Five Brothers and a War

May 10, 1940

For the massive grief of May 10, 1940, the day that will forever live in Dutch infamy, there was one positive episode on that day. A couple of months before the war started, as usual, Bertus was hanging around the school grounds as he did pretty much every day, weather permitting. On that particular day, they had a good football game going. The only interruption they had was one particular girl riding right through the middle of the furious action. Despite all of the howls of disapproval, she still kept going. Bertus decided to take matters into his own hands by grabbing onto her bicycle’s baggage rack, located behind the seat. So as she rode by the next time, he grabbed the rack, and stopped her in her tracks. He let her go so that the match could continue, but she did not learn her lesson, and continued to ride across the pitch anyway. She changed her tactics though by speeding up, still weaving in and out of the players. Time after time, Bertus caught up and stopped her. She finally rode away and left the boys to their football. After that, Bertus lost track of her because she was several years ahead of him in school, and their paths never crossed. On May 10, 1940, Bertus was leaning out of the window in the front bedroom window on the third floor of their house on the Margrietstraat. He was looking at all the German planes flying by and the parachutists jumping out when he noticed a girl walking around the corner from the Lobelialaan. She stopped in front of the van Pelt house, and it was only then that Bertus recognized her—the same girl who tormented the football play months earlier. She looked up, but did not recognize Bertus. She shouted up, “Is my sister here?”. “Who is your sister?”, Bertus shouted back. “My sister, Henny”, she responded. “I don’t know anyone by that name”, was the reply, followed by, “Don’t you know me?” She finally recognized Bertus and this was how the family learned that Piet had a relationship with Henny, the older sister of the girl with the bicycle, Rita Bender. It turned out that the Benders lived a very short distance away, down the Lobelialaan and across the Laan van Meerderfoort, on the Riënzistraat. Six years later, the two girls would marry Leen and Piet in a double wedding, with Leen, the eldest, marrying the younger sister, Rita, and second-born Piet marrying the older sister, Henny. Then nine-year-old Flora van der Lecq (who would go on to marry Kees) awakened on what was an otherwise beautiful spring day to the sound of what she thought was a massive amount of water running. She, not surprisingly, had never heard hundreds of aircraft over the city in the midst of a full-out aerial assault.

van Pelt

Five Brothers and a War

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