"They were New Zealanders" continued

Trevor Bayliss started this whole project off when he wrote his book "They Were New Zealanders"  about the Kelly family of Waima into which he married.

The title he chose is entirely suitable for a continuation of my family story, the story of Dutch immigrants, pioneers in their own way, to this new nation.

My father Roelof Hielkema of Auckland wrote about his early life growing up in the Netherlands during World War II.

From the world that I grew up in Roelof's story is of an alien world and a life far removed from that of my reality. It is the exceptionally courageous step that my father and mother took to emigrate that I owe and attribute my very nature.

Roelof writes...

"My Father (Harmen Hielkema) worked for a road construction firm. He drove a road roller. Although steamrollers were in common use till well into the 1950’s, my father drove a diesel powered one.

The road roller of my grand father Harmen Hielkema, my Omke Foppe, Tante Aali and my father Roelof at the outbreak of war, summer 1939.

Our family lived in a wooden caravan with big wooden spoke wheels. It had a wrought iron tow bar so that it could be towed behind the roller when we shifted. The caravan had a kitchen cum living room with a coal range in it. There was also a small bedroom with bunks; a double bunk for our parents and a double and single bunk for my eldest brother, my sister and myself. Plumbing unknown to us then, we had a portable loo with a bucket in it and a bundle of neatly torn newspapers for the wiping. Our water supply came from a 1000 Litre tank on wheels, which was part of our cavalcade when we moved.

I was born in 1933 so my earliest recollections are of the late 1930’s when the world was just emerging from the great economic depression, poverty was endemic although my father had a job and we were therefore better off than many other people, we could only live soberly. Even a one-cent ice cream was a rare and special treat to us!

My father Roelof, His mother Feikje, my uncle Foppe and my aunt Aali. In the back groung the road roller, the water tank and the family home, a gypsy wagon.

I was the youngest for a long time. We traveled all over the country wherever my father’s work took him. Three weeks in one place, two months in another and so on.

In most of the towns and villages that we came to we were made to park in the gypsy camp, because the local policemen always thought that we must be gypsies because we lived in a caravan. A lot of villages had a designated gypsy camp. Sometimes we lived by the side of the road, or on an industrial site like a brick factory or something like that.

When traveling from job to job we used to trundle noisily along the road at walking pace.. The ten-ton roller towing the caravan, towing the water tank, with the dunny lashed on top.

We children used to ride on the roller with dad, mum used to be in the caravan. We would stop for meals and travel in this way till our destination was reached and the curious villagers would cluster around to see us set up our home. The caravan just so, nice and level, the water-tank close by and the loo.

Sometimes on bigger jobs there were other road workers with their families, also in caravans of course and we would be a little community.

In the summer of 1939, we and five other families were encamped on the outskirts of Utrecht, where a new suburb was being built. It was there that I first went to school. I must have been a difficult pupil at first. I remember that I could not sit still and kept wandering away by myself. I had always had the freedom to come and go school discipline was not for me.

My Father was very proud of the new radio receiver that he bought that year and it was always switched on. These were stirring times with frightening news bulletins. Germany has annexed Austria; Germany has invaded Czechoslovakia! Hitler is a threat to world peace! In September Germany has invaded Poland! England and France declare war!

For a long time our life went on as before. I December 1939 my brother Willem was born. I remember the snow was deep all around. I remember I used to love to pee in it because it made yellow holes and interesting patterns if you really tried!

On the tenth day of May 1940 the radio announced that the Germans had invaded our country. People stood around in groups passing on rumours and what they had heard and seen.

The next day there was shooting, paratroopers and aeroplanes.One evening while we were having our meal outside a large bomber came flaming out of the sky and crashed about a kilometer away from us. The southwestern sky was full of smoke and at night there was a red glow in that direction. Rotterdam burned for many days and nights.

Then just as suddenly our war was over. The Dutch had surrendered. Life went back to being normal, or so it seemed. German soldiers were everywhere but proved to be friendly and did us no harm. For the next five years our lives were dominated by the war and the German occupation.

Us kids, we did not know that there was anything wrong with life. The austerity we experienced then was only an extension of the austerity before the war. Most working people had more money than before, wages were higher, unemployment was less, child benefits were introduced, free medical services for children, etc.

There was not much that you could spend money on, travel was curtailed, things like tyres for bicycles were unobtainable, shoe leather was scarce and food became rationed. All the country’s resources were taken for the German war effort.

Our family moved again, on a freight train this time. We went to the south of the country to a province called Noord Brabant, to a village called Gilze Ryen, where the Germans established an airfield. My father and many others worked there for about eighteen months making roads and runways. For us children it meant yet another school, this one was run by a religious order. We, as outsiders, had a hard time of it at first, because we were not Catholics. The other children thought that the devil must be in us. I was bullied a lot and got a lot of hidings on the sly because I did not have a guardian angel.

Eventually we became more accepted and had a good time, roaming the woods and fields. The winters of 1941-1942 were very severe. The snow lay deep and all was frozen for months on end. Every day my brother Foppe and I took our sled into the forest to gather dead branches for the cooking range. In those woods was an old field kitchen and other military equipment. Many of the trees were blasted and damaged by shell fire, the remnants of a battle between a French brigade and some German units.

Our school was held in the attic of an old leather tannery because the school itself had been destroyed during the fighting.

In the middle of 1943 we moved again, this time to a permanent depot that the road-making firm had established a few kilometers out of Utrecht, alongside of the Amsterdam-Rhine canal. This was another paradise for children, because of the swimming in the canal, the fishing in some smaller waterways in the neighbourhood, the orchards, cherries and apples that could be raided by us and also the rabbits and hares that we could catch in our snares. We had a vegetable plot and an air raid shelter. The shelter always frightened me because it was deep under ground and very dark and damp. There were five caravans and ten children all together, so we had a lively community. We had to walk about an hour to get to school in Utrecht, along a narrow brick road on top of the dyke alongside the canal, then across a large steel arched bridge, through an avenue with large oak trees, a park and across two more canals.

Our fathers came home for a weekend every fortnight, because their work was a long way from where we lived. We were no longer allowed to live near where the work was as we had done in the past.

I remember playing by myself a lot. I realize now that I was the only boy among eight girls. My eldest brother Foppe had been sent to Oldeboorn in Friesland to live with our grandparents so that he could attend the secondary school there.

Foppe was five years older than me and always teased and bullied so I really did not miss him at all! My brother Willem was six years younger than I.

Willem and Roelof at a local fair in the 1940s

I made friends with the German Soldiers manning the anti aircraft battery near us and learned to speak their language somewhat.

There was always something interesting happening, about a mile away there was a big factory, where it was said, parts were made for the German V1. Rocket propelled weapons. This factory was often the target of attack by the allied forces dive-bombers and missile carrying aircraft, such as Typhoons, Mosquito’s, etc. There were aerial battles between the German and allied fighter air-craft that escorted the bomber squadrons on the way to Germany.

During the day American squadrons came over in great masses and during the night the R.A.F was on the job. The noise was deafening at times when the ack-ack guns around us stared up. As a boy I thought it very exciting although ever since I grew up I have marveled at the folly of it all.

In May 1944 it was decided that it had become too dangerous for us to go to school because of the air raids so we spent the summer helping out in the vegetable garden, fishing for eels and swimming in the canal. We used to love the German torpedo boats that came past in the late afternoon on their way to the sea. These boats went very fast and caused a tremendous wake. We used to surf on the waves that they made!

How our Mother coped with all this I don’t know. At the time I was an unthinking boy and only since I grew up have I wondered how she managed during those crazy years. Virtually the only food we had came from our garden plot. Everything was rationed, like the small piece of green bread that was our weekly ration and the small amount of blue milk. I cannot remember that there was anything to eat other than what we could scrounge for ourselves. In the spring we collected the eggs of the wild birds, lapwings, snipe and ducks that inhabited the countryside around us. We set long lines for eels and snares for rabbits. Sometimes I was able to score a loaf of bread from the German supply truck. We had no salt, no butter, no electricity, very little fuel, and soap was a luxury.

By this time the men of our five caravan families stayed home. The trains no longer ran, there was no traffic on the roads, except women and children and of course military traffic. The Germans kept rounding up the men in the towns and put them to work in German factories so any men that remained stayed out of sight. We faced another bitter winter with little food or fuel. Somehow my father had organized a two tonne truck to take us to Friesland. It was early January 1945, Mum, Dad, my sister Alie and my younger brother Willem who had just turned 6. We sat on the back of this flat deck truck, huddling under a piece of tarpaulin, blankets and clothes and what food we had left. It was mostly kale boiled in water, no salt or anything. It was difficult to force down our throat.

Most of the space on this small truck was taken up by a wood burning furnace and a kind of gas-bag. The engine ran on wood gas, not very well, and our progress was slow and noisy. It snowed constantly. We were stopped many times during our two day journey by German soldiers but all they saw was a skinny woman, some skinny kids and an old man with a grey beard. My father was only 38 at the time but his identity papers had been falsified to show him as 10 years older so that he would not be taken to Germany for slave labour.

We finally arrived at my aunt and uncle’s farm in a village called Olderkoop. There we saw some wonderful things on the dinner table; potatoes, ham, fresh vegetables, milk, butter and bread, simple things to you now, but to us then, a miracle from heaven. Our parents rented an empty house on the edge of the woods. The previous occupant had died a short while before, the name on the front door? H. Hielkema!

We lived in that house for eight months and to me it seemed like paradise. Looking back fifty years, today, I am sure that it was. If you walked out of the back door and through the garden gate you entered a real forest, a long way through the forest led to open Friesian moorland. There were wonderful birds and hares, rabbits, foxes, snakes, deer, salamanders and woodcutters with a team of oxen.

Aaltsje and Roelof Hielkema

My sister Alie and I went to the village primary school. There were children from all over the country, displaced by the war and unable to go home to the south of the country where many of them came from. The snow disappeared in early March. The middle of April brought beautiful, warm weather and also an American armored column that set up camp in the churchyard, right in the middle of the village.

To us these people looked like aliens from outer-space, they were well fed, beautifully dressed in their Khaki uniforms, fine boots and all! Their field kitchen and supply tent had something that I had never seen, white bread! They gave us chocolate and oranges and joked amongst themselves. They really seemed strange to us, we were a people who had forgotten how to laugh.

There was some minor shelling and skirmishing, then all went peaceful again in our bit of countryside. Then on the 5^th Of May came the wonderful news, the Germans had surrendered. Our war was over.

August 1945 our family went back to Utrecht. I can’t remember how, it must have been on the back of a truck, I have a vague recollection that it was a closed in one. The railways and bridges had been largely destroyed.

Due to the influence of my father’s employers and because we had lost everything during the last winter, we were given a rental house in the centre of Utrecht. This house was one of a block built just prior to the war. The surrounding area had been mostly obliterated in some bombardment, but our house and the school next door had survived intact, as had the 13^th century church across the street.

In this wasteland, a large area had been cleared of rubble and became the site of the biggest fairground I have ever seen. The amazing bustle of it went on for months. Great steam driven fairground organs made the air vibrate with their noise till the early hours of the morning.

There were merry-go-rounds and swings and cakewalks, shooting galleries, several horror rides, ferris-wheels, the electric lady, the fat lady, the young lady that turned into a skeleton, fire eaters, knife throwers, escape artists and hustlers of every kind. There were soldiers and their girlfriends, fights and police, such an amazing show. I spent all my spare time there; the edge of it was only 30 meters from our front door! We also had parades, brass bands, dancing in the streets, the war was over and the future looked wonderful. It was great to be young., when I was thirteen, I felt convinced that the earthly paradise had come. From now on all would be perfect, no more war, no more hunger, no more oppression, After all, we were told that was what the war had been about.

I am afraid that the dream was gradually broken; at first the Dutch sent troops to Indonesia, to prevent the people there from becoming independent. This shameful episode went on for about two years.

Eventually, pressured by the United Nations the Dutch allowed Indonesia to become an independent republic.

The Iron curtain came down across Europe and the dream of peace and plenty seemed more unlikely all the time.

In 1946 I went to a technical school and followed a course in carpentry. I got my diploma in 1948 and found a job with a building contractor. I did not like the work. I had to fetch timber from miles away out of town with a handcart. I had to sweep chimneys and unblock drains, etc.

At last I was assigned to a gang that started to build a villa in a town called Zeist, right in the middle of the woods. I used to leave home at six a.m. and cycled to Zeist to be at work at seven. Every part of the job was still done by hand, from digging the foundations to mixing the mortar for the bricklayers. We cut the timber, planed the profiles and made the window frames, sashes, doors, kitchen cupboards, staircases, the lot! I was only the boy, the tradesmen were all elderly and very skilled, this whole villa, a big place with a thatched roof, only took about seven months to build. I don’t think that it could be built in that time today, to the same high standard, in spite of all the modern machinery available.

My father talked me into taking a job with the Post Office as a trainee draughtsman. I really wanted to go to sea but I was not allowed. 

I joined a military band and learned to play the oboe, the uniform was a great hit with the girls. I spent eighteen months high under the roof of the Chief Post Office in Utrecht. The building itself is a major work of art by a famous architect called Berlage; early art deco. Every time I go to Utrecht I go back to admire it. However I did not like to be cooped up inside, so I became an apprentice dragline operator. Having done the night school exams for the Post Office I started night school again and took the course in engine technology. This was quite a feat when I think back on it because I left home at six a.m. each morning and cycled the 15 km to Soosterberg, got the machines ready for the days work, greasing the tracks, filling the tanks, cleaning everything in sight, etc. I used to arrive back home at six thirty at night, quickly eat something, and off to night school four nights a week. Yes I did get the diploma!

Roelof in 1951

My father Roelof in his first ever sail boat an olympic class international sailing canoe. I believe from what he told me that this boat was rotten and sank not long after this picture was taken. Roelof went on to build a number of excellent small sail boats for his children in New Zealand.

Life is strange at times. I met the brother of Minke De Boer (the attractive blond talking to my father Roelof far right) recently where I now live in Hokianga New Zealand nearly 56 years later! My father introduced us in Utrecht in 1971 and whispered to me " That woman very nearly became your mother"

Roelof and friend Sake in Paris 1951. Together the cycled all the way from Holland and back.

Re reading what I have written so far, it occurs to me that most of the detail is missing, the smells, the tastes, the feelings, the incidents that are so vivid in youth.

All my life, I have had the feeling that the world is a fascinating place, in spite of its many horrors. This feeling is still strong in me now and is becoming stronger, possibly because as one gets older there is more time to reflect on what has passed. There is also the tendency to make comparisons between then and now. Older people tend to think that things were better when they were young. What we reflect on is our feelings and how things were perceived to be, not how they really were….

Roelof Hielkema.

41 Deep Creek Rd.

Torbay, Auckland.

1999