Five Brothers and a War

The Bike-jacking

Since Kees and Bertus were very close, it was only natural that they had friends in common as well. Kees used to hang around Paul Westerhof and Simon Duinker, and Bertus tagged along. The four became close and spent endless hours together. Paul and Bertus were a couple years younger than Simon and Kees, which reflected in their levels of closeness. If Bertus was not spending time with these friends, he was spending it with Mary Drachten. With Mary in the Dalton HBS, just a couple of blocks from home, Bertus could now walk her home, arm in arm, as was the Dutch custom. With her changing schools, and with the war changing school hours, and even school days, they didn’t see each other as many times as they wanted to. Bertus worried that their relationship would suffer. The reality was that over the months, Bertus had become attached to both Mary and Mary’s home, and the freedom and privacy that her home provided and permitted. During the course of the war, telephone service for the average person in Den Haag had been cut off, but because Mary’s mother’s partner worked for the Dutch phone company, they still had a working phone. Bertus mentioned that to his father one day, and Leendert would occasionally stop by the Drachten house to call his head office in Zaandam. As a result, he got to know the family members a little, and when Bertus asked every so often to borrow his bicycle to visit Mary, he usually allowed it. No doubt, Leendert did not think that the relationship would last past their teenage years, so he probably wasn’t too concerned that they did not attend the same church. Bertus was very happy every time he got to borrow the use of the bicycle, since streetcars had stopped running after 6 o’clock by 1944—and their operation was sporadic throughout the rest of the day. Leendert had hidden his car, because the gasoline it required to run was impossible to find as the Germans were using every drop they could get their hands on. In any event, even if they could find gasoline, no one would let on they had a car because a gun-toting German would have stolen it in an instant. With no car, and very limited street cars available, the bicycle was crucial to Leendert’s ability to get to work and to move around the city. By this time, work was limited. Most of it was for the German authorities, or for people who had come into money through the black market. As people dealing in the black market, for food, coal, or anything else that was being rationed, would be shot on sight, having unexplainable cash on hand was a certain way to have a person’s life expectancy shortened, so they found legitimate ways of spending “dirty” money in ways that would benefit them in the long run. This was a primitive form of money laundering, but it apparently worked. Business people got into a habit of not asking too many questions about too many things during the war. Even casual conversation had to be carefully monitored, as no one was certain about who could be trusted. By doing even a little work, Leendert was able to keep employees working, and was able to make needed money in order to live. The bicycle was crucial.

van Pelt

Five Brothers and a War

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