Miriam Troostwyk - May 28, 1998 and June 3, 1999
End of the War (Con't)
Did you ever think...
And that was liberated in ...44...
And it never occurred to anyone to try to make it to Nijmegen ?
Nobody knew how strong the Germans were to come over the Rhine. You couldn't come over that river.
Right.
That river was trouble and the bridges.
So when did the Canadians appear?
Um, I think they started uh, to do it again in um, in April. And after uh, a battle for five or six days, they came through.
The ground battle was the...
Yes, the tanks, the artillery, artillery and the tanks.
How close was...
And they were um, in the air to protect them, to try to protect them.
How close did the fighting come to you?
Well, they were from house to house. Every house was liberated. The Canadians came in with the ??? and they had, um...
Machine guns.
camouflage, uh...
Uh-huh.
uh, from leaves and everything on their...
Hm.
heads with nets. And this was parachutes, they had parachutes, wearing--they were parachutes wearing.
Oh, so they were parachuted into the...
Yeah. You saw them...
And so it was--it was house to house?
Yeah, with the tanks, they came uh, and house to house. They were fighting every house. The garden at the end--they were beautiful houses. They were for a week, was the whole street on fire, at the end of the garden. And we were sitting in the cellar. And a neighbor, he was just uh, engaged, he was a young man, he didn't know that uh, we were hiding, because our house was attached and then there was a big path from both houses and then there was again a house like that. And that neighbor, they had a bunker in the uh, garden.
Uh-huh.
And they were there with the whole family in it. But he had to take some medicine and he went out to go in the house to take the medicine and a hand grenade killed him. And we heard that scream, we were not outside in uh, we didn't have a bunker outside. We were inside, in the cellar. We heard that scream and then uh, ten minutes later, he uh, we heard that he was dead.
So you must have been terrified at all this fighting?
I don't remember so very much. I think I was more terrified uh, being in hiding and I heard every night coming, the V-1 over.
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