Page 50 - Discover Spring 2021

Reign of Terror CONTINUED
working as a nanny for a lawyer with eleven
kids; four would be a snap by comparison. There
was a catch, however: She would have to leave
Holland and move to Chevy Chase, MD in the
USA. She had come to know many Americans
after they liberated her town during the Nazi
occupation, and she liked them, so she agreed.
Once in America, Tini attended a young
adult club sponsored by her church. It was
widely attended by other new immigrants like
herself. She went there to make friends, and
that is where she met George, who was born in
the USA and raised in Pennsylvania. He readily
admits that the reason he went to the club was
to meet girls. It worked. Almost immediately,
the two noticed each other, and the attraction
was mutual. It wasn’t long before they were
finding excuses to leave the group and meet in
the kitchen.
“George gave me our first kiss in that
kitchen,” Tini giggles as she confesses this, “And
my face turned red. That’s what George liked...
my face turning red... so every time I would go
into the kitchen he would follow me and kiss
me.”
It was good for him that he followed her,
as there was an Irish chap who had his eye on
her too.
“She was quite kissable,” George said,
“And I did like to see her blush.”
Tini loved her job as a “glorified nanny”,
and she grew to love the children. In fact, she is
still in touch with three of them. The fourth died
recently. While she was living in Chevy Chase
and raising the children, she met and befriended
Senator Hubert Humphrey.
“He said we were soulmates, because
we have the same first name. Hubert and
Hubertina. He and his wife, Muriel, were
so nice to me.” She was also neighbors with
George McGovern and his large family of five
rambunctious kids.
48 Discover Smith Mountain Lake SPRING 2021
Both McGovern and Humphrey were
Senators at the time. Humphrey would go on to
become vice-president to Lyndon Johnson and
he narrowly missed beating Richard Nixon for
the presidency in the 1968 election. But, that
is another story. It was her remembrances of
the occupation of her native country that we
came to hear... the injustices that she saw and
experienced before her eleventh birthday, and
that she still remembers.
The Gestapo ruled with an iron fist. They
took whatever they needed or wanted, and if
you resisted you were gambling with your life.
Her uncle’s van, that he used to deliver baked
goods, was confiscated. If they needed your
bicycle, they ordered you to turn it over. If they
liked a horse you owned, they took it. Likewise,
farmers had to hand over fruits and vegetables
from their gardens along with eggs and chickens
or pork. The soldiers ate for free, and they ate
first. The farmers’ families got what was left
over, or what little they could safely hide.
Once, following a heavy snowfall, Tini
and her brother were sledding. A German
soldier, trying to impress a young woman, took
her brother’s sled and gave it to the woman for
her to use.
“My brother was a hot-head so he took
it back...away from the woman,” Tini said.
Apparently, the young woman didn’t object too
strongly, as her brother, who was 16 years old
at the time and certainly no match for an armed
soldier, was successful in reclaiming his sled.
“We were lucky; we always had day-old
bread to eat,” Tini said, “Because of my uncle’s
bakery. Plus my father worked at the co-op food
store. Also, my father’s friend was a farmer.
We would walk three kilometers (a little less
than two miles) every day to get to the farm
and work. Then the farmer would give us fresh
vegetables and fruit. But soon the Gestapo
began taking the food we had worked to grow,
so we didn’t have as much. But we always had