Toevlucht Vinden--Finding Refuge

I was out walking on Friday and I saw this monument.  It commemorates the bombing of Rotterdam by the Germans on May 14, 1940.  The way that this is commemorated deserves its own post, and a little more research, because it is fascinating but I found this story first.  In the map of Rotterdam that is printed on the stone below, the gray blob in the middle is the area of the city that was destroyed by the bombing and the fires that resulted.  The line around the edge of the bombed out area was called the "brandgrens"--literally, "the fire border."

When I got home, I looked up the website that is listed on the monument--www.brandgrens.nl.  It is the official Rotterdam website for an oral history and cultural memory project about WWII and it looks like it will be really interesting to look through.  By accident, I stumbled upon a set of interviews with people who were living in Rotterdam when the Germans bombed the city and invaded the Netherlands.  There are several interviews and I decided to listen to them because the subject sounded interesting and because it seemed like a good chance to practice my Dutch listening skills.

The second video I watched was an hour and a half long and was with Elizabeth Rippe.  She was fourteen years old when the Germans came.  At the beginning of the interview, she was asked what her family did during the war and she talked about reading the Bible and singing psalms.  Later, she talked about memorizing the Psalms in school. She talked about what it was like living through the bombings, with the noises and the debris flying everywhere.  When she was talking about how hard it was to breath with the dust, she sounded like she was choking just on the memory of it.

But what really struck me was when the interviewer asked how she and her family and those around them dealt with the  trauma and the uncertainties that the war must have produced.  She said that they read the Psalms.  She remembered, as the bombs were falling, that they would open up the Bible and, every time, would read from Psalm 91.  And fifty years later, she quoted what she had learned as a little girl:

"For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.

They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone."

She remembered people asking what was going to happen and what to do and where to turn and she remembered the answer: "Alleen God kan us help en God is nog bij"--"Only God can help us and God is still with us."  And she cried.

At the end of the interview, she got out her Bible and read the whole of Psalm 91 and she looked up and she smiled and she said "I go here to find my refuge."  "Is this still your refuge?" asked the interviewer.  "Yes" she said. "Always, forever."


If you click here, you can see the section of the interview where Elizabeth Rippe reads Psalm 91.  It is in Dutch of course, but you might be able to follow along anyways.

If you click here, you can see the English language version of the home page of the "brandgrens" page.