- My name is Marian Takens and I plan to share with you our family story of living in the Netherlands during World War II.

And my father being involved in the Dutch Underground Resistance Movement.

My mother was born here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, thus an American citizen.

My father was born in the Netherlands and thus a Dutch citizen.

As a young fella, he came here with a couple of his friends and traveled all over the United States.

Eventually he settled in Grand Rapids.

Met my mother.

They got married in 1928.

By December of 1932, they already had four children.

And if you know your American history, you know, this was Depression time.

My father had a very difficult time trying to get food on the table and take care of the needs of his family of six.

His family in the Netherlands had plenty of money, sold a big piece of land.

This is the, all the land plotted out.

And number 228, this big one here was my grandfather’s right there.

They invited my parents and those four little ones, why don’t you come by us for a year?

We’ll see to it that you get a job.

We’ll provide a home and all the furnishings and maybe after a year, the depression we done.

And you’ll go back.

This sounded exciting, even to my mother.

She was looking forward to as an adventure.

She had never met my dad’s family, and they of course have never met the four little children.

So this was exciting.

In June of 1933, they got on a train, took a train to New York, and then on a boat, 10 days on a boat, and eventually to the Netherlands.

They gave away all their stuff temporarily.

There, There were appliances and whatever ’cause people were in need.

They were in depression.

They would take whatever with the intention of in a year, getting it all back.

There was a house furnished for them with all the furniture, all the pots and pans, dishes, everything that my dad’s family provided for them to live in.

Well then 1934 happened.

It was time to go back for a year, but my dad could not get a visa because of the fact that the US was not allowing immigrants in because of the 25% unemployment.

My dad was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis when he was only four years old.

So his fingers and his feet were crooked.

It was limited to what he could do.

My father had no special skills to offer, so they wouldn’t give him a visa.

1935, 36, 37, 38, all of them went by.

In the meantime, my sister and I were born.

In 1939 the Germans, invaded Poland.

That was kind of like crossing the red line for Great Britain and France.

They let Hitler get away with a lot of things, but they said, okay, enough is enough.

So they declared war on Germany.

The American Embassy then responded to all countries in Europe to Americans.

Get out of there, go home.

Well, my mother got this letter to go home, but they wouldn’t give my dad a visa and there’s no way she was gonna go with, at that time, six children and without my dad.

A little later she got that letter again.

So at that point, my parents got on the train to Amsterdam to the American Embassy.

They were gonna plead in person for my dad to get a visa, but they wouldn’t even let my dad speak to them.

When he tried, they’d said, we’re talking to your wife.

She’s the American.

My mother used to love to tell that story.

She’d chuckle every time ’cause she wasn’t used to that, that she had to be the speaker.

But no, he could not get a visa.

So consequently, we got stuck there during the war.

’cause once that war started, there was no coming back.

The Nazi movement was getting very powerful in our area in the Netherlands.

’cause we lived within 10 miles of the German border.

If anyone would find out that we were Americans, it got dangerous.

They didn’t hate the Dutch, they hated the Americans because of what we did in World War I. Over a period of about six years, we moved three times.

My sister, Hilda was born in one home.

I was born in another.

And later on, the twins, another, as my father said, we had to keep ahead of the Nazis.

The Dutch tried the best to resist and the Germans didn’t expect that.

So they bombed Rotterdam.

Some 800 people were killed.

My father was painting a kitchen floor that night and he heard all the planes going over in the morning.

He said to us, boy, London really got it last night, only to find out that it was Rotterdam.

Reality started sinking in.

What the Dutch did to resist is they dynamited bridges that would be used by the Germans to get through the Netherlands, then through Belgium and then to France.

Everyone with a certain radius of that bridge, we were told to get outta there.

Didn’t know how badly our homes would be destroyed.

We were all assigned farms to go to.

We had to stay in the barn, the hay barn.

My sister told me, I cried all night long.

I didn’t like that hay.

My mother, I was still in diapers, but she didn’t know what to do with the diapers under the situation.

So she had me sleep there with my little bare butt.

And I didn’t like it, so I just cried.

Eventually it quieted down.

So my father went to the house to see if there was any damage done, and he found this piece of the iron from the bridge.

It had gone through a big picture window in the front.

And then he also learned that damage was done to our roof.

Many homes, other ones were damaged much more than this.

This is minor in comparison.

We lived there for about eight years, just before the war, during the war.

And then for a couple years after war.

This was home to us.

For the first couple of years of the war, the only thing that we really experienced was all the planes constantly going overhead.

The city of Bremen and Hamburg were close by and they were military bases.

And so the allies were there to bomb them.

The Netherlands was in the pathway of all of that.

My brother Ludolf, my oldest brother, told me that he could tell by the sound, whether it was a German, an American, a British, Canadian.

Each one had a different sound.

And this, this was a constant fear ’cause they would hit each other and try to, of course, land in the farmer’s fields and avoid homes.

The Netherlands is known as the graveyard of allied and German planes.

About 10,000 planes crashed in the Netherlands.

Many bodies were never found ’cause that soil was very soft and oftentimes the planes would just sink down under.

And for years, maybe even today, if there’s the new housing development going on, Dutch government has to check it out first.

See if there’s any planes or any bombs.

In 1941, the first Jews were picked up from Amsterdam, and the Dutch resisted that.

And then from that grew the entire underground resistance movement.

My father became the leader in our local community.

Some of them resisted militarily.

There were a variety of things.

But my father was very unusual.

He was in his early forties, had eight children, totally unfit for resistance.

Most of ’em in their twenties and thirties, most of them were single.

Or if they were married, they didn’t have children.

One time when my father was not home, a couple of Nazis who were on the lookout stopped at our house and were suspicious of what he was doing.

And he came home and he saw two nice looking bicycles.

Knew right away they were Nazis.

So he went in the house very quietly.

He waited to see what they were doing, and he had a weapon, a pistol ready in case they dare to put their hands on my mother.

It sounded like the conversation was coming to an end.

So then he walked in and very nonchalantly said, what are you guys doing here?

And he said, when they said what they were there for, he said, do you think I would do that with a house full of kids?

And my mother loved to tell that story also how he could just lie with a straight face.

This is what we had to do as kids.

We were told also not to speak the truth.

When a lot of these allied pilots and airmen got shot down or crashed out, they would then go to the farmer’s house hoping that it was not a Nazi.

My father had a job where he had a motorbike.

His father made sure he had insurance for it.

He then went from farm to farm.

I’m sure he was the one that had a sit down and had a cup of coffee.

And he’d tell ’em about his adventures in America for nine years.

All of those farmers in the area all knew his story.

So they knew that my dad could speak English and that my mother was an American.

So they would lead these allied pilots then and airmen to our house during the night.

So when those kids got up in the morning, we never knew what all would be there.

Then it was my dad’s job to see to it that they would get farther.

Another thing that my dad did in the underground resistance was getting official news reports on the war and a paper called Trouw and telling what actually was going on.

’cause we were getting all kinds of German propaganda and telling that they were winning and all things were going well for the Germans.

I have a little brochure that says, Dàt nooit!

which means never that.

And it was tell young men, don’t you ever go to Germany.

Remember about your, your children, your mother, you resist and go into hiding instead.

Another one I have that says, Gij kunt helpen!

and which means you can help.

And it says you can help by keeping your mouth shut.

And it mentions too many people are talking too much.

My brother Ludolf and his mid-teens, it was his job to go to the printer and pick up a pile of this stuff.

Eventually he had to go into Germany ’cause all the publishers from the Netherlands were killed.

He was arrested at one point and was being escorted to the police station.

But all along the way, Dutch underground resisters were informed that my brother would be out doing this.

And they ambushed them.

My brother quickly scooted away and got free.

It was in 1941 that my parents got their ID cards.

They had to be in their possession at all time.

And I find it interesting that one of my mother says that she was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA.

My sister Jane did most of the errands so that my mother could stay home and wouldn’t have to show that ID card.

We had a control over what we could eat.

Bread, milk, butter, some reserve for whatever that was supposed to be.

The only way that we could get things by these cards.

Farmers were limited.

Germans kept track of how many cows they had, how many chickens they had, how many acres they had, what they produced.

They were allowed to keep a certain percentage for themselves and the rest was all supposed to go to Germany.

The Dutch found ways also of getting some of that material.

One time my sister Hilda, at age 10 was sent to go get some milk.

There was a back path along, a drainage ditch.

She was told to go there so she wouldn’t be caught.

Lo and behold, on her way back there, she saw two bicycles coming down that path and they were nice bicycles.

So she stopped her bike, she hid that little liter of milk and she pretended to be cutting a bouquet of flowers.

And so when they went by, they said hello to her and she enjoyed retelling their stories, saying, I said nothing back to them.

I was not going to give them that satisfaction.

So that’s how we as children lived that war.

We could each tell our own individual story of what we experienced, but we had to just keep her mouth shut, keep quiet.

Another thing that was illegal was to have a picture of the queen, but yet this was up on our wall.

Weren’t supposed to have a radio.

We kept a radio because my parents could understand the BBC.

The older children were all told what to hide, where whenever there was a hard knock at the door, put it all into hiding and then act innocent when they came in.

Another thing that I remember as a child that my dad had right next to this, he had a map with thumbtacks.

He kept track of where the war was, especially once they got into the Netherlands.

He’d move those thumbtacks based on the information he’d get through the underground.

We lived this close to Germany, right here in Stadskanaal.

It’s right there.

And here’s the German border.

It was less than 10 miles from the German border.

The Queen, by the way, spent the entire war years in London.

The Dutch coins, Dutch money was not usable.

And so what the is they soldered a quarter and two dimes soldered it together and the men wore them on the bottom side of their lapel waiting for that day when the war would over and that they could then turn it over and wear it on the top.

It was decided on September 17th, 1944 that the entire railroad system would strike ’cause it was the Germans that were using the railroad.

The Dutch had a very advanced railroad system and the Germans didn’t know how to run those trains.

So they had Dutch people run it.

And then all the railway stations were also controlled by Dutch.

We had a little station right close to us that was an elderly couple that ran that little station.

Their stuff all went into our house and was put in our shed.

All of these railroad people, they had to find hiding places for them.

There already were so many people in hiding, but Dutch people still stepped up and took ’em in.

The problem with this is that Rotterdam and Amsterdam were not getting food.

The hunger winter, the winter of 1944, 45, devastating starvation took place.

We suffered it from malnutrition.

That was one of the bad consequences of that railroad strike.

It was all a part of trying to resist trying to win that war.

- The greatest news story in 1944, D-Day, H Hour, that fateful moment for which the whole world held its breath D-Day.

Up to this day, I feel guilty, feeling happy about that.

That was the only way we were gonna be liberated from D-Day until the end of the war was just one month, short of a year.

They took three months to liberate France, took another month to liberate Belgium.

And then on September 17th, 1944 was the date that they first landed in the Netherlands.

By Christmas time of 1944, they had the southern half of the Netherlands liberated.

And the northern half, which included us, was still under occupation.

It was finally May 5.

The Netherlands finally was liberated.

We did keep in our home one young fella, he was supposed to report to Germany, but he went into hiding to keep himself occupied.

These are all pieces of wood inlay.

When he left, he left this with us.

My mother found in a gift shop.

It says, In stilheid en vertrouwen zol uwe sterkre zijn and to sign, which comes from the Bible, which means your strength is going to come through quietness and trust with her being an American woman, having her husband involved, and of course having his two oldest children getting these secret papers and serving as couriers for their dad to be able to do that.

And then to feed the Allied Airmen, her very strong faith is what carried her through.

After the war, the Allied Soldiers stations throughout Europe and they helped us to clean up the mess.

Canadians were in charge of our area and because my dad could would speak English, he worked closely with one.

This is a letter of commendation.

To whom it may concern, this is to certify that I have been associated with Hiltjo Takens.

Hiltjo was his Dutch name from the 1st of July of 45 to the 1st of November of 45.

During this time and previously, Takens was the commander of the Interior Force’s Command Post, Pekelderweg.

My Squadron was billeted in his area so that I was closely associated with takin.

He was most cooperative and rendered valuable assistance in all our dealings with the local populace.

Taken’s reputation, and standing in the civilian population as shown clearly by the responsibility of his position as the commander of the areas underground for the last two years of the war.

And in the six months after VE day, I consider that Takens character awards the highest testimony as evidenced by his war record.

I personally found him most reliable, cooperative and of unquestionable integrity.

So finally the war ended and right away my parents’ plan was to go back to America.

So a passport picture was taken.

Those four little kids, now were all teenagers and four more were added to the family.

We had to wait our turn just like everybody else.

People from all over Europe were on the list of wanting to go to America, to Canada.

Some went to Brazil, some went to Australia.

It was so devastated that there was no housing at all.

People, matter of fact, were housing in German bunkers.

That’s all they could find.

It was so desperate for homes.

Near the city of Westerbork, the Netherlands built a refugee camp just like there are refugee camps throughout the world today when the Germans took over and they invaded.

Oh, how nice.

They got Jews all nicely gathered together here at this Westerbork, the Dutch police would escort them by train to Westerbork and then they’d stay at a certain amount of time there and then be shipped off to Auschwitz or wherever at the rate of about a thousand every Tuesday.

Among the ones who went there just toward the very end of the war, was the Anne Frank family.

Camp Westerbork was liberated when the allies liberated in Netherlands and they found there a lot of Jews.

They also found some Dutch underground people.

They were also put there.

They also found gypsies or Romas as they were known in Europe.

And so all of these people were liberated.

After the war, that camp was used to put Dutch Nazis, those who had collaborated with the Germans, they were put in there to await the day of their trial.

My father was appointed to be the commander of that camp because of his rheumatoid arthritis, he was denied military training so never had any military training, but he became a commander.

My dad came home one day with an American GI, came and asked my mother, do you know who this is?

No.

And crying, he said, I’m your brother Jim.

Your brother Jim.

He was only 14 years old when she had last seen him in 1933.

And now he was a married man.

He left behind a baby and he fought in the war.

Through him, she learned that also her brother Harold and her brother Lewis were also fighting in Europe, helping the local people get the feet back on the ground and eventually going home.

All mail with her family here in Grand Rapids was put to an end because it would be a dead giveaway if we’d be getting this mail from America.

So she had no idea that her three brothers were fighting in the war.

My brother Ludolf had, he had turned 17 and he got a draft notice.

The Dutch had owned Indonesia for some 400 years until the Japanese took it from them during World War II.

So when the Japanese lost, the Dutch figured they would get Indonesia back.

Well, the Indonesian people had a different story.

They said, no way.

And so they fought for four years and that’s what they wanted my brother for and my parents said, no way, you are going to America.

My dad was able to get him and my 13-year-old brother Joe up on top of the list and they got them onto a ship immediately to go to America.

The two of them, 17 and 13 years old, they went to an Aunt and Uncle’s house.

The aunt and uncle didn’t have the clue as to who are these boys.

They had to identify themselves, they couldn’t speak English.

Ludolf found a room to board.

He got a job at Baker’s Furniture Company through my grandpa De korne, my mother’s father.

And then Joe.

They enrolled him in school.

And then 10 months later, my dad and my brother Don came.

For the rest of us, my mother and the remaining five children, he had arranged everything, the boat and the train and everything.

When we arrived in Grand Rapids, they were there to welcome us and the Grand Rapids Press was there also and took this picture of our family quite different from when they left in 1933.

So here we were becoming Americans.

Even though we were Americans, but we didn’t know it.

We were war refugees for the first three years.

We had no car, we had no telephone, we couldn’t afford it.

And so gradually the younger ones of us went to school and gradually we melted into American society, each doing our own thing.

Eventually there were 22 grandchildren.

So the typical American life that we live, my father was the first one to go back in 1966.

And we told him take a lot of pictures of the house, of the school, the church, whatever.

He came back and he didn’t have any, how come dad?

Oh, it just wasn’t possible.

So I went the next year and I stayed with the same family friend and I told her that.

She said, what happened is we were biking and we were on the other side of the canal of your home.

We stopped to look at it and he melted down.

He, he didn’t wanna go farther, he just wanted to go back home.

And that was like 21 years after the war.

You don’t get over something like that In 94, It’s a map of the Netherlands.

They gave me this as a gift.

God blessed us.

All of my siblings are gone.

My parents of course are gone.

I’m still here to tell the story.

So I hope you enjoy my story.

They kept those good looks to themselves.

They passed it on to my brothers, all five of my brothers.

My mother in 1933 brought with her a hymnal book because she knew how to play a pump organ.

My country tiz of the sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing to share this with you, just to maybe give you more empathy for the Palestinian children and the Ukrainian children, they’re, they’re going through the same stuff.

It was quite emotional for me to see this video for the first time.

I was literally shivering and afterwards I started thinking, why, what?

What really?

And one was it was like reliving those five years when I saw those planes and the bombing and all of that.

So it was like reliving the experience.

I so much would love to have some of my family see this with me, even if just one of my seven brothers and sisters, I experienced the, the loneliness of being without my family.