VALKENBURG 2024 – 80 years free

Point 19 – How I experienced the liberation in Valkenburg

by Adrie van den Meiracker, born: Valkenburg, August 1933.

When the war broke out I was 6½ years old and can still remember the arrival of the Germans very well. I can still see the armored cars and cannons pulled by horses and all those soldiers on horseback, on foot and in trucks. But of course I could not understand the danger it represented. I was surprised that there were people crying and others throwing flowers at the German soldiers. The N.S.B.-people. It was a beautiful sunny day before Pentecost and many blossom leaves lay on the streets. What was special was that my parents were not there at the time, because they were in Rotterdam for a few days for business and private reasons and experienced the terrible bombardment in person. The entire inner city was bombed to the ground with hundreds of dead and 80,000 homeless. Fortunately they made it out alive because they stayed with relatives outside the center. But the tragedy was that they were both infected by T.B.C. in the air-raid shelter and had to spend almost the whole war in a sanatorium in Bilthoven near Utrecht, although they had seven children, of which I was the youngest. The danger of the V1s was very great. It was a hard time for us that we had to go through. With always threats and danger. Especially by the American bombers during the day and the British at night.
The danger of the V1s was very, very high.
I experienced it once, when I was standing at the top of the hill near the Wilhelmina tower, that a number of fighter planes flew over with thunderous force and shot with a lot of noise at an ammunition train, which was standing still just before Valkenburg. That was particularly exciting, with a lot of noise and heavy explosions. Once I was also threatened by the Germans during a raid on my house, with a pistol to my head, because they thought we had people in hiding. But I managed to keep my mouth shut. Finally, after four years, it was September 14, 1944. We were hiding in the imitated Coal Mine on Daelhemerweg, when at a quarter past eight in the morning, we saw the first Tommy’s. (We did not know any better, but it was the Yanks, who came to liberate us.) I can still see them, the jeeps carrying point 50 machine guns and later the Sherman tanks and half trucks. There was then 5 days of heavy fighting to liberate Valkenburg with many casualties and heavy destruction. We were liberated!!!!! 80 years ago, and we celebrate it now!!!!
For several months we then had over 20 American soldiers in our home. This was a wonderful time for us, because those Yanks had all sorts and plenty of things. Several of them were later killed and buried in the American cemetery in Margraten. In the end, it was May 5, 1945, the day of the capitulation. The Germans surrendered and WW2 was over, at least for us.
The special thing about that day was that I was able to travel to England with a group of 500 children to recover from the misery of the war. In Breda, Queen Wilhelmina waved goodbye to us. I spent a wonderful six months there with a family in Leeds. That was “the time of my life”. Finally, in November 1945, I returned to Valkenburg to see my parents again, whom I hardly recognized as I hadn’t seen them for five years. And now normal life could begin again for me and I could go back to school.
This was my little story about the Second World War in a nutshell, thank you for your attention