Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Miriam Troostwyk - May 28, 1998 and June 3, 1999

V-2 Rockets

Right, V-2, rocket.

Or the V-Two came over. And when it stopped, then all the red light came in the bedroom and you didn't know where it stopped and it could come in your area, in your house. That was the V-Two that went from Arnhem to Nijmegen--I mean Nijmegen. But there were so much miss...missiles uh, they missed it, so they came in the middle, they never got to Nijmegen so far.

Hm.

They always came uh, five miles before it down.

So the...

I--that scared me terribly.

The, the, the motor of the, um...

Because I thought everything is burning, now they are doing something that we can get liberated. I don't know something.

And when a V-2 rocket came over, you could hear it...

Yeah, we heard it.

the mechanism.

Yes.

And when it stopped, you knew it was going to come down.

Yeah.

What was the red light about?

It exploded in the air or something.

Ah, oh, I see.

That was fire, red fire. It was terrible.

And did it ever um, did, did any fall on Velp?

Near Velp...

Yeah.

or maybe on Velp, that I don't know, but not in our area.

None, okay.

They come...

And this was every night?

That was every night. And uh, but when they started fighting, I thought, well, how long can it take? Well, when we saw--it was very scary when we saw, of course, that everything was burning there at, at the end, but yeah.

What was burning?

All the houses.

The whole town?

Yeah, the whole town was burning, so yeah, what do you think when you are in the cellar and you are quiet and you look at each other and--well, we'll see.

That's liberation.

Yeah, well...

Everything gets burned down.

I don't know. I don't know so much about it, but uh, I thought, well, finally all the Germans get out Nijmegen.

Is, is there a person or a group who liberated you that you can remember? I mean, is there a face that you put with the liberation, someone--some...

You couldn't recognize the faces...

They had...

because they had the things still here and uh, nets over it and uh, uh, um, leaves...

???.

a lot of leaves. And they were scared too and uh, uh...

Did they ???...

I know one came in with this and I thought, what a young boy is this.


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