People in hiding

Aalten a record?

Most probably the beautiful village in the Gelderschen Achterhoek Aalten was the place that housed proportionally the most people in hiding during the war. The village has only 11,000 inhabitants and no less than 2500 people were placed in hiding. For the time being, we will be able to assume that this is a record in the Netherlands.

Aalten’s task did not end there. In addition to the people in hiding, hundreds of children — especially from Rotterdam and the surrounding area — spent their summer holidays in the village. It is no exaggeration to say that thousands of people elsewhere in the country benefited during the food shortages from the hundreds of thousands of rye loaves, bags of flour and oatmeal, bacon and eggs sent out from Aalten. Among his colleagues, the director of the Aalten post office was even nicknamed the ‘rye-bread director’.

We will remain grateful to Aalten for this war activity. The 2500 people in hiding are too. They sent a request to H.M. the Queen and asked her to visit Aalten during a trip through the liberated Netherlands. We sincerely hope that it will happen. Aalten deserves it.

In the years that the Germans occupied the Netherlands, in the small, agricultural town of Aalten, there was hardly a house in which there were no people in hiding. The people who live there are closed by nature. The Hague resident and the Amsterdammer, who went under water, had to get used to it. The Germans too, by the way, and once an SD officer spoke in anger of ‘abscheuliche Leute’ and he added: ‘Wir sind Luft, Luft!’ However, the silence of the Aaltenaar has benefited many people in hiding.

During the war years, Rev. J. Klijn (of De Open Deur), Rev. P. Kuyper and Rev. J. van Dijken respectively as a reformed, reformed and christian-reformed minister. One evening, two farmers, who had made a long bike ride for it, arrived at one of the three rectories. It matters little which one. They told the preacher about a naober, who was unwilling to take in people in hiding. In some houses there are eight, why doesn’t he want to accommodate one? Can’t the pastor go and talk to that man and point out his responsibility? They get the promise from the pastor that he will exchange a hearty word with the brother in question. It turned out not to be necessary. On the day that the Allied tanks thunder into Aalten, the farmer, who has been complained about, stands in front of his stee, laughing and waving. He is there with his wife and his family, but also with a bunch of Jews. He accommodated them, without the nearest neighbours having any suspicion of it.

Not all Jews who were given shelter in Aalten survived the years of occupation. A number of them were discovered, sent to Poland and liquidated there.

Church services

Aalten would not be Aalten if it had only provided the people in hiding with equipment. The churches held special church services for people in hiding, usually on remote farms, where people met in smaller groups. The congregation of God started to function here as a hidden church, in the summer the services were held on the deel, in the winter in the large Achterhoek kitchen. People did not ‘go’ in large numbers, but came with two or three people at a time. Guard posts were often posted to be alert to danger. There were also special catechisms for people in hiding. Even separate Jewish catechisms. A number of Jews came to believe in the Messiah.

Early in 1944, during an ordinary service at the Reformed Westerkerk, German forces surrounded the church. One young man escaped by leaving dressed in traditional Scheveningen women’s clothing. How had he obtained such an outfit? Aalten had also quietly taken in a sizeable group of people from Scheveningen who had been forced to leave the coastal area. Forty-eight people in hiding were loaded into a lorry and taken to Amersfoort, and many were then transported on to Germany. The Christian Reformed church was also raided on a Sunday, and around a dozen people in hiding were arrested.

Some boys did not return. In an issue of De Open Deur, which appeared the following year, Rev. Klijn of a service that was held on Christmas Eve ’44 on a farm in Aalten. We quote a few passages: “The Christmas Gospel was read in many wonderful places last year, in that time of need and misery, of shelters and shelters. But it was robbery in order. Also here in this simple peasant kitchen with its international circle of resistance fighters, herded together from all over the world; Achterhoek farm boys, heavily wanted illegals, navy people in hiding and secretarial staff, and allied pilots from San Francisco and Florida. Brighton and Plato Sask, Canada. It was as quiet as in a church, when the familiar words of Luke 2 were read, first in Dutch and then from the Moffat translation in English. And there was a twilight of emotion over some of those tough faces, when the old Christmas message came to them in their own language, here, so far from home, Christmas after all, the Christmas message: Today you have a Saviour born in the town of David, the Lord Messiah. And in the silence of Christmas night, their hearts, filled with thoughts of war by day and by night, knocked on the door of a different peace from that for which they were fighting, the peace of which the English sang: Glory to God in high heaven, and peace on earth for men whom the favours! By a puzzling achievement, the underground from the Achterhoek had also collected a few English church books and so the Christmas carols were sung bilingually: Honour be to God, Now sijt wellecome and the Silent Night, Holy Night, known all over the world…”