My War

Ina Hunt-Turner | Nov 05, 2009

Ina Hunt Turner writes of her experiences as a child in Holland during World War 2. She presently lived in Arden, Ontario.

Before I was sent away from Amsterdam, away from my mom to live in the countryside with the farmers, we were slowly running out of resources to feed ourselves. For a while my mother still had possessions that she could sell or trade by biking outside the city and bartering with the farmers for food. That is how I learned to like liver and tripe, which the farmers would just throw out.

Earlier in the war my mother had housed and hidden Jewish people. You might say that we were part of an underground railroad. Some of the people would stay only for a day or two and others maybe for two weeks. And then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they would disappear. The one thing my mother used to get for looking after these people was potatoes; where they came from I did not and to this day, do not know. All I know is that my mother created some wonderful meals from those potatoes and even made cakes with them. When all the Jews had been relocated or arrested, that resource dried up.

Once a day we had to walk to a central kitchen to get our main meal of the day. You had to have coupons to get the right amount and you had to bring a container to carry it home in. For some reason we still received the coupons from my brothers and sisters who at this time had already been deported to the countryside, so we were a little better off than some other people, but the meals were usually atrocious. You really had to be careful as there were often maggots or other vile things in them. As this was a central location and you had a time limit, there were always lots of people there at the same time in a big lineup. My mother and I would take our places and that is when I discovered how many people were bigger than I. Here I stood, holding my mother's hand and being pushed around by all these giants. Someone would push me from behind and then I in turn would push someone in front, who would push me back. I tried to stick out my backside to try to keep people at bay but that usually did not work. I hated all that closeness and the smells of body odor and I remember thinking to myself: "When I grow up I will never ever stand in a lineup again." And for years after the war I kept that promise to myself. If my favorite restaurant had a lineup waiting for seats, I would walk out, rather than wait. Also being close to someone in a bus or streetcar was offensive to me. Maybe the memory has grown dim, because in my present situation I attend a lot of potluck dinners and usually there is a lineup. Even so, I always try to be at the tail end of the line.

This is but a small part of what happened to ordinary people during the second world war and as I write this, I wonder how many children in Afghanistan are going through the same things as I did. Irrespective of how one feels about this present war, and who makes the decisions to start a war, our soldiers who are there, believe in fighting for the ordinary people and making a difference. Thank God they were there in my war.