I landed on Schiphol early enough on March 28 to attend the Holy Thursday service at my familiar parish at the St. Augustine church and the stations of the cross on Friday. On Easter Sunday I took bus and train with my 50-lb backpack from my sister’s home in Badhoevedorp to Zaandam and attended the Easter Sunday service at St. Bonifatius church.

St. Bonifatius

The boat survived the unusually stormy winter in good shape. I am back, since Monday, at YC “de Schinkel” where I learned to sail as a pre-puber and spent a good part of my 2009-2014 Europe visit. It is good to be back on my floating home, cook my own meals, act crazy; a lifestyle I am stuck in voluntarily since 2005.

home

I slept in 19 different locations since I arrived on November 15 at Lisa’s home, on two boats, one train, one motel, one hotel, the rest “real” homes. Too many names to post here to express my gratitude for the hospitality, not to forget the many visits and meals at other homes.  Thank you all. I am very blessed.

The work to finish repairing the hidden defects on the boat starts in earnest today. So far I have been catching up on an unending battle to get my residential permit that was started in 2022. Last summer, my application got lost in the system, the permission to pick up the license was granted the day after my departure date on November 15. I was then granted an extension to the end of this month. But guess what? They have no trace of my permit, once again. The only way to communicate is by snail mail. I am going to advertise for a personal secretary with minimum 10 year gaming expertise to deal with the online DigiD maze.

In my previous blog, I had just come back to the Cape Charles, Va. area where I have spent time since I washed up on the Barrier Islands adjoining the Eastern Shore of the Peninsula that runs north and south between the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay. I made many good friendships here while I repaired “Fleetwood II” from the June 22 2017 shipwreck wounds.

On March 9^th I gave another “SoloMan” presentation at the YC in Kinsale, close to the southern bank of the Potomac River. That Saturday night I was the guest on the yacht of Harry and Cathy Coorens in the Blue Water Marina in Hampton, Va. We met in Cape Charles in 2018. Harry is also raised in the Netherlands. Last summer they looked me up in Zaandam.

View from Coorens residence

The three of us attended mass on Sunday at the same church I wrote about on my blog of the 4^th of July 2020, Our Lady Star of the Sea at Fort Monroe. That day I happened to be sitting in the same pew with Skip and Doreen Grimm. Skip is a walking history encyclopedia and he has been a great help in educating me, particularly the role the Dutch played on the Chesapeake and the James River in the New World. In 2020 he gave me a tour of the historic surroundings and the impressive Maritime Museum in Newport News. The five of us had coffee across the street at the old Fire Hall.

I stayed with my friend Susan Kovacs who lives in Machipongo on the banks of the Hungars Creek. Where the deer and the Bald Eagles play and one never gets tired of watching the watermen work oysters, clams and crab and see the recent full moon set.

Full Moon Hungars Creek

The Palm Sunday service and Saint Patrick day dinner at Saint Charles church were opportunities to shake hands again with parishioner friends I got to know here.

with our Episcopalian neighbors in Cape Charles. Blessing of the Palms

Susan drove me to the Amtrak station in Norfolk on the 26^th for a ride to Quantico, the marine base just south of D.C. My new friends Jack and Scottie Foster drove me to their home in Warrenton, Va. Scottie is the Bauernmalerei art teacher of Cathy Crowley I reported on in my previous blog. Just like my experience with the Crowleys in Napa, we share the same interests and values as sailors and Christians.

Bauernmalerei. 4 Seasons. “I and my house, we will serve the Lord”

    Jack & Scottie

They drove me to Dulles the next day for my flight to Amsterdam via Dublin. Again, just like the flight to Seattle in November, excellent service on Aer Lingus. Highly recommended, total opposite of my experience with Easy Jet in 2022, with whom I will never fly again.

80 years ago on 4-4-44 

I was only seven years old. This is a date that has left a permanent imprint on my entire life. I still see the posse, with an armed German soldier, coming up the stairs, hiding behind our mother.

from my book The Mastmakers’ Daughters:

“Chapter 30. My husband arrested

A black car drove slowly into the Alblasstraat where we lived on the evening of the fourth of April 1944. The car stopped near our address. A civilian stepped out and asked our daughter Lientje, who was playing in the street: “Can you tell me where I can find the van Ommens?” Now, that was not that difficult for an almost ten-year-old.

The civilian happened to be Maarten Kuiper, a Dutch traitor, who was accompanied by Friederich Christian Viebahn, Staffelsturmscharführer. Later on, we discovered that we had earned the distinction to have been visited by a notorious posse of the German SD (Sicherheits Dienst). These same two men arrested the Anne Frank family four months later. The Frank family went through the same routine as my husband via the SD headquarters in the Euterpestraat and then sent to the prison on the Weteringschans. Maarten Kuiper was also the one to empty his pistol on the legendary Resistance heroine Hannie Schaft, two weeks short of the end of the war. His bloodthirstiness became the fatal fate for the many men picked at random in the “Silbertanne” executions at the end of the war. Kuiper was sentenced to death by the Dutch war court and executed right after the war.

The black booted gentlemen rang our door bell and announced themselves as: “Police” and then explained that they were looking for housing for people that were being evacuated from the coast line, where a defensive system was being built to keep any invasions from the North Sea at bay. Dick happened to be on the fourth-floor attic listening to his clandestine radio transmissions from the BBC. After tramping through our apartment for a half hour, they disappeared across the street to pay a visit to the street level apartment of Henk Dienske’s parents. But twenty minutes later Kuiper with a German soldier came back up our stairs. The soldier had his rifle drawn. They arrested Dick and took him across the street to the Dienskes. It was obvious that they were on a wild goose chase. Dick had never been involved in any of my resistance activities, and for every one’s safety, it was not discussed between us. I was hoping that it all would turn out to be an error. It was obvious that they were on a wild goose chase.  They did not seem to be clear in what or whom they were searching for.

But yet the thoughts of what the Germans could be up to frightened me and my praying started in earnest.

The old Dienske, Johan, Henk’s father was not home yet. Another man, a certain van der Most^[1] out of the Deurlostraat, was being interrogated, in the Dienske home, by Emil Rühl, second in command at the SD Amsterdam headquarters. Dick was brought, with van der Most, to the SD headquarters. Dick was asked what he knew of a certain “de Ridder”. This was the alias of Henk Dienske. Dick did not have a clue. The only “de Ridder” he knew was our milkman who came daily through our neighborhood to deliver fresh milk. Johan Dienske was brought later that evening to join Dick and van der Most. When the old Dienske arrived home, Kuiper was waiting for him. His wife, Jo, had a plate of cereal ready for him and Kuiper let him eat it and mocked him: “Don’t you need to say grace first?” The threesome, Dick, van der Most and Johan, were brought over to Weteringschans prison, near the Rijksmuseum. Each was in a separate but adjoining cell with van der Most in the middle cell. Johan was transferred to a different part of the prison the next morning. Dick’s cell number was B 2.16. Johan’s wife, Jo, was also arrested and brought to the women’s section of Weteringschans prison. Dick shared his cell with an “onderduiker”[2] and Sponmoelee who had been imprisoned for more than two years. The first thing his new cellmates asked was: “Do you have any cigarettes or tobacco?” No, Dick had neither. Dick slept reasonably well on his straw mattress that first night in prison, considering his predicament. Their daily routine was to be woken at 7 a.m. and then to wash their faces from the water pitcher. Each had four thin slices of bread and tasteless coffee for breakfast. The best that could be said for the coffee was that it was warm. Lunch consisted of potatoes and cabbage that floated in warm water. Every other day they were served soup that did not taste bad, but was far too little. Dinner was identical to breakfast. On Saturday, the prisoners received 25 grams margarine, a small chunk of cheese, and a tiny measure of sugar, which was meant to last for a week.

When Dick paced himself, it could last him through Tuesday.”

Laissez Passer

As a background to this chapter: Henk Dienske was the leader of the L.O.L.K.P. in the province of North-Holland. This was one of various resistance groups in the Netherlands.

L.O. stands for Landelijke Organisatie voor hulp aan onderduikers. (see picture). Their function was to provide hiding places, false I.D., food ration coupons, etc., for targets of the enemy, Jews, young men forced into labor for the enemy’s war industry, conscientious  objectors.

We still do not know the exact role our mother played. The curiosity came after mother passed away in 1993. My theory is that she was asked by Henk to take over the role he had assigned to his parents, our neighbors across the street. They lived at street level and anyone could see the couriers come and go with their contraband for re-distribution. We lived on the third floor and access was on a stone stair to the 2nd floor to a portico with three different exterior doors. The couriers, mostly female university students, would ring the door bell in the portico and mother would push a button from the 3^rd floor, she’d keep our interior apartment door ajar, the couriers would drop the documents behind the commode in the bathroom and disappear; mother never saw them. Then mother would meet with, mostly with Henk Dienske present, others in the group to sort the incoming contraband for further destinations. Since the 4-4-44 visitors did not know the gender of the van Ommen they came for and did not know the real name of de Ridder, I speculate that it may have been a courier who was compromised by the enemy.

Two weeks after father’s arrest, Henk Dienske was taken into custody. The S.D. managed to get the identity from someone we all knew. I discovered this in 2009 in my search for information in the national archives about the young Dutch Nazi who worked for the S.D., Sonja van Hesteren who managed to trick Dienske out of his hiding place. This is all detailed in my book. Henk Dienske succumbed on February 15, 1945 in the Beėndorf/Neuengamme concentration camp.

Mother turned herself in to replace our father on April 25. She figured that since the S.D. had their precious price that they would probably have little need to keep her. Apparently she was suspected to have more to share. She drove their interrogators to desperation, as described by her in the book. Her uncle, the father of her NAZI cousin, the other Mastmakers’ daughter, tried to plead her cause but was told that she would have to be locked up until war’s end. Mother ended up in two prisons, three S.S. concentration camps and was intercepted by the U.S. Army on the death march out of Dachau.

On May 1^st the L.K.P. made a failed attempt to free Henk Dienske from the Weteringschans prison because word came from inside that Henk Dienske was under much pressure and had started to spill details. As you may have noticed above our father had a problem in his confrontation in prison with Dienske. My parents and the parents of Henk were all still in this prison and recalled the commotion of running guards, shooting, barking dogs.

Father was released on May 5^th, , the parents of Henk on May 3^rd.

[1] Philippus van der Most. Dick van Ommen wrote in his diary that v/d Most was very scared. His name has never come up again.

[2] Literally: diver=gone into hiding from the enemy   .