GROOS
The life of Paulien
This is the first book made with Abrevity: the life of Paulien, told when she was 92. Tanja and Jasper had the conversations; we turned them into a book.
Abrevity wrote the chapters from the conversations. Tanja and Jasper chose the photos and shaped the foreword.
Translated from the Dutch original
From the foreword
In February 2025, we drove to Harderwijk with a simple aim: to record Mum and Grandma’s stories while we still could. She was 92, and we had prepared a list of questions, but we had no idea what to expect. Would she still remember the details? Would she even feel like talking?
We expected a conversation of perhaps thirty minutes. But as soon as we sat down and asked the first question, something special happened. The stories did not just come back; they poured out. The first conversation lasted more than three hours, and when we had to leave, she was disappointed that it was already over. In the end, we went back five times. We recorded fourteen hours of audio and video in total. Because everything was being recorded, we did not have to take notes. We could simply listen. Really listen.
What has stayed with us most from those sessions is not even the history itself, but the pleasure and the connection. We laughed at her dry humour, marvelled at her sharp memory and enjoyed our time together. We came to know the woman behind the mother and grandmother we thought we knew.
Chapter 1: A sky full of planes
The morning of 10 May 1940 began not with the familiar sounds of a city waking up, but with a deep, ominous drone that made the walls of the house in Crooswijk tremble. In the upstairs bedroom, where the skylight framed the world outside, seven-year-old Paulien was jolted awake. She crawled towards the window and looked up. What she saw was beyond anything a young girl who had lived a relatively sheltered life could have imagined.
“The whole sky was full, and there was all this droning,” she would recall, the sight still perfectly clear decades later. “It was just like... Sometimes you see a flock of birds. Well, it was just the same with those planes. I was lying in bed, so I looked straight up at the sky.”
It was no flock of birds. It was the Luftwaffe flying in formation over Rotterdam, a forewarning of five years that would change the face of the city and the lives of the family for ever. Paulien, born in 1932, was still just too young to understand the geopolitical implications, but old enough to feel the fear spreading through the house. “I don’t think I really realised it was war yet,” she reflected later. “But I can still see it as if it were yesterday.”
Downstairs, there was a panic Paulien had never seen in her parents before. Her father, Herman, was a man of few words. He kept things to himself and worked hard in the flower business his family had run for generations. He was not a man who showed his emotions. But that morning, as the planes flew overhead, Paulien saw something that shook her world: her father was crying. “My father stood there crying. I’d never seen that before. I never saw him cry again. No.”
Herman was an air force reservist. Mobilisation meant he had to report for duty immediately. As rumours began to spread along the street and radio reports confirmed how serious the situation was, he prepared to leave. Paulien watched it all unfold. She saw her father, his hands trembling but determined, winding strips of cloth around his lower legs: the puttees that were part of military uniform at the time. “I remember my father sitting there winding those bits of cloth round his knees,” she said. “Soldiers used to have those. I remember that so well. […] Like a bandage when there’s something wrong with your leg.”
His little boy Wim, still a preschooler who had not quite mastered speaking, watched wide-eyed and babbled after him: “Poeties, poeties,” a child’s version of the word “puttees”. It was a moment of surreal contrast: the child’s innocence against the despair of a father who knew what was at stake. He had to report for duty, leaving his family behind in a city that had become a target. “He was only gone for one or two days. Then he came home again,” Paulien remembered. The German forces were so overwhelming and the surrender came so quickly that Herman scarcely had a chance to fight. But the war had entered their home.
Rusks with orange sugar-coated aniseeds
To understand who Paulien was when those planes flew overhead, we need to look at the years before. She grew up in a large family in Rotterdam-Crooswijk, a working-class neighbourhood where life largely revolved around the market garden and flower business belonging to her grandfather, Hendrik. It was a family business in the most literal sense. Grandpa Hendrik lived in the downstairs home, which also housed the office. Paulien, her parents, her brothers and her sister lived in an upstairs flat, and later they kept moving closer to the business. “Always to another house, closer to the business, until my father moved into that downstairs place,” Paulien explained.
Life in the 1930s was not easy, but there was a strong sense of community. The church played a central role; Grandpa Hendrik was an elder at the Reformed Noorderkerk, and her father Herman was also active as a deacon and later an elder. Paulien remembered Sundays in the pews, sitting beside her father in the elders’ pew, and the national celebrations that reached even into the classrooms.
One of her clearest memories from before the war was the birth of Princess Beatrix in 1938. At her nursery school, the A.S. Talmaschool, where her grandfather sat on the board, this was celebrated in the traditional way. “I do remember a couple of cooks coming in once, wearing white chefs’ hats,” she said with a smile. “When someone in the Royal Family was born, they’d bring us rusks with sugar-coated aniseeds.” To a little girl, those men in their white uniforms were giants, bringing something magical. “Yes, when you’re little, they look so big with those great hats. Coloured aniseeds, you know? Orange, I think they were.” These were carefree moments in an orderly world where traditions and the royal family offered a sense of security.
Skating among the flowers
Despite the poverty, life at the nursery offered a magical world to play in that few city children knew. Especially in winter, when the ditches around the Rotte froze over, the market garden became a haven of warmth and adventure.
Paulien vividly remembered how those afternoons felt. Outside it was bitterly cold, but in her father’s and grandfather’s greenhouses, stoves burned to protect the delicate plants and flowers. “We had a ditch at the back of the garden. They had the heating going there for the plants they grew in the greenhouse,” she said.
It was a ritual of contrasts. The children came off the ice with frozen cheeks and tingling fingers. “If you got cold, you’d pop into the greenhouse.” There, among the scents of damp earth and cyclamen, they put on their skates or warmed themselves by the stove. Moving from the cutting wind into the humid warmth of the greenhouse was the ultimate luxury. “And then you’d go straight out onto the ice on your skates.”
The shadow of death
But behind that façade of normality and celebratory rusks, Paulien had already encountered life’s darker side at a young age. At a time when medicine was still limited, infant mortality was a reality that touched many families, and the family was not spared.
“There were six of us, weren’t there? Yes. And I also had two little brothers and a little sister who died at three months,” Paulien said matter-of-factly. “So really, they had nine children.”
As the eldest child, Paulien was pushed into a caring role early on. It was not an official duty, but something taken for granted in a busy family running a business. Her mother, Antonia, had to help in the business, make coffee for the staff and keep the household going. “My mother was busy, of course... and she had a lot of children, so I helped,” Paulien said. She gave bottles, rocked the babies and saw at close quarters how fragile a new life could be. “I always bottle-fed my little brothers. I liked that. Yes, I really was there for all of them.”
The most profound event of her early childhood was the death of her little sister Marietje in August 1939, just before the outbreak of war. Marietje was only two months old. Paulien was six at the time. Her father, the man who usually stayed quiet and worked, took her by the hand for a lesson she would never forget.
“My father was never much of a storyteller, you know, he always kept himself to himself,” Paulien said, describing his character. “But sometimes I think: oh yes, that’s right, because my father would say, ‘Come along and see Marietje.’” He took her to the cradle where the baby was struggling for her last breaths. Instead of sending her away or softening the truth, he chose a raw honesty.
“So I’d go with him, and he really would tell me: ‘Yes, Marietje is going to die, because look, she can hardly breathe any more and she’s gone all blue.’”
The image of the baby turning blue was etched into Paulien’s memory. “Look, can you see how blue she is? He said, ‘Because she’s going to die.’ And he told me all of that,” she repeated. It was a moment of intense closeness in grief, in which her father treated his eldest daughter as an adult and let her share in the harsh reality. “My father really wasn’t a talker, you know... But he told me all of that then.”
The funeral that followed was a solemn occasion, steeped in the rituals of the time. Because her mother was still confined to bed after giving birth and was not allowed outside, it fell to little Paulien to accompany her father. “I remember it so well, my mother was still in bed after the birth, and I was allowed to go along to the funeral,” she said. She remembered the horse-drawn carriage, and the little white coffin placed on the seat beside them. “I sat with my father, and that’s how we went to the cemetery. I remember that so well.”
These experiences were a harsh schooling for a child not yet seven years old. She learnt to take responsibility, to care for those more vulnerable than herself, and to accept that death was part of life. They made her, as she put it, “streetwise” and mature beyond her years. “When you’re the eldest, you do get brought up differently... They trusted you with a bit more.”
The carefree years, when the greatest concern was plaiting hair or playing in the greenhouse, were drawing to a close. The threat from outside grew ever more tangible, until that one morning in May when the droning in the sky could no longer be ignored.
Hear Paulien tell the story herself
In this clip, Paulien recalls the planes over Rotterdam, as you read at the beginning of this chapter.
Watch the clips from this chapter