My grandparents Sjef and Doortje Gielen-Goorts and their children experienced many of these events first-hand. Grandpa was a peat digger in the Peel, a marshy area in the southeast of the province of North Brabant in the Netherlands. At the time of the German invasion on May 10, 1940, the Peel-worker’s family consisted of seven sons and three daughters aged twenty-one to six. This story chronicles their fate.
Sjef and Doortje
Sjef (officially Jozef) Gielen was born in 1889 in Neerkant (municipality of Deurne), barely three months before a certain Adolf Hitler. He had just been discharged as a conscript when he married Doortje, officially Theodora Goorts, on May 11, 1918. She was born in 1892 in ‘the Derp’, a hamlet near the railway in Deurne. Sjef had already met her in 1913, but had to wait five years to get married because of compulsory military service. With the money that Sjef had received from the sale of his parents’ small farm, he had managed to buy a modest accommodation ‘on the Heath’ in Liessel, on the edge of the Peel. He also had his own peat field there. Later, in 1927, the family would come into possession of a new worker’s house with two acres of land ‘on the Heitrak’ between Liessel and Neerkant through a government-financed home exchange. Sjef knew the Peel like no other, because he had already started working there at the age of eleven in the service of the Municipal Peat Company in Deurne. So it was obvious that after his military service and a failed career in hairdressing, he would return to work as a peat digger. He was on the scene on June 17, 1910, when his Meijel colleague Gebbel Smolenaars dug up the famous Golden Helmet from the peat at ’t Zinkske near Helenaveen. In 1950, he was awarded the bronze medal of honour in the Order of Orange-Nassau for his fifty years of service as a Peel-worker.
Sjaak
Only eight and a half months after Sjef and Doortje’s wedding, their son Sjaak was born. The fact that a baby arrived so soon after the wedding was, of course, the subject of gossip in the village. Like many boys from the generally large families around the Peel, Sjaak went to work as a farmhand immediately after primary school at the age of twelve. When he turned eighteen, he moved to the south of the province of Limburg, where, after a short training as a miner, he started working in the Laura mine in Eijgelshoven. Doortje was happy with her eldest son’s first income. With the money that Sjef earned as a peat digger, she could not feed twelve mouths. At one point, she owed the local grocer six hundred guilders, a considerable amount. She had tried to pay off the debt with a load of peat and a statue of Saint Peter under a glass bell jar, but it had not been enough. In the end, the grocer agreed to a repayment of one guilder and a quarter a week.
On April 11, 1938, nineteen-year-old Sjaak was conscripted into the 2nd Infantry Regiment, which was soon renamed to the 2nd Border Battalion. After the mobilization on August 28, 1939, this battalion, as part of the defense line called the Peel-Raamstelling, was assigned the task of defending the Maas bridges near Venlo against a possible German invasion. This invasion came in the early morning of May 10, 1940. Because the Germans threatened to move around the Peel-Raamstelling, the 2nd Border Battalion was ordered to withdraw via Liessel and Meijel behind the Zuid-Willemsvaart canal at Locks 11 and 12. The static and poorly coordinated defense of the Dutch troops proved to be no match for the audacity with which the Germans, with a superiority of firepower and men, opened the attack on Lock 11 between Asten and Someren. Early in the afternoon of May 11, the Zuid-Willemsvaart was crossed and the Dutch soldiers were cornered. A number of them were killed. Entire groups retreated in the direction of Heeze. Others, whether or not disguised in civilian clothes, fled or were captured.
Sjaak also surrendered and was interned with other prisoners of war in the boys’ school in the center of Asten. Sjef and Doortje soon received the news of the capture of their eldest son. Brother Toon managed to convince the German guards to allow him a visit, during which he gave Sjaak a few sandwiches and a five-guilder note. But after a few days, Sjaak and the other prisoners were transported by bus to an internment camp in Germany. One month later, he was released as part of Hitler’s general amnesty for Dutch prisoners of war. Although emotions of joy were rarely openly shown in the Gielen family, they were given free rein when Sjaak showed up unannounced at the back door.
In November 1940, six months after his capture, twenty-one-year-old Sjaak moved back to South Limburg to resume his old profession as a miner. By signing a declaration in which he committed himself to work in the mine, he was exempted from the Arbeitseinsatz, the compulsory employment in the German war industry. In May 1943, all former Dutch prisoners of war and all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five had to report for this.
After the liberation of South Limburg, Sjaak continued to work in the mines. He married in September 1945 and emigrated to New Zealand in 1952 with his wife and four children. For his military service during the Dutch mobilization in 1939, Sjaak was awarded the Mobilization War Cross.
Jan
Within a year of Sjaak’s birth, son Jan was born. When Jan turned fourteen, he went to work for a farmer on the Hoijsen in Someren. Two years later, he moved in with his uncle and aunt who lived across the street and also had a farm. He wanted to help his aunt, a sister of his father, because his uncle’s health was deteriorating. Every Saturday, Jan cycled the fifteen kilometers to his parents in Liessel, returning to his uncle and aunt on Sunday evening.
Suddenly, on Saturday, May 11, 1940, everything was different. Like every Saturday Jan longed to go home. Now that the Germans had invaded, he wanted to know if everything was okay at home and if there was any news about his brother Sjaak. However, Jan didn’t really know what to make of all the noise of explosions and machine gun shots that had been heard in the distance at the Zuid-Willemsvaart since noon. To be on the safe side, he went to the neighbour across the street where he had been boarding before, because he knew that this neighbour had to go the same way to visit the hairdresser in the village. They decided to cycle together. The question of whether they might have been taking risks out of overconfidence did not occur to them. After all, they were not afraid and wanted to know what was actually going on. They had already seen Dutch soldiers, some on bicycles and in civilian clothes, leaving in a hurry via the Vaarsel towards Heeze. Arriving in the centre of Someren, they saw German soldiers, some of whom on stolen bicycles and with requisitioned cars, also heading towards Heeze. At the hairdresser’s, the neighbour got off, while Jan cycled on. When he arrived at Lock 11, he saw that the bridge over the Zuid-Willemsvaart had been blown up. He also saw that more and more German soldiers were crossing the canal via the intact footbridge, which had been captured around 2:30 p.m. A German sentry gestured to Jan that he’dbetter turn around. Back at the hairdresser’s, he saw his neighbour standing there. The neighbour had been forced to hand over his bicycle to the Germans. “That doesn’t matter”, said Jan, “then we’ll just go home together on my bicycle.” He pedaled as hard as he could to the Vaarselstraat to be back with his aunt at the Hoijsen as soon as possible.
But at that moment, around 4 p.m., the Dutch soldiers retreating to Heeze were ordered to launch a counterattack to stop the Germans who had penetrated as far as Someren. They shot back with everything they had. Jan and his neighbour were trapped: the Dutch in front of them, the Germans all around and behind them. They saw and heard bullets hitting. Because the Germans most likely mistook them for Dutch soldiers disguised in civilian clothes fleeing on bicycles, they started firing at them. Just past the intersection of the current Loovebaan with the Vaarselstraat, they fell into the ditch at the side of the road. Jan was hit by a bullet in the head and died on the spot. The neighbour was shot in his ankle. Only when the Germans had passed did the neighbour dare to step over Jan, climb out of the ditch, and hobble the approximately one and a half kilometers home. “I believe it’s over for Jan Gielen”, he said when he arrived home at dusk. The next day, Jan’s body was retrieved from the ditch and taken to the monastery in Someren. When father Sjef came to report to the town hall on May 15, it was noted on the death certificate that his son died at 4 p.m. on May 11, 1940. That day, nineteen Dutch soldiers were killed at Lock 11 and in Someren, five of them in the Vaarselstraat. All five were given a field grave near the spot where Jan was lying in the ditch. At least eleven soldiers were killed on the German side.
It was only two days later that Sjef and Doortje heard of the death of their son. The aunt with whom Jan was boarding was the first to hear from the neighbour that Jan had died. She then called in her sister in Liessel, who sent her eldest son out to tell the sad news to Jan’s parents. The son knocked on Sjef and Doortje’s door and asked Sjef to go for a walk with him. He told what had happened and that Jan had been taken to the nuns in Someren. The next day, Sjef cycled to the monastery with his son Toon and daughter Door. The nuns had already laid Jan, dressed in a new blue overall, in a coffin. “He was lying there beautifully, with only a plaster at his temple”, brother Toon remembered. Door had looked a little more closely and had noticed that the large hole in the back of Jan’s head had been neatly camouflaged. But they would not tell that to their mother. They thanked the nuns profusely when they offered to pay for the coffin and the burial in the cemetery of the St. Lambertus Church in Someren.
Jan is still buried under the original gravestone, as are three other Someren victims of the war. One of these victims is mayor Piet Smulders, who was murdered by Dutch SS members on August 15, 1944 as part of Aktion Silbertanne Although the graves of the four victims are of cultural-historical value, in 2021 the municipal council of Someren declined a joint request from the relatives to designate the graves as municipal monuments.
Saturday, May 11, 1940 must have been a confusing day for Sjef and Doortje. They woke up to the realization that it was their twenty-seventh wedding anniversary. They must have been worried, because they knew that their eldest son Sjaak was stationed in Venlo and might still be fighting the invading Germans. But at no time could they have imagined that he would be captured by the Germans at Lock 11 and that the same afternoon, not far from there, their second son Jan would be killed in a firefight between Dutch and German soldiers.
Toon
Within three years of Sjef and Doortje’s marriage, their third son Toon was born. Just like his brothers, he went to work after primary school, in his case for a gardener in Helenaveen. Toon’s life was relatively carefree, until he was called up in May 1943 to report for the Arbeitseinsatz. Toon had no desire at all to do heavy work far from home in Germany; but if he did not follow the order, he would have to go into hiding. He was not the person for that. Presumably, he and a friend, who was in the same boat, reported to the Employment Office in Venlo, asking if there was work for them as a gardener’s hand at Fliegerhorst Venlo. This was an airfield of the German Luftwaffe near Venlo, partly on Dutch territory and partly in Germany. They were lucky: they were allowed to maintain the gardens that decorated the accommodations of the German ground crew and pilots, and were also paid for it. They could have done worse. Now they did not have to worry about being arrested during a raid, as happened to a number of Toon’s acquaintances during the raid in Helenaveen on October 8, 1944.
They saw up close what life was like for forced laborers: at the airfield, they witnessed Russian prisoners of war being starved to death. Sometimes, they managed to slip them a cigarette or a sandwich. They were only afraid of the Allied bombings of the airfield. When bombs fell, they had to get away. Apart from a short period of living in Venlo, Toon and his friend cycled to the airfield every day until the liberation of Liessel in September 1944.
The majority of Dutch men who were called up for the Arbeitseinsatz ignored the order; many went into hiding. Toon himself decided to look for work for the Germans that suited him. Wasn’t his decision a form of collaboration? Few Liessel residents would have questioned his choice in 1943. After all, his actions fitted in with the general attitude among the Dutch to adapt to the situation as much as possible, even if it reeked of collaboration with the enemy. One did it because he felt compelled, another out of fear, a third out of realism, a fourth out of a sense of duty. The guiding motto until then was: stay calm, don’t do crazy things and don’t resist. This suited Toon. However, this lenient general attitude changed as German repression and reprisals increased in the last years of the occupation. People kept an increasingly close eye on each other when it came to their attitude towards the Germans. The contrast between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ reached a peak in the period immediately after the liberation. If Toon’s decision had been tested against the moral standard at that time, the verdict would have been considerably less favourable. Yet Toon never received any comments about it. Precisely because the collaboration question is a moral question par excellence, it cannot be answered. A better question might be: “What would I have done in the given circumstances?” But who can answer that question unequivocally?
Frans
When Sjef and Doortje had been married for four years, their fourth son Frans was born. Like his brothers, Frans also had to work after primary school. He decided to train as a carpenter. Sometime in 1941, as an eighteen-year-old, Frans joined the local underground resistance cell led by his neighbour. The group consisted of twenty-five men. They were involved in arranging hiding places and stealing German containers with fuel, clothing, and radios. Frans’ hatred of the Germans was enormous. He stole the identity cards of the family members three times, because he thought they should not be carrying German documents. Later, Frans admitted that he used these documents to provide people in hiding with a new identity. Among them were Jews and crashed Allied pilots. In the attic of his parental home, Frans secretly hid the dismantled bicycle of an alleged member of the pro-German National Socialist Movement who had been killed by the resistance cell. Throughout his resistance period, Frans hid on a farm.
When his work as a resistance fighter was done after the liberation of the southern Netherlands, Frans joined the 2nd Dutch pioneer group in Brussels as a war volunteer from March to November 1945 and was stationed in Germany for several months. He then signed up as a guard in the former concentration camp Vught in mid-April 1946, where members of the National Socialist Movement, alleged collaborators, and German civilian evacuees were interned at the time. About this period, he told his brother Toon that he forced prisoners to lick a saucer of milk empty on the floor like a cat. If they refused or did not succeed, Frans would beat the prisoners with his bludgeon. Maria remembers that Frans told her that he locked prisoners in a dark cage, without food or drink for five days. This memory is supported by reports of the camp regime in Vught, where confinement in a completely dark punishment cell was daily practice. In any case, Frans was part of a camp regime that allowed for beatings and other forms of mistreatment, which in a number of cases led to the violent death of prisoners. Some of them, including women and children, are buried in the German War Cemetery in Ysselsteyn. In early September 1946, Frans was given an honorable discharge for “being overcomplete”.
In December 1949, Frans emigrated to New Zealand and started life as a poultry farmer. Brother Toon always said that Frans, because of his participation in the arrest of alleged collaborators and members of the National Socialist Movement in the villages around the Peel, had made enemies who wanted to make his life miserable. Frans himself said about this: “There was so much hate, I was sick of Holland”. Toon’s assessment is in line with post-war reports, showing how former resistance groups in the South arrested almost everyone who was known to be ‘wrong’ shortly after the liberation. Many a quarrel with a neighbour, family feud, or business disagreement was settled in these chaotic days by accusing the other party of a German-friendly attitude.
The price Frans had to pay for his resistance work was high: he often had nightmares, was easily frightened, and resorted to alcohol. These were the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, for which he was prescribed heavy medication. He even feared for his life if he were to visit his parents. It was not until 1979 that he dared to come to Liessel for the first and only time. On that occasion, to be on the safe side, he first visited the former leader of the local resistance to borrow his pistol from the war. Brother Grard has always said that for Frans, time came to a standstill when he emigrated to New Zealand. His hatred of the Germans never went away. This became clear at the wedding of one of Grard’s daughters during Frans’ visit. When the song ‘Aan de grens van de Duitse heuvelen’ (‘At the border of the German hills’) was played halfway through the evening, Frans became so angry that he had to be taken outside by his brother-in-law.
On March 31, 1982, Frans was awarded the Resistance Commemoration Cross in the Dutch embassy in Wellington. The local press portrayed him as a war hero. He also received a war pension from the Dutch government. After his death in 1987, Frans was praised for his bravery and help to Jewish people in hiding. On his gravestone the words ‘Member of Dutch Resistance 1940-1945’ are carved in gilded letters. His daughters are still proud of their father’s resistance work. However, they have never heard from him the dark side of his work as a former resistance fighter just after the liberation.
Friday October 27, 1944
“Around 6 in the morning. German grenades fall nearby. Rifle shots pop. Machine guns crackle. I’m the first one out of bed in the morning and the first one in the cellar. The others follow quickly. This goes on all day. Then outside again for a while and then back into the cellar. In the afternoon, the first farm in our neighborhood burns down. In the evening it’s still the same. There’s another farm burning and also straw stacks, a nice spectacle when it’s dark! Later in the evening it’s a bit quieter and we go back to sleep in the cellar.”
These are the first lines from the diary that Toon kept about the events in the last days of October 1944. The Germans had crossed the Deurne Canal at Helenaveen and the Noordervaart at Meijel. With a total of fourteen thousand men, they were carrying out a coordinated attack in the direction of Asten with the aim of drawing Allied troops away from the Breda area in the east of the province of North Brabant, in order to relieve the pressure on the German 15th Army at Antwerp. It had rained incessantly that autumn and the ditches were full of water. Sjef and Doortje’s house was not far from the Kanaalstraat, the road that starts in Helenaveen and connects to the main road between Liessel and Neerkant. It was via this road that, after the first barrage of grenades, thousands of German soldiers came sneaking through ditches and over the heath. But the families along the Kanaalstraat only noticed this the next morning, Saturday, October 28. Visibility was less than fifty meters due to dense fog.
All hell broke loose when the Americans, who had set up on the main road, opened fire on the houses, shelters, and straw stacks with their Sherman tanks. They had seen that German soldiers were hiding everywhere. The place was swarming with them. At Sjef and Doortje’s house, they were hiding in a hastily dug trench. The peat shelter that Sjef had constructed behind his house as a precaution was also full of Germans. Meanwhile, Sjef and Doortje had fled into the cellar of their house together with their children Toon, Maria, Tonia, Theo, and Jozef. Doortje had taken her rosary with her and started praying. Toon was lying under a blanket because, being twenty-three years old, he was terrified that he would be arrested for the Arbeitseinsatz if the Germans entered the cellar. And they did enter. But the Americans had seen that too. The house immediately took a few direct hits. Sixteen-year-old Maria counted: nine seconds passed between each hit. Immediately after the next blow she was the first to flee from the cellar and run to the peat shelter. She wriggled between the German soldiers and found a place in the back corner.
Another direct hit on the house. Then, Doortje ran out of the cellar with fourteen-year-old Jozef, twelve-year-old Tonia, and ten-year-old Theo. Doortje had the presence of mind to grab the box with family photos. When she saw that Sjef’s peat shelter was full of Germans, she ran with her three children in the other direction, to the neighbour, about two hundred and fifty meters further on the heath. Immediately after that, the house received a few hits just above ground level. It was unbearable in the cellar because of the dust and gunpowder fumes. The German soldiers called it quits and ran out of the cellar. Then Sjef and Toon also fled in their socks to the peat shelter. The Germans who were there made way. Maria noticed how young they were, at most seventeen or eighteen years old. And they were all terrified. “I believe that of those eighteen soldiers in the shelter, there were fifteen who were praying”, Toon would later write in his diary. They had already put a white flag ready to surrender. Sjef and Toon were each given a pack of little cigars. “They really weren’t bad people, even though they were Krauts”, Toon noted.
Then a grenade exploded near the entrance. The German soldier who was sitting there fell down. His legs had been almost completely blown off. When he whispered to Sjef a little later that he really had to relieve himself, Sjef slid the young man’s helmet under him like a bedpan and lifted him up under his armpits until he was done. When it was dark, Sjef, Toon, and Maria crawled out of the shelter. After Sjef fed the pigs, they crawled on their hands and knees down the four-hundred-meters-long sandy path to the main road, where the American tanks were in position. When a German-speaking American soldier threatened to send them back, they decided to go to Asten, where one of Sjef’s sisters lived. On the way, the grenades kept hitting close by, forcing them to hide in the shelters of some farms. After a night-time journey of about seven kilometers through ploughed fields, meadows with barbed wire, flooded ditches, and straight through the high water of the river Aa, they arrived at Sjef’s sister’s house around noon on Sunday, October 29. From there, Toon cycled for weeks through ten villages in search of his mother and her three youngest children. He had even made inquiries in both hospitals in Eindhoven, the Binnengasthuis and the Sint-Jozephziekenhuis. However, there was no trace of them to be found.
Sjef, Toon, and Maria did not know that Doortje and her three youngest children had run to the neighbour’s farm that Saturday after fleeing from the cellar of their own house. This neighbour had fifteen children of his own. They had all sought shelter in the cellar of their farm. But it turned out that it was not built to withstand the violence. When the farm was in flames, they all ran through the deadly grenade and rifle fire to a straw stack. When the straw stack was also set on fire, they ran to the shelter that was hidden in a pine forest a hundred meters away. This had been built by Dutch soldiers during the mobilization five years before. Although Theo was shot in his ankle, Doortje and her children made it. One of the neighbour’s daughters was hit by shrapnel and had to stay behind in a pit. Then a grenade fell on the entrance to the shelter. Tonia ran back outside again with some of the neighbour’s children, back to the pit where the wounded neighbour’s daughter lay. On the way, she saw another daughter of the neighbour lying dead. The gunfire was relentless. More and more children in the pit got wounded. One of the neighbour’s sons was fatally hit. Another daughter was seriously injured and died the next day. Tonia saw it all happening around her. The children remained there for the rest of the day and then the whole night. Bullets and grenades kept flying over them. The pit was soaking wet, they were shivering from the cold and were terribly thirsty.
When dawn broke, Tonia crawled out of the pit and made her way by herself across fields and ditches towards her aunt in Asten. On the way, she stayed in the shelter of an acquaintance. Two days later, she arrived at her aunt’s and met her father with Toon and Maria. Six weeks later, Tonia was asked to point out the spot where she had seen the neighbour’s dead daughter after her escape from the shelter. The girl turned out to have been buried in a field grave. The oldest daughter of the neighbour would later say that the death of three of his children had broken her father’s heart forever.
That same Sunday, all wounded children were taken to the High Bridge over the Deurne canal by another neighbour with a horse and cart. Doortje walked along. A compassionate German army doctor carried the children one by one over the bridge to a Red Cross car and told Doortje that they would be taken to the hospital in Venlo. She had to leave her wounded son Theo in his care. Doortje had hardly returned, when they had to go back into the shelter because of shelling. Once again, they were forced to hide for two days and two nights. Then they were summoned by German soldiers to come along. Uncertainty and fear prevailed. They would not be taken to Germany, would they? Including all children, there were thirteen people. Via Helenaveen, they ended up in Grashoek for a week, then a week and a half in Helden and from there a week in Roggel. Doortje was still very uncertain about the fate of Sjef and the other children. When the three oldest children left the church in Roggel after mass on a Wednesday, Sjef ran to meet them. Son Grard had managed to track down his mother. By that point, it was early December 1944. Only Theo was still in the hospital in Venlo. It was not until early March 1945 that Sjef was allowed to pick up his now recovered son by bike from the emergency hospital in Deurne. Sjef and Doortje and their children were finally reunited. ‘It doesn’t matter that everything has been shot to pieces, we are together now and everything is fine again’, Doortje said.
Emigration
Between December 1949 and September 1952, four of Sjef and Doortje’s children emigrated to New Zealand: Sjaak, Frans, Jozef, and Door. They were among the approximately five hundred thousand Dutch people who left for other continents between 1945 and 1967. Each of the four had his or her own reasons, but all of them, influenced by the bombastic propaganda of the Dutch government, cherished the illusion that a golden future lay ahead. In their letters to Sjef and Doortje, the image was evoked that they had ended up in ‘the land of milk and honey’. Indeed, thanks to their hard work over the years, all four of them managed to build a prosperous life for themselves and their children. Because Sjef and Doortje did not have a telephone, the four children on the other side of the world were never able to call them. Later, from the sixties onwards, there was occasional telephone contact with the brothers and sisters in the Netherlands. But calling each other was expensive, and because of the many connections it was difficult to hear each other clearly. Door and her husband visited Sjef and Doortje a few more times. Frans and Jozef each came one more time. Sjaak never came again.
Life goes on
Sjef and Doortje and their children were confronted with everything that war entails. Jan’s death and the events of the last days of October 1944 inflicted the greatest wounds. Almost all of them went through agonizing fear. At such moments, praying helps. Doortje always wore the rosary around her neck during the weeks in which she was on the run with her three children. They have seen death and destruction. Except for the clothes they had been wearing all those weeks, they owned nothing at all after the liberation. Fortunately, there was a distribution centre of the Red Cross Aid Action in Liessel as well, where they were allowed to pick out some clothes, shoes, and furniture. But for everyone, life had to go on. The children were busy building their own lives, some in New Zealand and some in Liessel. Sjef had to go on again as a peat digger. Doortje found her own way to cope with the hardships she had endured. Grief and sorrow did not fit in with that. Fortunately, Sjef and Doortje were able to use the three thousand guilders of compensation for their destroyed house to build a makeshift house at about the same spot. They never spoke about the events during the war again. Sjef died in 1976, Doortje on May 11, 1982. It was exactly on her sixty-fourth wedding anniversary. It was also the day on which, forty-two years earlier, her son Jan died at four o’clock in the afternoon. She breathed her last at the same hour. It was meant to be.
When the war broke out on May 10, 1940, Sjef and Doortje had ten children at home. A decade later, there were only four left who regularly visited for coffee. One died and four left for New Zealand. It has always been unbearable for Doortje to visit the grave of her son Jan in the Someren cemetery. ‘After the death of our Jan, our mother never sang again’, Maria would later say. Some of Sjef and Doortje’s children told their own children about the fate of their family in detail. However, no one ever mentioned the word ‘Germans’: it was always ’the Krauts’. As they grew older, the stories came back more often. Their children recorded them. So did the author. He is Toon’s eldest son and was given the first name of his uncle who died on May 11, 1940.
Sources and literature
Sources
The Hague, National Archives, Ministry of Justice: Directorate-General for Special Jurisdiction 19451986, Personnel files, Access no. 2.09.70, Entry no. 2881 (Frans Gielen).
Author’s personal archive
- Diary of Toon Gielen, October-November 1944.
- Diary of Doortje Gielen-Goorts, October-November 1944.
- Newspaper article with interview with Frans Gielen: ‘Dutch award rare medal to war hero’, Kapiti Observer (April 2, 1982).
- Newspaper article: ‘Obituary. Franciscus (Frans, Frank) Gielen. Immigrant talked little of war work’, Kapiti Observer (August 14, 1987).
Interviews
- With the daughter of Jan Gielen’s neighbour, September 11, 2019.
- With Theo Gielen, March 3, 2018.
- With Tonia Weijenborg-Gielen, July 15, 2019.
- With Maria van de Wardt-Gielen, October 21, 2021 and May 2, 2023.
- Conversations with Toon Gielen, the author’s father.
Correspondence
- Emails from Frans Gielen’s daughter, May 19, and September 30, 2023.
- Email from Grard Gielen’s daughter, October 13, 2023.
- Email from the son of Toon Gielen’s friend, May 29, 2023.
Literature
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Van der Plas, A., “Brute moord op twee oorlogsburgemeesters: ‘Duivelse dilemma’s kostten hen het leven’”, Omroep Brabant, 14 augustus 2019. (Accessed 13 June 2023).
“HARK” on www.oorlogsbronnen.nl/thema/HARK (Accessed 13 June 2023).
Van der Heijden, C., Grijs verleden. Nederland en de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Amsterdam, 2001.
Hoefnagels, T., en Maas, T., Gevels zonder vlag. Asten, Heusden, Ommel 1940-1945, Asten e.a., 1989.
“Jacobus-Sjaak-Jack Gielen (1919-1985)” op www.wikitree.com/wiki/Gielen-7 (Accessed 13 June 2023).
Heemkundekring De Vonder, “60 Jaar Bevrijding”, in: De Vonder (jrg. 10, nr. 2, september 2004).
Janssen, P., “‘Wat hebben we gedaan?’ The Janssen-Gielen Family in the Netherlands”, Huntly, New Zealand, 2013.
“Jozef Gielen (1889-1976)” op www.deurnewiki.nl/wiki/index.php?title=Jozef_Gielen_(1889-1976) (Accessed 13 June 2023).
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Snapper, F., “De legervorming in Nederland tussen 1813 en 1940”, in: Militaire Spectator (jrg. 141, nr. 411417, 1972).
Vink, P., “Kras gouden paar in Deurne-Liessel”, in: De Traverse, (14 May 1968).
Vink, P., “Ik was in Helenaveen” in: idem (red.), Zwerftochten door de Peel. Deel 1, Helmond, 1979, 7381.
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