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| Gus Smoorenburg, left, a member of the Dutch resistance during World War II, helps unfurl a U.S. Flag in front of Willamina city hall. Photo by Shelley Harman |
Sheridan man recalls role in Dutch resistance during WWII
‘Gus’ Smoorenburg wants Congress to recognize efforts
By Gail Oberst
Correspondent, The Sun
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A.F. ‘Gus’ Smoorenburg’s story about living behind enemy lines as a Dutch resistance fighter reads like some exciting World War II novel. There are train derailments, explosions, furtive nighttime operations, daring rescues and danger at the hands of the cruel Nazi soldiers.
But the story this Sheridan man tells is real.
Smoorenburg’s story came to light in 1994 when he was asked to talk about his experiences as part of the Anne Frank exhibit that passed through Oregon, including a stay in Sheridan.
His accounts of World War II have attracted the attention of local and regional media, and has garnered him invitations to speak all over the state.
Smoorenburg, now nearly 80, was born in Amsterdam, Holland, the second of eight children.
His was a typical Dutch childhood, he said. Life in The Netherlands was much like life in Oregon. Winters were cool and rainy. Summers were warmer, but sometimes it rained then, too. He attended school and then followed his father and brother into the graphic arts field.
But his schooling was interrupted May 10, 1940, when Germany invaded Holland, Luxembourg and France. Smoorenburg was 19 years old.
To stop the Germans, the Dutch tried using their own landscape, opening the country’s famous dams and sluices to stop tanks and trucks.
But the Dutch couldn’t stop the bombers that rained terror on Rotterdam, killing thousands of civilians, including schoolchildren. On May 15, the Dutch capitulated.
The surrender changed everything, Smoorenburg said.
"Life was comfortable before the war. But when the Germans came in, everything stopped. Everything came to a halt."
Without school, money or regular jobs, Smoorenburg and his buddies were left to foster their anger. The anger expressed itself first as pranks. The
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Germans on invasion had erected signs directing soldiers to "Krankenhaus" (hospital), "Bahnhof," (train station) and "Commandantur," (headquarters). The youths rearranged the signs, sending the invaders in circles.
"You could see soldiers asking civilians if they knew where they could find what... and you could see people lifting their shoulders and hear them saying, ‘No speek Jerman’," Smoorenburg recalled.
The marauding band of more than a dozen youths became part of an organized European resistance movement when they finally established short-wave radio contact with London and received coded messages. By mid-1941, food was becoming scarce and the Germans forced their captives to work in factories to earn their food. Smoorenburg illegally stayed behind.
And at night, the sabotage continued.
Meeting in barns late at night, the youths tracked the Germans’ habits. One night while the soldiers were drinking beer at a hall, the group gathered sugar and filled the German motorcycles. In another operation, the group gathered nails, twisted them into double-pointed spikes and spread them out on the highway overpass where the English had informed them a transport was due to pass.
Dressed in hunting camouflage, the new uniform of the resistance, and hiding in the bushes, Smoorenburg and four buddies waited.
"Listening to all the hollering in German and the running around and wondering what the devil was going on, it was clear to us they did not arrive in time at their destination. That made us grin," Smoorenburg said. "We called it Mission Accomplished."
As the war waged on, the Germans forced Dutch Jews to wear yellow stars every time they left their homes. Smoorenburg recalled the day his neighbors and friends, the Levys, were moved to Poland along with known "undesirables," the Dutch people who refused to work in German factories. Smoorenburg never saw his Jewish friends again.
German paranoia increased for a good reason. Hitler’s invasion of Russia was not going well and the Dutch resistance fighters had become more sophisticated.
Smoorenburg’s eyes glisten as he talks about an operation in which he and his group derailed two German trains loaded with bulldozers and backhoes headed for the Dutch coast, where Germans were preparing to fend off an English invasion.
Not everything went so smoothly. Smorenburg recalled another incident when he was refurbishing pistols in his home and accidentally shot himself through the shoulder, nearly giving his resistance work away. Two months later, he was back at work for the resistance, crawling through a wheat field to cut a cable used to feed electricity to a searchlight that wove through the air looking for invading planes.
"Another job well done. For several days, no light and no possibility of shooting down airplanes," he said.
Picking up pilots from planes shot down was among the most important jobs of the resistance, and one for which Smoorenburg earned five gold bumble bee pins, one for each pilot he picked up in the woods and helped smuggle to safety. The pilots were among 127 saved by Dutch resistance groups. Smoorenburg, however, brushed off the bravery.
"We did not consider having done a great job as may pilots went to POW camps downed over Germany," he said.
By 1944, his starving family was living on tulip bulbs, and two of his fellow resistance fighters and a cousin had been executed by firing squad. To save his life, Smoorenburg’s mother sent him to work in a Dortmund, Germany, factory, 45 miles from his Holland home.
Within three months, bombs began falling on Dortmund and Smoorenburg had to wait out the destruction in the basement of a school. At least nine times the city was bombed while he was there.
"This sight I cannot ever forget: burning roofs collapsing, burning window sills and brick walls crashing down on sidewalks, bricks and debris laying everywhere from roads as well as from houses, blown to pieces. It is unforgettable...to see and feel a city, an entire city, on fire."
A few days after the Allied soldiers rolled into Dortmund, Smoorenburg began hitching rides back home, one with an American truck full of wounded soldiers headed for a hospital.
From talking to Allied soldiers, Smoorenburg discovered how little most people knew of the resistance effort and how the Dutch, as well as other Europeans, were forced to work and die in German factories.
But for now, he was happy his family had survived -- thin, but alive.
Life returned to some semblance of normality after the war. Smoorenburg bought a printing plant in nearby Nuth and eventually married his bookkeeper, Yvonne Dronkers. But he eventually grew weary of increasing Dutch regulations on businesses.
In 1959, he brought his wife and two daughters to the United States to work as a printer. He first settled in Louisiana, where a third daughter was born. As soon as he was eligible, in 1964, Smoorenburg applied for and was granted U.S. citizenship.
After his wife died in 1977, he moved to the Portland area to be closer to his oldest daughter. He married a McMinnville woman who died in 1994. That’s when he moved to Sheridan, joining Willamina’s Amvet Post 2000.
It was as a member of that group that Smoorenburg finally found a forum to spotlight the efforts of the underground heroes of World War II.
In letters to congressmen and senators, and in public speeches, he is asking for official recognition of the contributions from the Dutch resistance, as well as the Belgium "White Brigade," and the French resistance fighters. Smoorenburg said he is not asking for medals or for benefits.
"Just a proclamation of recognition, what we surely earned. Consider it a pat on the back from Washington, D.C. Don’t you agree?"
But more than recognition, Smoorenburg said he continues to talk to groups because believes in peace.
"I never saw an elephant kill and elephant or a butterfly a butterfly. Even before World War II, we are using our brains to find better, more sophisticated ways to kill our (own species). It is time to put our brains to better uses and stop the killings, not only at the battle fields, but downtown as well."