Five Brothers and a War

The First Razzia at the van Pelt Home

It would be a while before the secret hide-away was to be used again. But Leendert and Marie understood that it was only matter of time before the Germans would be coming to call on their family. As the Germans were losing soldiers, and as they had to convert their economy into a total war effort, they came under increasing pressure to staff their arms factories and the nation’s support and ancillary functions. The war was dramatically shifting on both Germany’s eastern and western fronts, with monumental losses continually increasing its manpower shortages. As a result, there were both pinpoint and general raids within Holland. The Germans had conducted razzias in all the large cities, and many of the smaller ones. As they had done with rounding up the Jewish population, they would seal off an entire neighborhood with dozens of Grünenpolizei, assisted by the hated NSB traitors. They would comb through as many streets as possible with as much information as they could have gathered from Dutch government files. The first time the Germans searched the house was one early morning—about 8 o’clock. One of Bert’s school friends had come to the house almost out of breath and had been furiously ringing the doorbell. Leendert almost ran to the door and as soon as he had opened it the boy shouted, “Mr. van Pelt…the Krauts …they’re coming! They are a couple of streets over!” It hadn’t taken five minutes to get Leen, Piet and Kees down below while their parents were anxiously wondering what would be hanging over their heads this time. Bert had observed all the commotion with a typical teenage curiosity—not really grasping the horrible consequences if the Germans would find the three brothers. Within an hour the NSB traitor rang the bell and stepped uninvited over the threshold as soon as Leendert opened the door, followed by a German officer and two soldiers. The NSBer, acting as the translator and without any type of “hello,” asked rudely, “Where are your sons? We would like to speak to them.” Leendert calmly answered by pointing to Bert and telling them, “There is one, you already have one in Germany and the other ones are not home and I don’t know when they will return.” The German officer, speaking German, instructed his soldiers to search the house. Bert had noticed the anxiety on his parents faces. As the search continued, Leendert went to his office on the second floor. He had asked Bert to fill up the coal-scuttle for which he had to go into the garden shed. It took the Germans another fifteen minutes before they left the house. The NSB traitor departed with a smirk on his face, which indicated that he hadn’t believed Leendert’s claim that he had no idea where the boys were. Piet, letting his nerves get the better of him, began whispering, wondering aloud whether the Germans had left. They had not, but Piet got a quick elbow in the ribs from Kees. Leen, Piet and Kees were kept down below until it was certain that the raid had been abandoned. There were a few lessons learned from this experience. Kees had a map of Europe on his bedroom wall where he kept track of Allied and Axis movements, victories and defeats. This was accomplished by moving flags on the map using push pins. The obvious problem was that with the only sanctioned radios restricted to German propaganda, there would have been no possibility that any ordinary Dutchman could have gathered such data without listening to radio stations in England through the use of a contraband radio.

van Pelt

Five Brothers and a War

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