In my last post I mentioned that the Dutch remember the last winter of the war, 1944/45, as the Hunger Winter. In September 1944 the Allies liberated the southern third of the Netherlands but failed to liberate the rest of the country where most of the populace lived. The Allied advance pushed eastward into The Third Reich, leaving most of the Dutch people under the control of angry and fanatical Nazi occupation authorities. In a vicious response to the uncooperative attitude of much of the Dutch populace, the Nazi authorities cut off food supplies to civilians. They barricaded and guarded warehouses.

Civilians made long treks out of the big cities and urban areas by foot and by bicycle to hunt down and barter for food in farming regions.  Nevertheless, tens of thousands starved to death. When the Allies arrived in early May 1945 they found most of the population on the verge of starvation.

As desperate as not having enough food or fuel during the coldest winter anyone could remember was, the Dutch people still had to navigate the dangers of being occupied by an authority that was intent on maintaining control through terror. It was not safe for males between the ages of 14 and 40 to be seen in public lest they be summarily arrested and deported as forced laborers. The authorities took hostages from among every community’s leaders and executed them in public to scare everyone else into towing the line.

Even though it’s 9F outside my window as I write this with a wind chill of -15F it is hard to imagine what the Hunger Winter was like for the Dutch people.  Yes, I can appreciate the feel of cold. But I have good clothing, a warm house to shelter in and enough food to eat. I am not living under Nazi occupation.

It takes art to bridge my reality in 2024 with the reality of eighty years ago.  If you want to start to understand what the Hunger Winter was like, I recommend the Dutch novel Oorlogswinter by Jan Terlouw and the movie of the same name directed by Martin Koolhoven. The movie was released in the United States in 2008 under the name Winter in Wartime. It’s the story of a teenage boy faced with the choices and consequences of resistance against the backdrop of cold and hunger that was the reality of the last winter of the war in the Netherlands. It’s both a thrilling story and a sober examination of what war really means.