CHAPTER 22
Constructing an Existence
For a very long time after the war, Evert and I did not realise that we both belonged, due to our birth dates to an age-group that suffered the highest casualties during the Second World War. ‘Lady luck’ however, had decided that we would both survive and now we had to build an existence for ourselves.
We both now had an identity, even if threaded with untruths, tricks and deceit, nonetheless it enabled us to live in the British Zone. It was far better than the alternative, but still not easy. So as not to starve we both needed work and a permanent roof over our heads, and neither was at a premium in Detmold. It meant looking elsewhere.
We gleaned the information that miners were needed in the Ruhr area. It would be the hardest of physical labour, but every miner was sure of 2,864 calories per day, i.e. a full stomach! There were no other offers of work, so we used this as a springboard for our futures. Work in the mines was top of the list, as hard physical labour of course. Another perk was that accommodation was offered with the job as well. There was a little fly in the ointment inasmuch as, in this still conservative time, you had to be married before you received accommodation together. Brigitte and I could not bear the thought of another separation, and so there was no other choice, we had to marry. That meant waiting until the bans were hung in the local Registry Office which took three months. Due to his contacts with the local council, Mr Snuverink managed to have this three-month wait waived. The advantage was that no one had the time to snoop into my true identity or nationality. The only truth in the matter was my name of Verton.
The date was set for 12 December 1947. It was a cold winter. Inside, the cold demeanour of the Registrar was just as ice-cold as it was outside. However, he married us, with Mr and Mrs Snuverink as our witnesses. Our romance had begun in war-torn Breslau eighteen months before, in the summer months. We sealed our fate together forever, giving our word to one another in the extreme of winter months, in Detmold. We are, after 55 years together, still as much in love as on that first day in Breslau.
We neither felt the cold nor saw the greyness of the mist as we left the Registry Office. Our wedding breakfast was a stew with runner beans. For those times it was cordon-bleu and relished as such. Our honeymoon, of one night, was spent in the Railway Hotel. It was rather meagre, for despite it being December, the room was not heated. The next morning in wanting to leave, a dog baring its teeth barred our way, warning the proprietor of our departure. The dog was there to stop those crooks of society who had no intention of paying for their rooms.
Our wedding was to prove to be the reason that the whole of my family left Holland and came to Germany. My brothers found their wives here, and in the words of Geothe, “we formed a chain” of Vertons, a new one, which now stretched from France to Holland, and from Holland to Germany.
The three of us then made our way to the Ruhr, the epicentre of coal-mining. Both Evert and I were engaged straight away by the Essen Coal Company in Dortmund-Dortfeld, which owned two-thirds of the coal works in that area. Brigitte and I were given a warm furnished room in the Karl-Funke Strasse. Only a couple of streets away Evert was given a room by one of the medics of the company. Among Evert’s duties was first aid to the injured in the mine. The medic was a Marxist and although he had never seen the Russian Steppes, a bronze bust of Lenin had its place of honour beside the highly polished coal-fired stove. Evert was to be found most evenings in our room, where we cooked and ate, and had to sleep. Brigitte knitted us pullovers from shredded parachute silk, and cut us trousers from tenting material.
The whole nation heard about our record output in the tons of coal that we dug out of the earth. We were the heroes of the underground, but the population still froze. “Every ton is useful. For death lies in empty hands, for no coal, no food, no transport, therefore no production”. That was the declaration of the British military command, who urged for more and more, because more than a quarter of our coal was for their usage. Dismantling and demolition was now the order of the day. There was a hive of industry, for what the Allies had not destroyed with their bombs, they destroyed with explosives, such as the tall chimneys on industrial sites. Everything that was of use was dismantled, brick by brick. It was a ‘cold war’ and the continuation of war, but by other means.
The increased pressure on the coal-miners did not ensure the upkeep of safety precautions in the mines. On the contrary, the training of new workers was simply not what it should have been. Evert and I belonged in that category, being fully-fledged miners after just three days of training. That was how we started. Our production was still not enough, and so POWs were released from the prison camps on the condition that they worked in the mines. The accidents underground increased, and at a shocking rate. 178,000 tons of coal daily was the record, 50% more than in 1936.
We, together with a dozen other colleagues, entered the cage. It took us down below at a rate of 20 metres per second. But we were still not at our place of work when we reached the bottom of the shaft. We had two kilometres to walk, that meant being bent almost double, and having to step over rail-tracks and electric cables, and always knocking our heads as we went. It was unexpectedly vast. In our pit alone, there were 200 kilometres of tunnelling. In total it was 5,000 kilometres in the west German mines, longer than the flight-path from Hamburg to Cairo!
I was plagued with a vision at the beginning of this work, of a worm being crushed from an avalanche of earth and stone. We were after all, a thousand metres below the surface, under towns, under cemeteries and to say nothing of rivers! Claustrophobia at this time, was the last thing that I needed. So it was nose to the grindstone and get on with the job.
The pressure of this work played on our nerves at times. Some miners were liable to this more than others. It made them argumentative to the point of disputes, as Evert found to his cost one day when he landed on the wrong side of one. It really had started from nothing. It resulted in a punch-up and Evert and his opponent waltzed in the coal-dust, with blood on their bare chests. I was held back forcibly by the others, when wanting to help him. It was the ‘Inauguration to the Association of Moles’, for like animals, we had to learn who had the say, who was the boss and where our place was, which we had to keep. The supervisor of our seam separated the pair of them and the whole dispute was then forgotten. We came to be a close-knit band, for were we not all in the same boat? We all gritted our teeth, we gave sweat and blood. We soon learned to depend on the experience of our colleagues who had been miners for far longer than any of us. They saved our lives, more than once, from avalanches of earth and stone, which was my nightmare. We did not recognise the ‘stretching and groaning’ of the mountain that warned them far earlier than we realised.
Somehow the sounds of the underworld were just the same as those of the war. There were pneumatic drills, replacing the machine-guns, and dynamite replacing the exploding bombs. There were injured and the dead, just as on the battlefield. The safety of the miners was not an important factor. It was not on the investment plan and there was a lack of the most experienced of the miners, for there were still very many of them sitting in prison as Nazis.
Two years before Evert and I enrolled for this new work, there had been a loss of 411 men from the neighbouring Grimmberg Colliery. At mid-day on 20 February 1946, a blue and red flame shot out of the shaft, the earth shook like an earthquake as a mixture of methane gas and air caused an explosion. That happened eighteen months after a previous explosion caused the deaths of 107 miners, as the result of an air raid.