Written In Darkness

By Anne S. Somerhausen

Written in Darkness, first published in 1946, is the diary of Belgian Anne Somerhausen, written during the war-time years of 1940 to 1945 – years of invasion, resistance, terror and eventual liberation. Described is life under the Germans: the political and economic administration, controls, deceptions, inflation, money and food shortages, anti-Semitism and increasing violence, black markets, resistance and reprisals, deaths and deportations. Written in Darkness also portrays Somerhausen's own life and that of her family: her need to find a job, her husband away in a prison camp, and her three boys, particularly Luke, the youngest, who wastes away on the meager starvation rations and almost dies, but regains his health through the efforts of kind people in the countryside. The diary remains a classic example of quiet heroism and determination to survive during a grim and frightening period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eumenes Publishing
• Release date: Dec 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781839741371

Book preview

© EUMENES Publishing 2019, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

Written in Darkness

A Belgian Woman’s Record of the Nazi Occupation, 1940-1945

ANNE S. SOMERHAUSEN

Written in Darkness was originally published in 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

PREFACE 6

1940 — Invasion 7

1941 — Famine 30

1942 — Resistance 64

1943 — Terror 101

1944 — Bombs and Freedom 143

1945 — Epilogue 184

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 191

DEDICATION

* * *

To

My American Friends

PREFACE

My husband is Mark; our three boys are John, Matthew, and Luke. Inevitably, I have thought and spoken of them as my Four Evangelists. A few jottings will present them to the reader as they were in May of 1940, when Hitler launched his attack on Western Europe and I began the five years’ record of which the following pages are the publicly relevant parts:

MARK. My husband, thirty-nine; a tall, silent man wearing gold-rimmed eyeglasses. He volunteered in World War I at the age of sixteen. Between the two wars he studied at the universities of Brussels, Harvard, and Wisconsin and was a lawyer and Labor M. P. He volunteered again in World War II.

JOHN. Our eldest son, thirteen. Had dark hair and eyes with fat pink cheeks. Was lively, loquacious, daft about aviation, and cocksure about being a pilot himself.

MATTHEW. Our second son, ten. Slim, blond, brown-eyed, tender, silent, and whimsical. Loved swimming and good food.

LUKE. Our youngest, four. All blond and blue-eyed roundness. Loved picture books, dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, and mice.

What the five recorded years did to them, and to tens of thousands of others, and to me, the record will show.

ANNE SOMERHAUSEN

Summer, 1945

1940 — Invasion

Brussels, May 10, 1940

For the first time in my life, this morning around five o’clock I heard bombs drop—and recognized them. Mark need not even have said: Those are bombs. Somehow, shaken out of my sleep, I knew.

The invasion! So it has come after all. We had thought Denmark and Norway might suffice, or that Hitler would turn next to the Balkans. Not very charitably, we had wished that Sweden or Switzerland might have its turn. We clung to every bit of reassuring news. Holland, of course, has taken special defense measures these last days; something was brewing. But our government said only yesterday that we were shielded from any surprise attack. And now houses in our neighborhood have been bombed, forty-one persons killed here in Brussels, and eighty-two injured.

I must record all this for my children to read some day. They must not forget. Today they were utterly unimpressed: bombing and invasion seem just a lark to them—since we did not suffer. Of course, they are only thirteen, ten, and four—our sturdy little evangelists, John, Matthew, and Luke.

No sooner had the bombs fallen than the telephone rang: Mark was to join his battery at once. He hurried into his uniform—quite unmilitary looking, the dear man, with his glasses, his slight baldness, his intellectual’s face and hands. Was he right to volunteer? He had done it once before, at sixteen, in World War I, and had come home unscathed; in fact, stronger, more mature. But now he is a lawyer of nearly forty, with three children. Couldn’t he serve more advantageously in some government office, instead of pointing a complicated antiaircraft gun at enemy planes? His answer is: No, airplanes are the greatest danger in this new war, and therefore he must fight airplanes.

Mark and I have wholeheartedly backed the government’s policy of neutrality. Mark was berated for it by political opponents. His retort was that if neutral Belgium were attacked again, he would again defend her with arms. I try not to think of what his pledge will mean from today on. Fortunately events are so swift that I haven’t time to brood.

The children had to be sent to safety at once. My brother-in-law offered to take them in his car to the seashore, and at noon they scrambled delightedly into his small roadster, accompanied by Helen, our maid. In 1914-18, too, the seashore was a refuge: at La Panne, where my children go today, King Albert held out on Belgian soil, behind the flooded Yser region, till victory came in 1918.

I am keeping our Ford for my work with the Red Cross Motor Corps. We shall have busy days now. The sirens are howling.

May 20, 1940

I am living through a nightmare. On May 12 I saw my husband for the last time. His nine-million-franc gun stood in the neighborhood of Brussels on a barren hill, clearly visible to the enemy. That frightened me: a single Stuka might have blown the gun and the twenty men around it to bits. We stood facing each other, Mark and I, both in uniform, both very matter-of-fact, repressing feelings. He handed me a roast beef sandwich, and I ate hungrily; there had been too much Red Cross work these days and no time to eat regular meals. While I munched, Mark wrote powers-of-attorney for me. He told me that some of his men had just run to the woods, barehanded, to catch parachutists reportedly dropped there. The German parachutists surely carried sub-machine guns; Mark and his men had only their one huge gun. We kissed each other good-by. We smiled. Mark said: I trust you with everything, and I drove away. The next day I managed to send him a revolver. A weird parting gift!

As secretary of the Red Cross Motor Corps, up to May 16 I helped evacuate the aged and ill from hospitals around Brussels. We motored between stations and hospitals, carrying loads of wounded men and women whom the Germans had strafed in the fields and villages of eastern Belgium; also many families who had fled in terror from their homes. Then word came that the British would blow up all bridges around Brussels on their retreat from east to west and north. We must save our Red Cross ambulances and cars; we must not be cut off from the Belgian army. On May 16 the Red Cross Motor Corps left Brussels in great haste in the middle of the night. I stopped at my house, heaped clothes and bedding and, rather practically, my silverware into the car, took Stella and Ghislaine, two young members of the Motor Corps, and set out for the seashore.

La Panne, at the westernmost point of the coast, was seething with refugees. I have never seen such mad chaos, such intense despair, as that of the families huddling here on streets, in gardens, among the dunes, all waiting for the French frontier to open to them. My mother-in-law, with thirty refugee friends to feed, was near a breakdown. Wouldn’t I take the children with me? she pleaded. The three boys were elated; they were helping at canteens, and even little Luke was carrying dishes. I drove several times to Dunkirk, crossing the French frontier easily under my Red Cross flag, transporting women and children to the Dunkirk station, whence trains—hypothetical trains—were to depart for Paris. Dunkirk was jittery with air alarms and Stuka raids. An elderly woman asked me to drive her paralyzed daughter and herself to Dunkirk. I hesitated—my gasoline was running low—but then helped carry the paralyzed girl into the car. At Dunkirk mother and daughter thanked me profusely; both stepped briskly out of the car and walked away, very happy.

It was then our turn to go; the Motor Corps was heading for France. We all squeezed into my 1937 Ford sedan: John, Matthew, Luke, my maid Helen, Stella and Ghislaine of the Motor Corps, and I. For two days we stopped at Calais, feeding aspirin (for lack of food) to the famished young Belgians who were rolling past Calais station in endless cattle trains. All men from sixteen to thirty-five had been ordered to leave for France to make up a new army. I doubt that these young Belgians will ever get guns, everything seems so disorganized.

At Boulogne we thought it unwise to spend the night. It was too bristling a military center—a whole beautifully equipped tent city of British soldiers. Therefore we went on to Berck, not far from the mouth of the Somme, on the Channel coast. Here we have rented a tiny peasant cottage at the village of Groffliers, near a pleasant bay. There are 100,000 refugees jamming Berck, with little food. We are hungry, but all of us are well. We have run out of gasoline and shall have to stay here until we find a fresh supply.

May 23, 1940

We are caught! The Germans, who were at our heels in Brussels a week ago, are ahead of us now, at the Somme. They are inside Berck; they are closing in on Boulogne. They are east and west of us. At all important crossroads strong blond German youngsters sit on light, rather cardboard-like armored cars and control the country. If only we had tried to cross the Somme one day earlier, when Abbeville and Saint-Valery were still free! It was the dire lack of gasoline that nailed us to this spot. Friends had given us five liters, which could not possibly suffice to take us beyond the Somme to Rouen. Altogether I had probably not more than eight liters in my tank.

May 20 was a white, moonlit night. The children were peacefully eating Quaker oats for supper when Ghislaine rushed in from Berck with the news: The Germans are at Le Tréport! We held a lugubrious war council over maps by candle-and moonlight, packed hurriedly, and drove off toward the Somme. The roads were a slowly moving puzzle of interlocked cars. We advanced a hundred meters every ten minutes. At three in the morning we reached Le Crotoy, opposite Saint-Valery. The Somme bay lay outspread at our feet. We saw a long line of men trickling across the bay, which is half dry at low tide. Saint-Valery, on the other side, could no longer be reached by car. Its drawbridge had been hauled up by the Germans. One might swim across the Somme, and that long, trickling line of men seemed willing to do it. They were French and Belgian soldiers, Jews, political exiles. We turned and drove back to our peasant cottage. I had sat seventeen hours at the wheel to drive thirty kilometers.

There was one more chance to escape the Germans. A few fishing boats left Berck yesterday for Dieppe, perhaps for England. We heard about it, but we reached the beach too late. One boat was still silhouetted on the horizon; it slowly vanished. A fisher-woman spoke to me soothingly: If I had only known, my husband would have taken you and your children along—for nothing. Only then did I realize that tears were running down my face—the first tears since this war began.

Berck was captured yesterday afternoon by a lone German armored car circling about in the town. We were lingering on the beach, hoping for other fishing boats, when suddenly a very stout Frenchman motioned us into his basement, which was, he said, of beautifully safe concrete. Don’t be afraid, he repeated over and over again in patent hysteria, while, in this cool cellar, the sweat dripped from his face. We heard a few shots fired from a French machine gun, then silence, then the rumble of the German armored car.

No escape. We must stay now. Where is my husband? Is the Belgian army still fighting? We have no newspapers, no radio. I dread the next days, the famine, for my children.

June 5, 1940

What a grotesque adventure last night!

We are living in the cottage of the Seven Dwarfs. Our dining-and-living room is two meters by two and a half, and so is our bedroom. The dining room is a kitchen as well, for we have in it a low stove in which we burn the dry branches that the children gather in a near-by wood. The bedroom is also a bathroom, for in it we have set a washbowl and a pitcher on a wooden box. We have four chairs, two suitcases, and a wooden box to sit on in the dining room, and there are four beds to sleep in. Helen, my maid, and I sleep on one rather large couch with little Luke. The springs of our mattress have succumbed here and there to old age, but the air here is so invigorating that we sleep soundly, very soundly. A mere slit between our couch and the three narrow cots on which John, Matthew, Stella, and Ghislaine sleep just suffices for each of the four to reach the foot end of his cot.

We love our Snow White’s house. If there is a Snow White among us, it is Helen, my maid, even if she is a blonde. She is young and slim and sings all day long, and often she draws water from our well in a bucket or hangs out linen in our tiny garden. Our cottage is whitewashed outside and in. It has only two windows, both facing south—one in the bedroom, the other in the dining room. There are three doors, which we lock at night. There is neither cellar nor attic, but there is a thatched roof, and there are also a little outhouse for a dog or a pig and an old baking oven in the back yard. Of course, we can’t bake bread in it: we have neither flour nor leaven.

The village authorities distribute a flat, unleavened bread to all refugees, 250 grams a day per refugee. It suffices when we have enough potatoes. We get plenty of milk from a big dairy farm, and I pedal on a borrowed bicycle to surrounding villages to buy butter and eggs. Since I am the only one who dares cycle on roads invaded by German troops, I purchase for a considerable group of families. I sell at a profit and use the difference to help poor refugees. The first potatoes and tender vegetables are to be had from the surrounding fields. Our worst famine scare is over. But we do not eat so grandly as Ferdinand and Jan, two Belgian soldiers hiding in a barn not far from our Snow White’s cottage. They eat duck with onions and tiny young potatoes. Ferdinand goes out at dusk or dawn with a fishing hook of his own manufacture; he slings a fine fat worm at a duck, which swallows it greedily; he pulls in his line, gets a good grip around the duck’s neck, and strangles it. He steals his onions, potatoes, ducks, chickens, and vegetables only from rich and avaricious peasants. Ferdinand has a well-developed sense of social justice.

We have been almost happy up to last night. The sun shines beautifully every day (the Germans have such luck with their Luftwaffe weather!), and we swim in the bay at low tide. While we were bathing yesterday afternoon, the Prince came to see our Snow White at the cottage. But he was in German uniform, and she sent him angrily away, warning him in her native Flemish that she was not alone, but with a family of seven. He laughed, incredulous. So tiny a house could not hold seven.

The nights can be unbelievably black here. When I awoke on this night because something was moving along my leg,

I could see nothing but stark darkness. Johnny, is that you? I asked.

Zilence, whispered a voice, zilence.

I sat up in bed, groped forward, met a man’s arm in a shirt-sleeve, grabbed it, held it firmly. What do you want?

I asked in German.

I want to be with you, said the voice, rather shocked and plaintive now.

Speak in whispers, I advised. There are seven of us in this room.

Oddly enough, the man was cowed—partly, perhaps, by the surprise of hearing fluent German in a peasant hut on the Channel coast. He did not stir. I talked to him in a low voice. I was motherly, I was grandmotherly. Had he meant to surprise someone here? Did he realize that he was breaking into a private home? Think of what his superior officers would do if they knew! Had he come in through the open window? Yes, he had, he admitted humbly. Well, he was to go out by the window, and so quietly as to disturb no one. What part of Germany did he come from? (His accent was that of a fairly well educated German.) From Lower Saxony; and he would like to know where he was. Where was the front? At Boulogne, I told him, behind him; and also at the Somme, ahead of him. He did not seem to relish this.

I suggested that he had better go now, while everybody was still asleep. Dropping his arm, I sought his hand. Good-by, and be careful now about nocturnal visits! He shook hands and thanked me, and a dark silhouette was faintly visible as he crept out of the window.

I closed it softly behind him, and suddenly the room was alive. My maid, the two older boys, Stella, Ghislaine—all of them had been awakened by the talk. And in the dark, in nightgowns and pajamas, we shifted our tables, chairs, boxes, and suitcases to barricade the doors and windows.

June 9, 1940

We know now by a German newspaper of May 30 that the Belgian army capitulated on May 28. Johnny, whom I sent to school in Berck, has had a terrific fight with the French boys about the Belgian capitulation; they called the Belgians traitors, and he boxed and jiujitsued them down. I cried, not about the capitulation itself—it certainly saved many lives, and I am grateful to our King for it—but because of worry about Mark’s fate. Is he dead? Wounded? Gone to England? Is he in Southern France? When shall I know?

I have put patches on a pair of trousers for our friend Ferdinand. He and Jan got civilian clothes from peasants here and will walk home. The Germans seize all able-bodied men for road work; but by keeping to country lanes Ferdinand and Jan hope to reach Belgium as free men. I trust they will succeed.

The German People’s Welfare have come to Berck. They came with a truck-load of condensed-milk cans to distribute to refugees. This is a region where milk flows as in the Promised Land, and there is no need for those unshapely German women to be distributing it condensed. Besides, it’s Dutch canned milk, requisitioned in Holland. Nevertheless, some refugees took it, and the scene was filmed. Thereupon the truck moved on.

June 13, 1940

Now that the Luftwaffe is protecting us, life has become most uncomfortable on this Channel coast, and we shall have to go away, however much we like this odd vacation. Bombings are frequent in the Boulogne and Somme regions, and even our insignificant nook was visited by the RAF a few nights ago. Three bombs were dropped within three hundred meters of our cottage. I threw myself wildly over little Luke to protect him. Finally all of us ran out into the fields; it is better to see the sky and the flares and watch the bombs drop than lie blind under a frail thatched roof. We stretched out in the cold dewy grass under willow trees.

Last night’s three bombs fell at the other end of our village, and one cow’s leg was broken. Now all the peasants agree that this is enough, and that peace ought to be concluded.

June 21, 1940

Now we must leave the Channel coast. The Kommandantur at Berck has ordered all foreigners to evacuate by June 30 a coastal strip fifteen kilometers wide. We have obtained gasoline from the mayor of Berck. Ghislaine is the proud pseudo-owner of a Packard entrusted to her by a Jewish family who want to stay and hide in France. We drove to the Somme bay last week, having been told that it was littered with bicycles abandoned by soldiers and refugees fleeing across the bay in the days of fighting at the end of May. We waded through the entire bay, but found only broken remnants. The Germans had come with trucks two days earlier and taken all bicycles away. We visited Saint-Valery. Its bombed houses were open like stage settings; in many of them tables set for supper had been hurriedly abandoned.

Along the road to the Somme lay dead horses and wrecked cars, and the underbrush was littered with French uniforms that fleeing soldiers had thrown away in an effort to escape as civilians. Twenty thousand were taken prisoners here last week, the Germans declare. I picked up dark blue coats of the French air force. They are made of the sturdiest wool, just the iron sort of fabric I’ve always wanted for John’s, Matthew’s, and Luke’s trousers.

June 25, 1940

Brussels, my Brussels. We have come home. It has all passed as in a whirl—our flight from Groffliers, where German soldiers wanted to requisition our Ford; the hideous sight of Jews being forced at Berck to clean the toilets of the Germans and the gutters in the street; the Nazi flag in every French town we crossed; German officers idling in the cafés of Lille; the heartbreak of seeing the center of Tournai, where houses have been razed to the height of little Luke while the Stukas spared the Norman cathedral with the same precision with which they hit the homes of civilians; a moonlight drive through the suburbs of Brussels and over the makeshift wooden bridges that the Germans have built beside the demolished ones. We are home. The children are in their beds. Helen is brewing strong coffee for us. The car is standing in the garage. Friendly neighbors have kept our house from being looted or requisitioned, whereas three other houses on our street are occupied by German soldiers.

I hear the street cars running. The telephone works. There are water, electricity, and gas as usual. The movies play Laurel and Hardy films or German and French ones. The main Brussels daily, Le Soir, comes out as usual, even with news taken from the BBC, though with reservations. The German mark is worth ten francs, and German bank notes are accepted everywhere. Noon concerts are announced at the Palace of Fine Arts. The vendors’ carts on the boulevards sell cherries, as in other summers. There are few policemen—one twentieth of the usual force—and they are unarmed. The schools have reopened, though one fifth of the teachers are gone. Nearly one fourth of the population is said to live on public funds.

Sitting at my desk and going over the accounts of our expenses in France, I might imagine that we are at peace. But Mark is gone, and the Red Cross telephoned me just now that they have no news of his unit. He may be a prisoner, they say.

July 18, 1940

Mark is a prisoner. What luck! He is alive; he is well, not wounded. He will soon be back from near Hamburg.

For nearly three weeks I was scurrying hither and yon, trying to find out what had become of him. I even bought that scandalous forged list of the dead that an unscrupulous printer sold to the relatives of Belgian soldiers. Then, two days ago—it was on the sixteenth anniversary of our wedding—a funny German card printed in Gothic letters arrived:

I am:

{well}

{slightly wounded}

{gravely wounded}

{captured by the Germans}

I am feeling fine. I may receive mail from you and write to you.

Cordial greetings.

It was signed in his own handwriting. Mark is Prisoner Number 7902 at Stalag XB, one of sixty P.O.W. camps in Germany. The children and I have been jubilant since this morning. The German daily Brüsseler Zeitung, which started publication early this month, has come out with this exhilarating news: The Führer has ordered that all Belgian prisoners of war except officers of the regular army be released. The return to their homes of those who were taken to Germany has begun and will continue as rapidly as means of transportation become available.

My mother-in-law is skeptical: not only does she not believe in a Hitler promise, but she remembers the first World War too well. Unlike me, she believes we are far from peace, and she listens eagerly to a French general called de Gaulle, who speaks over the radio calling for resistance to the Germans.

July, 1940

A few notes on our present life:

The Polite Occupation Army is the title of an article in a French daily. The writer asserts that the Germans make it a point to be polite in order to conquer their occupied territories morally. Yes, they are remarkably polite, these Germans of the Wehrmacht. On street cars they offer their seats to women and children; they help carry babies across a busy street. They transport Belgian refugees back from France in their trucks or on their motorcycle sidecars. The Brüsseler Zeitung is full of commiseration on the famine and on the lack of hygiene among the refugees in France, and it publishes pictures of the National Socialist People’s Welfare distributing sandwiches to the refugees. But can we forget that these same Germans killed 13,600 Belgian civilians on the roads last May?

All German soldiers look neat, healthy, and sportsmanlike, in brand-new uniforms and heavy, noisy new boots. And all are smoothly shaved every morning and always seem to have fresh haircuts. (Admirable! an army of nine million men with a fresh haircut, says Stella.) They buy generously in all our shops with German banknotes, paying without hesitation even the highest prices. The main streets of Brussels are crowded with gloating German officers and soldiers, each carrying parcels under his arm. Brussels shops seem to be selling out to them. There is a story about the English spy in Brussels who put on a German uniform to pass unobserved. He was detected at once: he carried no parcel!

Verboten. If only they didn’t make such a lavish use of the word "verboten (prohibited)! It is verboten to go out after eleven at night; verboten to close shops or factories; verboten to raise salaries or wages; verboten to listen in public to a non-German radio broadcast or to own a radio sending set; verboten to hold public meetings, distribute handbills, go on strike; and, of course, verboten to own arms or ammunition, help Germany’s enemies, commit sabotage, flee, or aid the flight of civilians abroad. It is verboten above all to raise prices and to hoard goods; verboten," too, to sell or lend anti-German books.

In exchange for these exactions the Wehrmacht guarantees absolute security for persons and property. Those who are quiet and peaceful have nothing to fear. I shall certainly be quiet.

"What has become of ——-?" My mother-in-law has sworn she won’t buy a single newspaper as long as the occupation lasts; she will get all her news by listening to the BBC. She may be right: our Belgian newspapers patently exist now by the grace of the Germans and belong to the New Order the Germans want to establish here—a more just social order, they say. Although our papers have kept their familiar old names and makeup, they are pro-German in content, and not even neutral. Their staffs are brand-new; their owners have been expropriated and most former newspapermen kicked out. Yet I read them; and even through their servile pages there comes to me a vision of these tragic summer months.

There are from twelve to fifteen columns of advertisements in Le Soir under the heading Whom are you searching for? or What has become of ——-? and four or five columns of Here’s news of ——- A Louvain University professor is searching for his seventeen-year-old son who didn’t return from France. Young parents want their baby whom they abandoned in the chaos of a Stuka bombardment near Reims. The Mother Superior of a convent publishes a description of a three-year-old girl whom she found wandering in the streets of Dunkirk. Day after day, columns and columns of these tragic notices. I try to get news of my Brussels friends. Professor Henri Laurent was drowned when the boat on which he tried to escape to England was bombed off Ostend. His wife, an American, is in the United States with her children and cannot know of his death for some time yet, for all postal relations with foreign countries are interrupted. Mme Ferrard, a young woman of thirty, wife of a fellow volunteer in my husband’s unit, died in my mother-in-law’s bungalow at La Panne during a night of heavy shellfire when a shell splinter struck her spine. I read the obituaries of acquaintances in the papers. Many were mowed down by strafing planes on Belgian roads, others killed