Theo Allis – born 1925 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
His parents: Johannes Albertus Allis (son of Johannes Jacobus Allis and Willemina Antonia Hendriks), and Johanna Catharina Bouman (whose father was Theodorus Bouman, a farmer).
His siblings: Anne (Johanna Catharina), and Johannes Albertus. There was one other son and two daughters born first, but all three died before Anne, Jan or Theo were born.
I shall write my grandfather Theo’s memoirs in the first person. These memoirs are from what my grandmother has written down & from the stories he used to tell me. Please contact me if you have any other information or stories about Theo.
Memories, as told to his family:
Childhood
– I had a happy childhood. My father loved birds. He kept pigeons. He was a bus-driver, and would feed the pigeons on his hands when he was at the station. Our mother grew up on a farm & used to milk cows into a metal bucket when she was a girl.
– My brother & sister used to call me “de kleine,” little one, because I was the youngest. All three of us shared a bedroom. Jan and I slept together on a double-bed that folded down at night & was folded back up against the wall during the day – typical of beds in Holland. Anne slept in a bed which was shut inside a closet during the day. To punish us, dad would sometimes give us a hiding. When he came into our bedroom in the dark to give Jan a hiding my brother used to push me across so that I would get it instead.
– We had many pets. Our rabbits were toilet-trained. Our duck was not. We had a pet duck which did poo’s on our doorstep. One day our duck disappeared. Our parents told us that he had flown away. We had “chicken” for dinner that night.
– One day our father told us that if we saved up all our pocket money we could buy a donkey. We were very excited, so we tried hard to save up our pocket money until we had quite a bit. We never got that donkey. Dad spent all of our savings on something for mother, for the kitchen.
There was a stream near our house. Once, our father found a dead body floating in the stream. Us children used to take fish from the stream near our house and we put them into our pond. The fish could be eaten if they were big enough. Most were light brown, and the size of a hand. The pond got overcrowded and the fish died.
During the War:
– When the war started I was working by the Princess Canal in the Red Light District; very close to, if not in the same building as that in which Ann Frank lived. To get to work and back I would ice-skate along the canal. I was fast at ice-skating.
During the war, Jews in Holland were made to wear stars and the Russians had to wear blue circles to identify themselves. Jewish people in our neighbourhood began disappearing. Food became very scarce. A friend gave Anne some ‘cooked rabbit’ to eat during the war, & told her afterwards that it was actually a cat. Anne told me it tasted good all the same. Our pet cat disappeared in the war, probably stolen and eaten.
Labour Camps:
– Altogether, I spent about 2 years in forced labour and prison camps in Germany during WWII and 5 years in the Dutch Army in Indonesia after WWII (before I immigrated to New Zealand). I didn’t have much of a childhood because I was only 17 when they sent to Germany (in January 1943) to work in a labour camp – “slave labour”. I don’t know why I was sent. Either I was sent instead of my father, or else my boss informed on me. I took the train west across the border to Stuttgart as directed (it was not a prison train). I went because if I didn’t my family would have suffered. On the train journey I saw the Cathedral of Cologne burning from the window. When I finally arrived at Stuttgart they were going to send me to a certain factory but after a lot of arguing they allowed me to go to the factory where mys brother Jan was working at. It was in Heidlefinge. I arrived there in the Blackout and didn’t know where to go. I asked a man on the street. Luckily he turned out to be Dutch. He worked with Jan so he took me to my brother. The factory was between Hedelfingen and the river Neckar. While I was at that factory I worked 12 hours on, 12 hours off day and night, 7 days a week with one day off, changing from day to night shifts. I mostly worked night-shifts, guarding the factory, with a Russian doing the day-shifts. It was our job to watch for fire-bombs dropped by planes onto roofs and go and put them out. I eventually learned to speak German, and later some Russian. I read German books that I had previously read in Dutch to help me learn the language.
– The woman who fed us our meals never cooked enough food. When it was all finished she would joke, “I’ve cooked just enough food again!” Sometimes I traded meat tokens for bread, with mothers and families, because bread was more filling than meat and there was more of it.
– My brother had a large lathe, I a smaller one. On night shifts the boss often mixed us up and sent us to the wrong lathes. We didn’t say anything. The factory was owned by Smith and Schaute (he was Jewish and no longer there). It was an armament factory, but never knew what the parts were for.
– The man who worked the lathe on the other shift to me was from the Ukraine. His uncle (his mother’s brother) and his cousin were traitors because they worked for the Germans. They needed the money and the food, so they worked as guards for the Germans to get extra food tokens. Later in the war I painted lampshades – his boss then was very much in favour of the Germans. Some people were telling us that the woman’s prison camp in southwest Germany had their own private room and the prisoners were allowed to write letters. That was all lies.
Escape
– Jan, a cousin of ours, and the man I met in the blackout managed to escape to Holland. Jan joined the Underground in Holland and was eventually a Sergeant in the Free Dutch Army. I heard from my father three weeks later that they were safe and had arrived, so I decided to escape too. People had told me that I only needed a passport to get to neutral Switzerland below Germany. Of course I later found that I needed more. I decided against swimming the river which divided Germany and Switzerland. Many others had attempted it, and while a few succeeded in making it to Switzerland, most drowned. Instead I took a train. I was stopped and discovered twice on my journey, but was let off. The third time I was stopped was when my train had arrived at a station, and that time I was captured.
Prison Camps
– They sent me to various prison camps for the rest of the war. I stayed in them for a total of 1 ½ or 2 years. If I had attempted to escape from any of them I would have been shot, so I didn’t try. Us prisoners had mainly swede soup to eat. Swede soup revolts me now. We were always hungry. We even used to take turns excusing ourselves to the toilet so that we could scavenge for food in the compost.
– There was a prisoner there named Pauki. He used to play the bottles with a hammer in the prison camps. He had been a very talented musician before the war, and could learn any instrument in 5 minutes. He also played in the prison camp concert.
– At one stage they accidentally sent me to a concentration camp (where the Jews were sent) instead of to a prison camp. The other prisoners & I were put to work camouflaging a plane. The workers would climb up netting attached to the side of the plane. The netting had wide holes, and was very dangerous. The workers were high up and there was no padding below them on the ground. Those who fell through the netting onto the concrete would break their arms or legs and they were taken off and never seen again, presumably killed. After two weeks in the concentration camp I knew that if I continued to stay there I wouldn’t survive, so I finally worked up the courage to complain. After that they took me out of the concentration camp & sent me to another prison camp.
The Army:
– The war ended and I was freed. I went back to Holland only to be conscripted into the Army. I served in Indonesia as a Sergeant during the 5 years that I was in the army. I had lots of free time so I enjoyed doing drawing in my sketchbook.
– After five years in the Army I was about 27 & I was given the option of which country to go to. I felt that Holland held too many bad memories and no future for me, so I chose New Zealand instead, thinking that it was a tropical place (as I had been told). When my luggage was mistakenly sent back to my house in Amsterdam instead of to New Zealand I realized on arrival in Auckland that the clothes I was wearing were not made for New Zealand’s less-than-tropical weather.
New Zealand:
I arrived in New Zealand with very few belongings. My brother Jan sent some of my things to New Zealand when I asked for them. I also didn’t have any money because the money I had earned in the army was put into my Dutch bank account – and I could not get it changed to a New Zealand bank account back then. Jan bought some things with that money, when I asked him to, and posted them to me. That is how I got myself ice-skates, and a white rain-coat. I used to ice-skate in Alexander.
As a boy I had learned English at school which helped, however it was school English which was different from real English and that made it difficult at first. When I first arrived in Auckland (where I spent two weeks) there were lots of Dutch people who arrived with me. We played cards for money on the train and spoke in Dutch – nobody understood us! It was fine to do in Holland, but strange in New Zealand. When I started work there were no other Dutch people.
I didn’t know the Maori pronunciation of words when I arrived in New Zealand. When I wanted to get to Onehunga I pronounced it as if it was English, “One-hunga” and nobody understood me (although it made perfect sense to me!). I eventually found my own way to Onehunga.
I worked as a mechanic and builder when I came to New Zealand. At work (I first worked in Rotorua) I found the position of the English comma and full-stop opposite from what it was in Dutch numbers, which was confusing. In English 2,350 would be 2.350 in Dutch. Yet there were a lot of similarities in some words – “glas” meant window or glass, “moeder” was mother, “vader” was father and “grootvader” was grandfather. I talked with my brother Jan every week on the phone. I had been advised to not speak Dutch at home because that would confuse my children, so I spoke only English in front of them as they were growing up. At that time most teachers in New Zealand thought that it was best if only English was spoken at home, and many other Dutch immigrant parents did the same as I did.
I worked for three months at Manapouri after I married Hilda – 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. It was my job to turn the engines on at 5 am so that they would be warmed up for the workers to start at 6am. I learned to work with diesel there. I then worked at all the Garages (three) in Raglan. When I worked at the middle Garage, the two brothers who had inherited it wouldn’t speak to each other for some reason and so I had to pass on messages to each of them. They didn’t speak to each other right up until they died – but I went to both of their funerals. Working in the Garages was flexible hours, which was great for me because I could go fishing when I wanted to. I loved fishing. I would sell the fish that I caught to the local fish & chip shop.
GERMANY’S FORCED LABOUR CAMPS RESOURCES:
– Arbeitserziehungslager – the name for the german labour camps – Workers Educational Camps. (Arbeitseinsatz means labor deployment)
– http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/germancos.html = list of firms where Dutch men were sent to do forced labour in Germany in WWII. The firm my granddad worked at is not listed there.
MY ANCESTOR PHOTOS 