Interview with Marten Van Heuven

Library of Congress Interview with Marten Van Heuven The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project MARTEN VAN HEUVEN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: January 31, 2003 Copyright 2004 ADST Q: Today is January 31, 2003. This is an interview with Marten van Heuven. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. Do you go by Marten? VAN HEUVEN: Yes. Q: Can we start at the beginning? Could you tell me when and where you were born? VAN HEUVEN: I was born in Europe in the Netherlands in a city called Utrecht, best known for the Peace of Utrecht of 1713. I was the first child of parents who both came from Utrecht. My father was an eye surgeon. My mother studied law but never practiced. Q: In what year were you born? VAN HEUVEN: In 193Utrecht was a university city. Since both my father and mother had degrees from the University, my family was part of the Utrecht nomenklatura. On my father's side my ancestors for several centuries were teachers. On my mother's side, my grandfather was also a doctor. His parents were farmers. So mine was a very Dutch family. We were comfortable at the time I was born, the crash of '29 had not affected my Interview with Marten Van Heuven http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001476 Library of Congress parents. But at that time - and I wasn't aware of it then - the Nazi threat in Germany was already evident. In due course, my father thought he saw the war coming. He was British oriented because he used to go to ophthalmological congresses in Oxford and had many English friends. He considered leaving the Netherlands, but in the end the settledness of our situation simply trumped the desire to go. So we stayed, something my father regretted ever after. We went through World War II in Utrecht. I never saw any fighting. Both in 1940 and 1945, fighting stopped just short of Utrecht. In May of 1940, we avoided being hit by German bombardments. After the Germans destroyed Rotterdam, Utrecht was next on the target list. We had been evacuated to the center of the city, to a building used by Louis Napolean. Two hours before sunset the Dutch armed forces capitulated and so Utrecht was spared. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't be here to tell you this story. By 1947, my father had been back to England, and also to the United States. There, he received several offers to teach and practice ophthalmology. He took up the offer to go to the Yale medical school. On my 15th birthday, November 25, 1947, my mother, my brother, and I set sail for New York on the New Amsterdam. My father had preceded us to the United States. A week later, we settled in our new home in New Haven, Connecticut. Q: I'd like to stop you and go back. What was life like in Utrecht during the German occupation? VAN HEUVEN: At first it was not all that noticeable. I was 8 at the time, so my memory is that of a boy. What I remember most was the last year. The Allies attempted to liberate all of Holland in September 1944 with an airborne attack involving the 101st, the 82nd, and the 1st British airborne. The attempt to take the bridge at Arnhem failed. The other landings succeeded. The result was that the south of the Netherlands was liberated and we were not. At that point, things really turned bad. They had already become bad for the Jewish population in the Netherlands, who had experienced roundups starting in 1942. And they had become bad for others, such as the young men who had been in the army, who had been shipped off to work camps. But these events did not affect me Interview with Marten Van Heuven http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001476 Library of Congress directly, nor did they affect my father's practice directly. But in September of 1944, the Germans requisitioned all able-bodied men. Schools closed because there were no more teachers. Then, from all 1944 to May 1945, we went through a cold winter. There were no more cars on the road. Bicycles were also requisitioned by the Germans. The trains had stopped running. People stayed in place. Some of them had a very bad time, both with the cold and lack of food. Because my father was a doctor and had patients from the countryside, there was a supply of food that kept us going. Not everybody was that fortunate. I remember times when we would get a couple of sacks of potatoes from a farmer patient and then redistributed them to people whom we knew and who needed them. There was also a pervasive element of fear, because at that point not only the German military occupation but basically the exercise of civilian authority by the Germans had come to rest on informants. The whole atmosphere was extremely hostile. The risk of doing a whole lot of things was enormous - listening to the BBC, picking up the leaflets that the allied bombers would drop overnight. The exercise of German authority was arbitrary. We lived from hand to mouth. You really couldn't trust anybody. Q: I would think particularly for a boy around 12 it would be a trial for the parents to keep somebody like that from not doing something that could really cause problems. Kids are very adventurous and all that. VAN HEUVEN: That's a very American way of looking at the situation. But let me assure you there was no adventurism whatsoever. Since 1940 we had experienced all sorts of restraints and we knew from family experience just how bad things could get. An uncle of mine was picked up by the Germans when hiding in my grandfather's country house. The Dutch word was “onderduiker.” He was an “onderduiker.” He had basically disappeared from view. But they tracked him down and he spent the rest of the war in a camp. His wife, a schoolteacher, later on used an unflattering word about the Germans. One of the kids in her school told the parents, and she ended up for a year in jail in the city of Groningen. So, right in the family, we knew that risks were all around you. Authority was capricious, arbitrary, and potentially lethal. It was lethal right until the end of the Interview with Marten Van Heuven http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001476 Library of Congress war, when my mother's nephew, who was active in the resistance at the time when the Germans were capitulating, incautiously decided he would reveal himself, put on the orange armband, and start trying to carry a message across town to allied lines. He was captured and summarily executed. Had he waited 24 hours, he would be alive. Those things made you very cautious. You knew even as a 12-year-old boy that this was not a game, that what you did could cost your parents' life. It could basically disrupt everything. So, caution absolutely impregnated everything I did. Q: One knows of the retribution given to Nazi sympathizers in France. Right after the German surrender, what happened in the Netherlands with the Nazi sympathizers? VAN HEUVEN: It was a very local issue. In Utrecht, there was an interregnum of about two days between the German capitulation and the arrival of the Canadian 1st Army. The underground came out into the open. The Germans were still there. The Dutch uniformed NSB, the Dutch Nazi party, were still out there in their black shirts. Everybody was armed. There were firefights in some of the squares, with casualties. After the war, there were trials and the Dutch quisling, Mussert, was convicted and executed at the end of his trial. There was not a lot of kangaroo justice. I think people were just simply too worn out by their ordeal. It was not in the Dutch nature to practice kangaroo justice, although the Dutch can harbor deep grudges. That was not the way you do things. But I cannot sit here and tell you that kangaroo justice didn't happen. Q: No, but it gives a feel for things. It must have been quite an adventure for you to arrive in the United States, wasn't it, in '47? VAN HEUVEN: The idea of leaving war-torn Europe and going to America was an amazing prospect. It was not just the British, but also the Canadians and the Americans who had come into Europe to chase the Nazi Germans out. The army side of the liberation was Canadian, General Foulkes' 1st Army. But it was the British Royal Air Force that flew Interview with Marten Van Heuven http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001476 Library of Congress the sorties. During the last year of the war we witnessed every 24 hours huge overflights of bombers heading for Germany. They dropped leaflets. So you were very aware of the war because it was being waged in the air. You associated with those men who were flying those aircraft. I remember watching from the back of the garden when one of them got hit, burst into flames, and then crashed. Near our country place there were graves of some British fliers who had been shot down and were buried pretty much where they fell. You associated heavily with the Allies. So the notion of going to America was a liberating prospect and a profoundly liberating experience.

Load more