Bill Zwiers was only six years old during the Hongerwinter (Hunger Winter) of 1944-45, which saw about 22,000 people starve to death in the Nazi-occupied western provinces of the Netherlands.
Zwiers was one of several Dutch Canadians who shared their memories of the occupation at the Dutch Canadian Tulip Commemoration at the Cenotaph on Saturday. Thousands of tulips are planted in cities across Canada by Dutch Canadians in gratitude for the role Canada played in the liberation of the Netherlands on May 5, 1945.
"There was very little food and no fuel. We lived in a big house... my father started on the fourth floor, taking up the wooden floor boards to burn in the stove in the kitchen. When that was gone, he started on the third floor, and the second..." Zwiers said. "The farmers had to give all the eggs, milk, beef, grain - everything they produced -to the Germans."
Zwiers said his father managed to find - possibly steal -some beeswax, and his mother turned them into candles that she bartered food. Most of the Dutch men were in hiding, for fear of being conscripted into forced labour for the Germans, he said, so the women would walk for miles into the countryside to find a farmer with some contraband food to trade.
"This is an idea of the menu we had. Breakfast: one slice of sugar beet, if we had sugar beet. Lunch, the same. Supper... tulip bulbs fried in butter. If we didn't have butter, then my father would find some oil," Zwiers said. "When I look at all those nice tulips there, I could gag. I'm sorry, but it was such an awful taste."
According to some reports, the rations for an adult in Amsterdam went from less than 1,000 calories a day in November 1944 to 580 calories a day in February 1945. A limited cease-fire negotiated between the Allies and German occupiers allowed Allied planes to begin air dropping food into occupied parts of the Netherlands on April 29, 1945.
"I have no idea what I looked like in May 1945... pretty skinny, I guess," Zwiers said. "No part of Western Europe was liberated at a more crucial time."
Zwiers said he remembers Canadian soldiers giving away so much of their rations to the Dutch that they went hungry themselves.
Canada played an instrumental role in the liberation of the Netherlands. Canadian forces who had landed on D-Day and fought in the Normandy campaign were united with Canadian troops who had fought in Italy, and ordered to clear German forces from the Netherlands and open the way to the Belgian port of Antwerp.
A total of 1,481 Canadian soldiers were killed and 4,808 were wounded during the fierce fighting through difficult terrain.
William Tavenier remembers all too well the price paid by Canadian troops to liberate the Netherlands. He was a child when his family farm was liberated by Canadian troops.
When the troops pushed on in four Buffalo amphibious troop transports, one of the Buffalos hit a German mine a short distance away -killing 20 soldiers, he said.
"I will forever be grateful for what people sacrificed for our freedom," Tavenier said.
