When I was a docent at a B-17 Museum in Tucson, I frequently engaged European visitors and chatted them up on their country, their history and, hopefully their remembrances of World War II.
An older man was a child during the Nazi occupation of Holland and remembered hiding in his cellar in Amsterdam. He lived in town with his mother and father who was a pharmacist. The Nazis didn't hassle his parents because their jobs were "vital" to the occupiers. They were, he told me, taking children hostage for obvious reasons, among them, child labor in factories.
Often, the old man said, the German Storm Troopers stationed on each street corners, would grab Dutch folks walking along the street and line them up against a wall and execute them by firing squad. No reason, just arbitrarily pick at random, some man or woman coming home from work, at the point of a bayonet against a wall, with a dozen other fellow citizens, and shoot them.
One afternoon, after lunch, there was a commotion right outside his cellar window, the man turned off his light, slowly opened his curtains and peered out. German soldiers were grabbing up his next door neighbors, their kids that were his best friends, children up the street, the minister from the church at the corner, about 35 in all.
Within two minutes. a half dozen storm troopers machine-gunned all 35 people, most of his friends, their parents, his minister, and one of his cousins, he told me. The Germans, when they first arrived in Amsterdam disarmed the populace, shot the governor and neutered the government..
In my time at that museum, I heard a hundred stories like that. The most horrific was of the French Villiage of Ora Dor sur Glane.
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