(2 May 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Delft, Netherlands – 29 April 2025
1. Buitenhuis holding a childhood photo taken in 1945 showing him sitting next to a girl called Neeltje, clutching a plate and spoon
2. SOUNDBITE (Dutch) Ben Buitenhuis, 83, Dutch Winter Hunger survivor:
++PART OVERLAID BY SHOTS 1, 3, 4++
"My wife used to say, ‘If I have to wait for you, I’ll never get any food,’ and I think that’s an after effect of the war, when you never got enough to eat. I don’t know the feeling of hunger. No, no, no."
3. Buitenhuis holding a childhood photo taken in 1945 showing him sitting next to a girl called Neeltje, clutching a plate and spoon
4. Tilt up shot from Buitenhuis’ childhood photo to his face
5. Various of Dutch Winter Hunger survivor, 83-year-old Ben Buitenhuis in his apartment
6. Various of wedding photo of Buitenhuis and his deceased wife, Ria, who died in 2023
7. Various of Buitenhuis showing photos of area where he used to live during the years of World War II and other documents
8. SOUNDBITE (Dutch) Ben Buitenhuis, 83, Dutch Winter Hunger survivor:
++PART OVERLAID BY SHOTS 5-7++
"I used to stand with a bowl of water at the milk factory, waiting until a sack with powdered milk fell and spilled open, then I used to empty the bowl and scooped it with powdered milk, but I was inevitably told to empty it again, but some of the powder would stick to the wet surface. Then I’d head back home which was 20 metres away. That way we’d have a sort of milk."
STORYLINE:
Ben Buitenhuis doesn’t get hungry. He never really has since the end of World War II, when he had to use his wits to scavenge for milk powder or wait in line for a meagre ration of a meal made from flower bulbs.
"My wife used to say, ‘If I have to wait for you, I’ll never get any food,’ "he said, chuckling at the memory of his wife, Ria, who died in 2023. “And I think that’s an after effect of the war, when you never got enough to eat. I don’t know the feeling of hunger."
Buitenhuis, now an 83-year-old retired truck driver, was one of the lucky ones.
The end of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands on May 5, 1945 — 80 years ago on Monday — came too late for around 20,000 people who died as a result of starvation or freezing temperatures in what the Dutch call, with grim simplicity, The Hunger Winter of 1944-45.
While Allied forces including U.S., British, Canadian and Polish troops liberated parts of the southern Netherlands in 1944, the more densely populated western part of the country, including major cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, had to wait months before their war finally ended with the German capitulation.
The long weeks and months between the liberation of the south and the final German capitulation turned into a famine in the west.
There wasn’t enough food to eat or fuel to heat homes in a freezing winter.
As German occupiers desperately tried to feed their homeland’s faltering war machine with any resources plundered from the occupied Dutch territory, the Netherlands’ government in exile in London called for a rail strike that halted many trains, including those carrying food from the fertile fields of the eastern Netherlands.
The strike, called in September 1944, was intended to hamper the Nazi war effort as Allied forces prepared to make their final push into Germany, but it also had the effect of cutting off vital supplies from the fertile fields of the Dutch agricultural heartland to the densely populated cities of the west.
"That way we’d have a sort of milk," he said.
AP Video shot by Ahmad Seir Nassiri
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