(Interview and transcription by Gunnar Knapp.)

Transcription

1 Partial transcription of a recording of a 2005 oral history interview of Parzival Copes about his experiences in Holland before and during World War II (Interview and transcription by Gunnar Knapp.) This transcription is of about the first 20% of the interview. If you are interested in more, contact Gunnar.Knapp@gmail.com; he can provide audio files of the rest of the interview. PLACE AND YEAR OF BIRTH I was born in a small place called Nakusp in the middle of British Columbia, in 1924, in the middle of the winter, when the snow was ten feet deep or whatever. It's in the west Kootenay Mountains in the interior of BC. PARENTS My parents were both born in Holland. My dad was born in Utrecht in a poor family, which had some pretenses to having had wealthier ancestors. There were six kids in the family. His father was just a tailor. But my dad was a very intelligent individual, and an idealist, and had some ambitions also to advance. The family couldn't afford putting him through university or anything like that although he had the ambition to go to university, and was glad when I did. He was an idealist, and a pacifist. In Holland in those days there was compulsive military service, and he objected to that. When he first had to appear for military service he managed to get into the medical corps, which he could reconcile more or less with his pacifist views. But he also decided then I'm going to go to a country where there's no compulsory military service. He decided he was going to emigrate to Canada, which he did in My father was engaged--not to my mother--but to the woman who became his first wife. She was from a Christian-Jewish family in Holland, by the name of Rabinovich. And they were engaged. My father went ahead to Canada--I'm not sure whether they got married before he went out to Canada or whether she came out and married him there. But in any case she came out. My dad decided that while his ambition had been to become a university professor of biology his family didn't have the means to get him to a university. And he could not earn enough money himself to put himself through it. And so he decided that the next best thing was to become a farmer in Canada. Because you could immigrate to Canada, you could get a piece of land on the prairies. And so he did that in Now my mother met my father by correspondence. His first wife died of what was called consumption in those days--tuberculosis. He still was in contact with some idealistic society back in Holland of which my mother had been the secretary. And so he stayed in touch with this organization, it was called (translated into English) the "Society for Clean Living," or something like that. His first wife had died, and he had two children already, and they were in an orphanage, and he was corresponding with this organization to which he had belonged when he was in Holland, and my mother was the secretary of the organization. Well, the upshot was that she decided to come out to Canada and marry him. And she came out--this was they had to wait for

2 WW I to end, and she came out and they got married on the first of January The arrived on the thirty-first of December 1918 and they got married the next day. And by that time my dad was in Calgary, and he had two children in a nearby orphanage, which came home then when he had a new wife in Calgary. And so they lived in Calgary for probably two or three years. My dad was qualified as an accountant. He had gone out to Canada as a homesteader and got himself a farm in Saskatchewan, and worked at night on his qualifications as an accountant, got this qualification, and got a job with the International Harvester Company in town, in Saskatoon. BROTHERS AND SISTERS My parents had three children. The first child died at birth. That was a girl. I was the next one. And I have a younger brother. But my father had from his first marriage a girl and a boy. The girl was thirteen years older than I was and the boy was ten years older. We returned to Holland in That is to say, my parents, my younger brother and myself. My older brother in the meantime was off on his own. He was ten years older than I was. He volunteered for the loyalist cause in Spain, fought the Nazis there, got badly wounded. The organization that was recruiting soldiers for the loyalist cause in Spain took responsibility for sending him back to Canada. He recovered in a sanatorium on the Mediterranean near Barcelona. The organization said "we'll take you back to Canada." He wanted to visit us on the way back. They agreed to that. So he went to Paris first and from there they gave him leave to go to Holland to visit us and he stayed with us for I think it was a couple of months. My sister had meanwhile married a Dane and was living in Denmark. He was the son of a very wealthy family, who had been sent off to Canada to straighten him out--he was a bit of a wastrel. MOVE TO HOLLAND The rest of the family--my parents, my younger brother and myself--moved to Holland in I was nine when I left Canada. By 1939 I was fifteen, and I was in high school. EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF NAZIS I was a good student. I was an enthusiastic boy scout. I developed my own political opinion, although it paralleled to a considerable extent that of my parents. But I thought for myself. I was intensely interested in politics. I read the newspapers pretty much from beginning to end. The Nazis had come to power in Most people in Holland were instinctively opposed to the Nazi regime. That was certainly the case in our family. And of course it was reenforced by my elder brother who was quite left-wing--he was a young communist. The rest of the family was not communist-inclined but certainly anti-nazi--as 90% of the Dutch were. But the prevailing public opinion in Holland was that we stay out of the war. So when WWII started the Dutch had no intention of being part of it. Certainly I observed the aggressive intentions of the Nazis in Germany. I hadn't decided in my own mind whether that meant that they would be invading the Netherlands. After all, Germany was fairly aggressive in WW I, but they left Holland alone. But the Dutch national policy was to

3 stay out of the war, and I guess I implicitly assumed that that was probably realistic, although with Hitler's intentions of dominance in Europe there was always the threat they might pose to Holland as well. We didn't feel it was necessarily imminent. We were suspicious of the Germans, but not to the extent that we thought tomorrow they might invade. FIRST HEARING OF THE START OF THE WAR I remember--i heard that the war had started--sitting with my dad on the edge of a swimming pool, both of us dangling our legs into the water, and it came over the radio of the club house in the establishment where we were. This was September 1939, somewhere in central Holland where we were at the end of the summer vacation, we were going to go back home to Amsterdam in a couple of days time. I was embarrassed to admit it to myself--i knew it wasn't right, but I was excited about it. I thought "this means at last there's going to be a fight against the Nazis." I'd made up my mind that they were an evil danger in Europe. Our family had a Jewish connection, as my father's first wife was Jewish, although she belonged to a Christian Jewish family. But Jewish nevertheless. My older brother and sister were half Jewish. Incidentally, I lived in a part of Amsterdam with a very substantial Jewish population, and I had many Jewish friends. In fact, I was a boy scout, and I was a patrol leader, and I a patrol of 7 or 8, and more than half of them were Jewish or part Jewish. So my closest friends all had Jewish connections, including two who were Jewish refugees from Germany. Prior to the invasion, the prevailing opinion in Holland was that they should stay out of the war, as they'd done in WW I--an opinion I didn't share. In principal, I thought we needed a good fight against the Nazis, and everybody should support that. So at school, as a Canadian citizen, I had from the start a national commitment, so to speak, to fighting the Nazis. But I was the only one in the class--the others were all Dutch. And the Dutch attitude was yeah, we don't like the Nazis, but we don't want to become involved. And I felt in the class that I was by myself in supporting the war against Germany. Holland was invaded in May 1940, about a year after the war started. Before that they invaded Denmark and Norway. That was shortly before they invaded the Netherlands. Denmark was the one country that didn't resist. Not that they were pro-nazi. But they thought, we're a small country, it's useless putting up resistance, we don't want to get killed. And of course communications were not easy at that time so we didn't have a detailed account of what my sister who was living in Denmark thought--she was half Jewish after all. She was against the Nazis very obviously. Her husband was a newspaper editor of Sozialdemocraten--the Social Democratic newspaper in Denmark. So they were undoubtedly quite anti-nazi. But we didn't have frequent contact with them. We wrote back and forth, but had no close contact where we discussed that. THE INVASION I was excited that at last we were going to fight the Nazis but concerned about the weakness of the Dutch. It was an important question for our family because we had Canadian nationality. Undoubtedly, if the Nazis occupied Holland and we were still there we would be at the very least interned, as we thought. But when we invaded, we didn't think that it would only take the Germans five days to occupy the Netherlands. We were in touch with the British consulate in Amsterdam which also looked after Canadian affairs. We were getting prepared to leave. On the fourth day the British consulate advised us to go the port of Einladen [I don't think this is the

4 correct spelling for this town, because I can't find it on a map] because they were sending a ship to pick up all British subjects, including Canadians. And we did go to the port of Einladen. We were told which hotel to go to. We took public transportation to get there. There was a representative of the British government there. It was full of anyone associated with either the British or the French empires. They were all there. It was quite orderly. But it was uncomfortable. It was a small hotel. They had run out of beds, and so we were lying in the lounge and so on, and not very comfortable. And then someone came and said "sorry, the ship has been sunk." We thought that the ship had been sunk coming out from Britain and hadn't made it. I read later on that the ship was in the port of Einladen and the British Navy sank every ship in sight to make the port useless to the Germans. And I only found that out after the war. And so we were stuck there. We felt depressed. We felt we might as well go home. So we took public transportation to get back to Amsterdam. But I am a born optimist. I had been excited about the idea that we were going to Britain--but of course that didn't come off. But I was thinking maybe now we're going to get exchanged as civilians against Germans that had been interned in Canada or the UK or whatever. And I was hoping that we be on some exchange of civilians. Nothing came of that. Before that, when we were still in Amsterdam, waiting to leave, I was a boy scout. The boy scouts were immediately called up to do national service of a sort. There were a few bombs that dropped on Amsterdam. Actually, they were not bombing Amsterdam. They were bombing--intensely--rotterdam, because of the importance of its port. But there were German planes coming over Amsterdam. And one of them got in trouble, and unloaded all its bombs. And they fell within a few blocks of where I was out on the street as a boy scout doing sort of national service there. So I saw them coming down. They fell about a block and a half away, I guess. **************************** ESCAPE FROM THE GERMANS [This part of the recording is from near the end of the interview, and is about how Parzival Copes and his brother, who had been captured by the Germans and were working in a concentration camp, escaped from the Germans near the end of the war.] We were marched north from the camp. We had a limited number of guards. A few of them were Dutch Nazis in German SS uniforms. Most of them were Dutch police who had been forced to serve as guards. And had been taken away from their homes in places like Amsterdam. And they were semi-prisoners. They were told "you make sure nobody escapes." Well of course, they were not terribly concerned about making sure we didn't escape, and large numbers did escape when we were being marched out of the camp to another camp further north, because the Canadians were getting too close. But sometimes you're not quite sure whether this guard could be trusted or not. The ones we definitely couldn't trust were in Nazi uniforms. My brother and I escaped within a few hours from leaving the camp. We could see people escaping along the way, in ones and twos, running off into the woods when the guards weren't looking. My brother and I were sticking together. We wanted to escape together. We were just looking for the opportunity.

5 We were being marched north, at one point we reached a little town called Wolkbrueck. A "wolk" is a heavy timber, so "Timber bridge." [I'm not sure of the spelling of the name of the town.] It was on a canal--a rather small narrow canal with one bridge across it. They gave us a rest there to stand around for a bit. Periodically there were Allied aircraft in the area. They were shooting up all transportation. They could shoot up the column they saw marching there, thinking they were Germans. So when the Allied aircraft came, we had to get off the road, and in this little town of Waldbrueck we had to get off the road again. And my brother saw a little shed behind a house close by, and he sort of moved in that direction, and when no one was looking, he sort of pushed the door open and motioned for me to get in, and I did. I was a little afraid that somebody might have noticed and given us away, but none of the guards were looking. So we went in there and we closed the door. And by that time a number of people had escaped and they had lost count of how many they had. Sol our hearts pounding, we waited, and the prisoners and the guards moved off, and we were free. The owners of the shed saw us go us in there, and he was a good Dutchman, and he wouldn't give us away. So once the prisoners and the guards had moved on they came to our shed. They knew what was up. They were duty-bound to help us. So they said, one of you stay here in this shed and my neighbor will take one over there. And we spread the risk, you see. So I went to the neighbor's shed. They said. Stay here. It's too dangerous to go out in the road now. There are still so many Germans retreating along this road. We'll bring you food- -which is what they did. We stayed for one or two nights in these two sheds. And my brother was in a shed. He had become tired, and there was a kind of a rough ceiling in that shed and there was some straw in there. And he went up to lie on the straw there for a rest. And it's a damn good thing he did. Because a retreating German soldier, when it started to rain, came into his shed to get out of the rain. Didn't know that my brother was lying right over his head. He was keeping absolutely still. He could have stuck out his hand and rapped on the guy's helmet. And after a while, when it stopped raining, the soldier left again. This was not a major route of the German army retreat. There wasn't a major troop movement along here, but there were all kinds of stragglers coming by. It was two days that we were in hiding there. When the guards and the prisoners had moved on they came to us and said it's too dangerous for you to go out now because there are all kinds of troops going by. Just stay in here. And at night you can get across the fields in the back. And they said you'd better head east because the Canadians had advanced further north to the east. They were outflanking the Germans. And you'll be free there. You could hear cannon fire in that direction. The Canadians were cleaning up the Germans there. But they said it's too dangerous to go in daytime, wait till tonight. And later they changed their mind and said it's too dangerous to go out. Stay here. We stayed there for two days. And then a Canadian patrol came into town. We had escaped just on the south side of the bridge. The Germans were retreating northwards. We were in two sheds that were within a few hundred yards of the bridge there. The first or the second night, we heard a big explosion. The Germans had blown up the bridge. And we also heard gunfire. They had executed ten hostages, because there'd been some sabotage. They'd just rounded up a bunch of men in the village and shot them there and left them in the street. We heard all of that going on. And if they had found us at the time we would have been amongst

6 them. Because we were people hiding in prison uniforms. They were the first ones. And the other people, they just rounded them up out of the houses and shot them as hostages--as a warning to the civilian population. The Canadians came in in armored cars and vehicles that were called "staghounds." They were light armored units with a light cannon on board but on wheels instead of tracks so they could move fast. They came with a couple of armored cars and a couple of staghounds. They came on the far side of the canal. Where we were hiding was just short of crossing the canal and going north. And they had outflanked the Germans on the east and they came in on the other side of the canal. And they got to the bridge which had been blown up, but it was a very shallow canal, so they could clamber over the wreckage and actually some Canadians came there, and they wanted to see if it was clear on the other side of the bridge. It was exhilaration when the Canadians arrived. The whole village broke out in festivity. The flags were out and everybody was in the streets, and the Canadians were being welcomed as liberators. And the people who had been hiding us, we had told them we were actually Canadians. And they ran out and said "we've got two Canadians here." And so they were expecting two downed fliers. Which we were not. But we got a very friendly welcome from the Canadian troops there. We had to clamber across the bridge there and hold onto the outside of these armored cars and staghounds. Plus a number of German prisoners they had taken--and they were simply told to hold on too. They had given up, anyhow. They took us to regimental headquarters. I was debriefed by the intelligence officer there. I was a boy scout, I was a good map reader and so on. I knew something about the German defense lines there because we had been working on building them when we were prisoners. So I could make myself useful to the intelligence officer. That was an area they hadn't liberated yet. And so we went to the regimental headquarters there first, and then they sent us to an intelligence unit. -- Gunnar Knapp Gunnar.Knapp@gmail.com (personal ) (mobile phone)