March 15, 1940 was a big day for the Hogenkamp-van den Berg family for one reason - a first grandchild was born into a family of mainly women. It was a good thing I was a girl child. Not that a boy would have been unwelcome (after all my father, Jan Hogenkamp, was a boy) but a girl was welcomed warmly. It was a relief for my mother, who having survived TB in her early twenties, had a difficult and tiring delivery. I arrived hale and healthy and immediately became the focus of a very "trots" Oma and two proud maiden aunts.
My mother and father were living in a very comfortable remodelled flat in Den Haag where my father had added a modern Canadian style bathroom with tub and shower for my Canadian mother. He was a rising executive in KLM and a reservist with the Dutch army. My mother was a Canadian nurse who had moved to Holland a year earlier to marry my father. Winky was the family cat that my mother named after the cat she left behind in Ottawa.
So you could say that Winky was part of the welcoming committee when I was brought home from the hospital. Family history has it that the cat took an immediate shine to me and was never far from my side ever after. He guarded me and slept near the crib. I was his baby.
Of course I remember none of this but I do remember being very fond of him when I got older.
My two aunts Jo and Ina were my father's sisters and he was the baby brother of his family. They were both teachers, well read, highly educated and dedicated to their professions. Teaching was one of the few professions along with nursing, that was suitable for ladies of breeding, in reduced circumstances. And their circumstances were definately reduced because their father had died young leaving a huge debt as a legacy. Oma didn't work but the daughters and my father were expected to work and pay off the debt and salvage the family honour. The debt was not to a bank or a money lender, but to my Oma's two brothers. It seems that my Opa first went through his wife's considerable legacy before borrowing from her brothers to keep his book publishing business afloat. It is aid, my Opa was unable to embrace the emergence of trade unions in the printing business and constantly lost staff and contracts as a consequence. In the family he was always referred to as "bad at business". He died early for his troubles and his three children were reqired to assume the burden of his debts.
When my father married and had a child my aunts decided to take over his share of the debt to permit him to care for his family. So the two maiden aunts became the stewards of the Hogenkamp honour. You might well ask why their two van den Berg uncles didn't just cancel the debt when Opa died? After all, they had wealth and their widowed sister wasn't responsible for her husband's bad business decisions. I can't answer that. All I know is that my aunts put their lives on hold for years to support their mother and pay off every last penny that their father owed. I have always suspected that was the reason they both became committed labourites and staunch defenders of trade unions.
These same two aunts doted on me, the only family grandchild. I was read to in both Dutch and English, outings to the country happened and all was peaceful and happy in the family circle. But rumblings of war were being heard all over Europe. My father was called up to defend tiny neutral Holland in case it turned out not to be neutral after all. KLM was giving its people time off to train and prepare. My mother was alone a lot more and enfolded into the loving but bossy bosom of her mother-in-law. Plans were being made to secure the family life-line so that while each family lived independently, there was a fall back plan for cooperation as needed.
Germany disregarded Dutch neutrality and my father left for the front. May 1940, Holland was invaded and after a seven- day march to defend Holland's border, my father was taken prisoner of war along with the rest of the Dutch army. Holland surrendered and to make a point Germany bombed Rotterdam. During the bombing, my mother hid me with Winky, in my pram under the stairs. At two months old, my world would be turned upside down.
