During the Second World War, children were sent to foster homes in other parts of the Netherlands to escape bombardments and starvation. Little was known about the Schiedam children’s broadcasts. In this oral history project, people were interviewed who had been sent as children from Schiedam to other parts of the Netherlands during the war in order to recuperate.

At the beginning of the war, the deployments were organised by the primary schools with the cooperation of the school doctors. During the Hunger Winter in January 1945, the local Interchurch Bureau (IKB) sent out more than 600 children. They were placed with host families in the province for a short or longer period of time where they could leave the war behind for a while. Especially during the Hunger Winter, many children suffered from malnutrition and illness. Not all of those selected for this project were sent as children via the IKB or the National Committee for Children’s Missions (Schiedam). In the winter of 1944/45 many children were also sent out on the initiative of their parents.

This project mainly tried to find out what role religion played in the children’s deportation, especially in those cases where the religion of the host family was not the same as the religion of the foster child. However, unambiguous conclusions on the role of religion cannot be drawn on the basis of the interviews. The IKB considered it important that the relationship between the religions of the Schiedam population was the same as that of the transports. The interviews (2009), however, show that the interviewees had the impression that religion did not matter during the deployments.

Shortly after the Second World War, children were sent to another part of the country or abroad to recuperate. Not much is known about the children who were sent from Schiedam to other places between 1945-1947. In this project (2009), ten people were interviewed who had been sent to recuperate as ‘pale-faces’ in the Netherlands or abroad at the time.

The Schiedam children who were sent abroad shortly after the war ended up in England, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Denmark or Sweden. They spent two to eight weeks in a children’s camp before being placed with a foster family. In the camps, the children were in quarantine so that no child with a contagious disease ended up in a foster family. During their stay in the camp, the children were kept busy with games and trips were made. They were also taught the basics of the host country’s language. The interviews show, among other things, that the children initially suffered from homesickness, but that at the end of their stay abroad they often did not want to return home.

On the evening of 9 November 1944, 8,000 German soldiers were deployed in Aktion Rosenstock. A cordon was quietly erected around Rotterdam and Schiedam. On the following two days, a total of more than 52,000 Rotterdammers and Schiedammers between the ages of seventeen and forty were rounded up and taken to Germany. Forced labour was the main objective, but the occupying forces also wanted to remove all able-bodied men from the western part of the Netherlands by means of the raid.

During their employment in Germany and the eastern part of the Netherlands, several thousand Rotterdammers died due to illness, malnutrition, escape attempts and acts of war. After the war ended, most of the forced labourers returned home as Displaced Persons.

With the capture of 52,000 men, the Rotterdam razzia was the largest manhunt conducted by the German National Socialist regime. For the project Reis van de Razzia, a total of 76 interviews with witnesses were recorded, providing insight into what happened.

Razzia’s. Deportatie mannen, Rotterdam. Foto is gemaakt in een woning aan de Oudedijk te Rotterdam. 10/11/1944. © L.M.A. van der Werff