off to Germany to work in the factories. They never found me in my house, and this is why: In Holland we build our houses in such a way that they are above the ground, and there is an air space between the house and the ground for insulation. If you take a closet and cut a hole in it, in the floor, you can get underneath the house. Then you put the floor back in and put all the junk back on, and it looks as though there is no entrance there. We did this in my house. (We had other hiding places, though.) By that time, however (when I was hiding), the Germans had gotten wind of the fact that we built our houses this way and that we hid there.

The Germans had come to this house because they had heard that this woman's husband and her son were in the house. (Sometimes they would search very stupidly. They would go around the block knocking on all the houses. One time they did this when I was hiding in the block, and the people in the house behind ours said, "All right, they've gone through our house, why don't you climb over the back fence and hide here now." Which I did.) The two that were being sought for this time, however, had found out this was going to happen, so they had enough time to hide beneath the house. The Germans couldn't find an entrance that could lead to the area beneath the floor, so they asked the woman. "Are you sure they are not here?" And she said,"I'm sure," knowing all the time that they were under the floor. They didn't believe her and said, "We know they're here, we got it from a reliable source." She said, "They're not. How could they be? You've searched the whole house." "I'll bet they are under the floor," one of them said. She said, "All right, why don't you shoot through the floor?" She took a real chance in order to protect them, and that took a kind of courage that was really fantastic. She didn't know exactly where they were under the floor, but the chances of them not shooting through the floor if she kept cool about it than if she got all upset were much greater.

During the last years of the war, the food supply went down and down and down. In the last six months of the war, we had only 480 calories a day, which meant that people were starving all over the place. The Germans were starving as well as the Dutch. We shot "roof rabbits" -- cats -- for food, and ate tulip bulbs, one of the few edible bulbs in Holland. Since Holland, of course, has a great deal of tulip bulbs, we all thought, "Well, we won't starve." The first time you eat tulip bulbs you say, "Well, they're not so bad." The second time you eat them you don't say anything. The third time you eat them, you say, "Oh God, no!" We tried everything -- tulip bulb bread and tulip bulb flour and tulip bulb whatever-you-could-think-of, and it all tasted horrible. But it was all we had to eat.

I was luckier than some. As part of my education, I worked on a farm in my 20th year. At the harvest there was a "controller" who was sympathetic to the Nazis who saw to it that all the harvest was weighed and only a certain percentage given to the farmer and his family and the rest put on the controlled market. I helped the farmer cheat the Nazis like mad. When we threshed the grain, it would be weighed in sacks, and I would take the weights off so there would be more grain there than the weights showed there was. We would later take the extra grain out of the sacks so they would weigh what they were supposed to in the end. (We took the weights off when the guy wasn't looking.)

Or, the farmer would invite the guy for a drink inside, and I would hustle like mad to put extra bags of grain in the pigsty (where he would never look), and ended up with a good deal of grain that the farmer would sell on the black market.

The farmer helped me and my family at the end of the war as a result of this help. During the last year of the war that I went in hiding, I had to stay in my room the whole time. Nobody knew I was there, not even any of my friends, at first. My parents changed their name, and nobody knew or expected me to be there.

A really weird thing is that, right across from my room on the other side of the street was, of all things, the Ministry of Propaganda of the Dutch Germans who broadcasted from his home all of the wonderful things these Nazis were doing, and wasn't it awful that there were these young men in hiding so that they didn't have to go to Germany-- and he didn't know I was watching him right from the window!

They never found me. They searched for me only once, and that was the time I skipped over the back fence.

Near the end of the war, however, things changed. This was when the Germans themselves were trapped and the big starvation set in. All the large cities were surrounded, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, etc., and the Germans really couldn't do anything. I would sometimes go out during the night and even sometimes during the day. I didn't care, they couldn't do anything anymore.

The starvation of Holland was the result of the failure of one battle, the battle of Arhem. The Allied troops were going to try to cross the Rhine. The British did most of the ground fighting, and the Americans were supposed to be there with planes and tanks, but they didn't make it in time and the battle failed. As a result, they changed their tactics and went around the Rhine instead, cutting off all of the Western part of Holland, and the starvation set in.

In the battle, however, not only did the British and the Americans fight, but the Dutch Underground did too. They asked all the train operators to stop the trains and hide so there would be no transportation of German troops anywhere. The only problem with this was that, once the battle failed, the train operators couldn't comeback. Having made this defiant act, you have to go into hiding, and then they couldn't come out again.

From that moment on, there was no transportation on Holland. Which meant no more transporting of food to the large cities in the west. That's what started the starvation.

People were desperate during that time. They would steal, even kill. Sometimes you could walk miles to get food, and then have the Germans steal it from you because they were starving, too. Or, having to walk so far to get food, many people would die on the way home because they got so few calories a day.

The Germans launched V-2's about half a mile from our house. One in every three didn't work, and might have fallen on our house.

There was one shot I'll never forget. It was shot off by the Germans at a quarter to twelve on New Years Eve, destined to land in England, as a German joke to the British New Years celebrations. That one went wrong and fell into a large new development of apartment buildings. All kinds of people were killed. There were also a group of horses (everyone used horses at that time because there was no gasoline), and as soon as the bombardment was finished, those horses were gone, people carved them up to eat and to bring home to their families.

They had central kitchens set up where you could get some food. They didn't tell you what they cooked (people at this time would eat anything), but I remember one time they gave us something that was green and soupy. People were really hungry at that time, but they took one bite of it and threw it in the gutter. At this time, there were hundreds of starving dogs around, nobody was feeding their dogs at this time, of course, and the dogs would eat anything they came across. But the dogs wouldn't even touch the stuff! And this was a central kitchen organized by the government!

Some Germans, at this point, tried to defect, and sometimes we helped them. But we did other things to the Germans. At this time there were no lights. People took great care to black out their houses, because a light, of course, would give the pilots something to aim by, so as a result it was very difficult to see at night. (The only scar I have from the war is the result of fixing the frames in the windows to keep the light out.) The Germans, of course, not being able to see anything, and not knowing the countryside, would ask us, for instance, "How do I get to such-and-such a place." And we would always answer, "Go straight ahead." There is only one way to land in Holland with those sorts of directions, and that's in a canal! Nobody would get them out, of course. (The canals go straight down and are not fenced off.) We lost quite a number of Germans in those canals.

Even though everybody was starving during the war, most everybody had some kind of roof over their heads because, after all, when you are faced by a common enemy that everybody hates, you put up with all kind of people you normally couldn't stand. We had one such family in our house. One of the reasons we let them in was that they brought some food.

The story of Anne Frank, by the way, is so beautiful for so many reasons. It is a very accurate description of what it is like to hide out. Their situation was different from mine, of course. For one thing, they had to hide out longer, and secondly they were different families, and so had the whole problem of trying to live together, sharing very small quarters. (Which is very difficult to do and is so well described in the book.) The family we had to live with was a smaller family and we weren't strangers to each other, so, although it was difficult and we got on one another's nerves, it wasn't quite as harassing as Anne Frank had to go through.

Anne Frank's diary is so full of the little things that, only if you have gone through them before do you pick them up. Little details, about how they cooked their food, for instance, was exactly parallel to my experience. It is probably one of the most significant documents to come out of the war.

It's a known fact that the Germans were saying (and still are saying) that they didn't know what was going on in the concentration camps. There may be some truth to this as far as the details were concerned, but we knew quite a bit of what happened even before the war started. We had at home what was called the Brown Book, a thick brown book that was full of sworn statements by people who had been mishandled by the Germans, some from even before the war started, specifically from political prisoners and Jews. Also we had a Jewish family in our house who fled from the Germans. (This is the family that I talked about earlier. We hid them all during the war, as a matter of fact.) How they got out, I don't know, and how they were able to get to Holland I don't know either. But they were never willing to talk about their experiences. They were so serious and so terrible they refused ever to talk about them. During the war itself, of course, we knew many people who were sent to concentration camps, first to a collection camp in the country and then to Germany itself, and although we never knew the details of the ovens and the gas chambers, we did know that they would be killed, and that most of them would never come back, and the Jews themselves knew it, too. Very few people came out of concentration camps during the war. Many did afterward, of course, to tell their stories, but we didn't get too much direct feedback. There were enough stories around, however, and enough things people told that we had a pretty good idea of what was going on.

Of course, you realize that the Germans tried not to find out what was going on, and if they did hear stories, they said, "Oh, but we can't do that!" So they were psychologically deaf to the stories they heard. But we were an occupied country, and every bad story we heard about the Germans we believed, because we hated their guts. That makes a difference. We knew more because we wanted to know more.

During the winters, since there was no coal or fuel or electricity or anything, people would cut down trees all over the place. It was forbidden, but we did it anyway, at night.

Little by little the Germans would confiscate everything, even radios. For a time you were forbidden to have a radio or listen to the BBC. But a friend of mine had made a little crystal set, and every night we would listen to the BBC and write it up and read it to everybody else (we had the only radio on the block). The news would be broadcasted in several languages, French, Dutch, English, and we would try to translate it as much as possible. We got propaganda from the Nazis all the time, so it was very important to hear from London. We never believed anything the Nazis said, and believed everything the British said, whether it turned out to be true or not. It was our life line, our sense of being in touch with the outside world.

What we did to make the radio work was to steal the generator and the battery from a car (by this time the cars wouldn't run anymore), get a bicycle, prop it up so the back wheel would spin free, connect it to the generator, connect that to the battery, and pedal for two hours just to hear a fifteen-minute broadcast from London! We were tired, starved, hungry, but it was so important to get the news from"our side" that we did this.

To try to stop the Germans at the beginning of the war, the Dutch inundated the land. They cut a few dikes in strategic places and flooded the land to try to keep the armies from going through. But the Germans would just go around.

The Dutch never really believed the Germans would really go through Holland, because they hadn't done so in the first World War. They expected them to go through Belgium. Nobody believed they would attack, even up to the very day that they did attack.

As a matter of fact, the night of the attack, I was camping out near my aunt's house. She said, "If you hear any loud noises or explosions, don't worry, because they're just maneuvering." Sure enough, at 4:30 that morning there were bombs and explosions allover the place. My aunt's house was rattling like mad, windows breaking. I looked out of my tent and saw all kinds of German planes dropping bombs, very close to the house, as a matter of fact. I ran to the house to wake up my aunt, who still said, "Oh, no, don't worry, they're just maneuvering." I said, "No, they aren't! Those are German planes out there!" She finally accepted the fact that we were being attacked.

During the last years of the war, getting food took a great deal of our time. But in the meantime we had to find ways of entertainment (you couldn't go out of the house because you would get picked up), and one of the things we did was talk about food. We did a lot of talking about food. We would get all the "Good Housekeeping"magazines out and look at the marvelous recipes and talk about them, or we might talk about the war, or (and this kept many of us alive) try to talk about, "Oh, don't worry, the war will be over soon." During all the five years we were convinced that it was going to be over soon.

One of the things I did while I was in hiding was read a great deal. I also learned English then. I not only read English, I gotten a hold of some Linguaphone records: "This is the family Brown." "This is the living room of the family Brown." And so on. That is how I learned English.

Another thing I did was to study graphology (the study of handwriting), and I became very good at it. The method I learned was supposedly a very scientific method tested with thousands of people. (I still have some of the books, some in Dutch and some in German.) I did one which earned us food. There was a couple who wanted a graphological analysis of their handwriting and an analysis of their marriage relationship. Apparently I hit it right on the head. I didn't know either one of them, but they sent us a whole crate of potatoes!

There was a great shortage of things then, especially food. You could buy things in the black market, but the prices were incredibly high. At the end of the war, I had gotten an inheritance, and I got a pound of sugar for my mother for 100 guilders (dollars), and a small piece of meat for 35 guilders.

Everybody had gardens and everybody took the risk of having all their vegetables stolen, including tobacco.

I remember one thing about my mother. There was a time when the bombs were dropping. She was so scared! I remember going outside, because I thought, "This is no way to do it." I didn't want to have the house fall on me, and when I was outside I could see where the bombs were falling and say, "No, that one won't hit me." "That one might." "That one might be too close!" But none of them hit us. The Allies were bombing the launching pad that was half a mile from our house.

We had a belief (I don't know whether it was true or not) that the British bombed by day and the Americans by night. This was just a feeling we had because of the different ways of bombing they had. We saw the British planes during the day. We didn't see the American planes, but we sure heard them, all night long, thousands of them going to Germany and back. We saw planes shot down all the time.

We had an interesting experience during the last few months of the war, when it was really almost over. The British and the Americans had made a deal with the Germans to drop food all over Holland. They pinpointed several areas where this food was going to be dropped. The British and the Americans dropped the food on several fields. At this time I wasn't hiding anymore, nobody was hiding anymore, we didn't care, too hungry. I went out with a lot of other guys to collect all this food and put it in the depots where it could be distributed. I would swear that the British would drop their bags (the British dropped bags, the Americans cartons -- typical) perfectly on the spot, while the Americans sort of generally strewed them around the mark. But they were very enthusiastic. These guys would fly really low and throw out everything: their cigarette packs, even their half-empty ones, their sandwiches in bags, everything. They were so excited at being able to drop food instead of bombs, it was really unbelievable.

Most of the food was gotten from the army. The Americans once, in their haphazard, joyful fashion, dropped some of their boxes onto the dunes. We saw it, and a whole bunch of us said, "Let's go!" It turned out that the dunes were all girdled with an area of mines. We wondered what to do until somebody got a hold of a poacher, who knew the area well. And he said, "The way to go through the mine fields is like this,"and we went like this and nobody was blown up. So we collected about 76 boxes of K-rations, cigarettes, chocolate, all kinds of things. There was another area that had about ten other boxes, but we had enough to start with, so we didn't go there. It turned out that that area had also been mined, and somebody was blown up as a result later. We were just damn lucky that we didn't go there.

Anyway,there were so many boxes that everybody else went back to get more help. I was elected to stay. I had a real day. I ate all I could, stuffed all kind of cigarettes and food in my shirt.

All of a sudden there came a group of Germans with guns and a police dog coming after me. They said, "You can't be here." I said,"My friends and I are going to distribute these boxes to the people of Holland where they should go." They said, "That's too bad." These guys were starving too. Then they asked me how come it was that I hadn't been shot yet, because there were orders to shoot anyone in that area. I said, "Well, that's nice news. But how about if you went with me out here so I won't get shot." One of them said, "I'll go." And I said, "Okay, fine, but while you do, would you mind to get me through these minefields?" He said, "Oh. I don't know how to get through the mine fields, but I'll take you up to them."

On our way through the dunes, he and I talked. He said, "You know, I think that the war is almost over, and when it is over, the French, English, and Americans will fight with us against the Russians." This is what many of them actually believed.

Once I did get out of the mine field, I told the others (as I met them on the way), to forget going back because the Germans were there. The Germans had let me keep what I had stuffed into my shirt and pockets (They had plenty left there on the dunes. They thought I had done a good job collecting it all). and I shared some of it, especially the cigarettes.

We had a great deal of trouble with cigarettes. They were very expensive in the black market. Although we tried to grow it ourselves, Holland is not tobacco country, and tobacco is very hard to cure. As a result it tasted horrible. We made surrogate cigarettes from oak leaves and from all kinds of things which tasted worse. Another thing we did was to make cigarettes from old butts. This is where the old joke comes from. The joke goes, if it takes three butts to make a cigarette, how many cigarettes can you make with ten butts?

You can make three cigarettes out of nine butts, right? After you smoke these, this leaves three butts plus one. You make another cigarette (which makes four total), take the two butts left over, borrow one from a friend, add these together (which makes five), smoke that one down and give the last butt back to your friend.

We really suffered those years for lack of cigarettes.

_________

I remember him mentioning that he was embarrassed the biography ended with him complaining about cigarettes. I had intended to do another interview, but was never able to get around to it. He died in November of 1979.

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