Miriam Troostwyk - May 28, 1998 and June 3, 1999
The Battle of Arnhem
Did any bombs fall near you?
Yes, of course.
What did you do? Were you in a shelter or, uh...
Well, Arnhem was really flat and only stones everywhere, that was what you see in--now, on the--CNN from Kosovo, so was Arnhem.
Hm.
But in Bel...Belgrade, what they do there now, they pick out a bridge or things in that time, they bombed everything so there was nothing left, maybe a church or a hospital or something and even that was half of it. It was terrible.
So what did you do? Was there a bunker or shelter of some sort?
Well, we were outside.
During the air raids?
Yeah. But it was mostly Arnhem who, who, who was uh, so terrible. But we--then in uh, the 16th of April, we were liberated in ...45. So first we had--in September, uh, the Schlacht of Arnhem uh, the fight over Arnhem.
Uh-huh.
So Arnhem was bombed and was really flat and it was nothing. Velp was five kilometers from Arnhem uh, was uh, with grenades and, and bombs, but not so as Arnhem.
The noise must have been frightening.
Terrible, but uh, we were not afraid. And then they uh, went back to Nijmegen or somewhere, Tiel uh, Elst and then they came over every night again to uh, bomb the ??? where um, all the factories are, the steel factories and everything in uh, Germany, Duisberg and uh, Dusseldorf and...
The Ruhr, the Ruhr district, then?
Yes, they did that for years. They started in uh, end of ...43, they came over.
Uh-huh.
And I could always hear whether it was an English plane. They had a--another noise than the German planes.
So these were all British aircraft?
Yeah.
And the...
That were bombing every night.
And the German planes...
R.A.F.
did they ever...
Royal Air Force.
fire on anyone?
Who?
The German planes.
Well, they tried to, to uh, to get them down.
It's--but they never, they never strafed...
But when they went to Germany, they went so high over...
Uh-huh.
So every night we, we saw the lights from the Germans and ??? uh, I said ??? all the things and sometimes one went down.
Tell me what you just said, ???--you, you said something in--which sounded like...
???, ??? that is, the big machines that have their uh, the pipe goes up and they try to uh...
Shoot it out, shoot it out of the sky.
To the planes.
Uh-huh. And when they were defeated, the British, I mean, how did that feel? I know you were disappointed.
When they uh, fell down or something?
When the, when the, when the British retreated from Arnhem?
Oh, ???, that was terrible, oh. Everybody was disappointed and everybody was down and everybody was afraid because we went out that--the street would know it and there was a Wehrmacht sign, um, in, in the street, it was three houses from us.
Oh, God.
I think I've told you before.
About the Wehrmacht.
Yeah.
Yeah. That was last time we talked about that.
Yeah.
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