Oral History Program Jeannette Koning Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 25 July 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jeannette Koning Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 25 July 2017 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Koning Jeannette, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 25 July 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Jeannette Koning circa 2010s Jeannette Koning circa 2010s Jeannette Koning 25 July 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Jeannette Koning, conducted on July 25, 2017 in her home in Layton, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Jeannette discusses her life and her memories involving World War II. Michael Ballif, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: We are here with Jeannette Koning in Layton, Utah, and we are talking with her about her life, memories and her experiences during World War II, for the World War II and Northern Utah project at Weber State University. My name is Lorrie Rands, conducting the interview, and Michael Ballif is here as well. Again, thank you Jeannette for your time. I’m going to start with, when and where were you born? JK: I was born in Surabaya, Indonesia. It’s on the island of Java of Indonesia. LR: How did that come to be? You being born in Indonesia? JK: My father was in the Dutch Navy. Indonesia used to be the Dutch East Indies, so that’s the reason why I was born in Indonesia. My daughter was born in Hawaii because my husband was in the Navy, and he was stationed in Hawaii. LR: How long did you stay in Surabaya? JK: Only until I was four, so I didn’t know much. I remember that I had a baboo, that’s kind of a nanny; and we had a jongos, that’s kind of a butler. LR: What did your father do in the Dutch Navy? JK: I don’t know what he did. I only know that he was in the Navy. LR: When you were four, where did you move to? JK: To the Netherlands. 2 LR: Back home? JK: Yeah. LR: Were both of your parents from the Netherlands? JK: Oh yes. LR: What were their names? JK: My mother was Jacomina De Jonge and my dad was Arie Dirk JongKees. LR: Remind me what year you were born. JK: April 9, 1929. LR: When you were four, that would’ve been in 1933 that you moved? JK: Yes. LR: What are some of your memories of growing up in the Netherlands? JK: I just had a regular childhood, went to elementary school, high school. High schools in Holland are a little bit more difficult. I went to what they call a Lyceum and there you have to have French, German, English, Latin, and Greek. Less math and other subjects, so their schools were different. Difficult, very difficult. LR: What year did you start high school? Do you remember? JK: I had to double one class, so I was seven years in high school. 1948. LR: Where exactly were you in the Netherlands? JK: We lived in Den Helder, There was the naval base in Holland. When I was 10 years old, we moved to Wassenaar. That is a city between Leiden and The Hague. It was 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland. My dad really wanted to immigrate to the states then, but my mother was against it. So, we did not go. MB: Do you remember why your mother was against coming to the states? 3 JK: Because my dad was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and she wasn’t. MB: Was your father born into the Church? JK: Oh no. He met a colleague on the base in Den Helder. He saw him sitting there on the side of the road and he looked kind of dejected. He said, “Brother Vlam, what’s the matter?” “Oh,” he said, “I feel like Job sitting in a sackcloth and ashes.” Since he quoted the Bible they started a conversation on religion. Brother Vlam explained the gospel to him right there and then on the roadside. My dad listened to it and he said, “Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. It’s like I have always known it, but forgotten it.” He was smoking a cigarette at the time and he said, “This is my last cigarette.” Brother Vlam told him about the Word of Wisdom. I never seen him smoke. LR: Did you have any brothers and sisters? JK: Yes, I had an older brother, Johan Paul. He was eight years older than me. I had an older sister, five years older than me, and a younger sister, five years younger than me. I was right smack in the middle. LR: Do you remember if your older brother was forced to join any military? JK: Yes, he was in the Navy, but not forced. He was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Germany during World War II. He made it back, okay. The prisoner of war camps were not as bad as concentration camps were. They were bad enough though. That’s a coincidence too, the same Brother Vlam was in that prisoner camp. He taught my brother the gospel there and that’s why he also joined the church. 4 LR: So, I know you were a young girl, but do you remember hearing about what Germany was doing and how it affected you? JK: Yes, of course. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 my mother said, “We are gonna be next.” She had the foresight of buying coffee, linens, lots of canned foods. She said, “They’re going to come and attack us.” Sure enough, they did, in 1940. I was sleeping over at a friend’s house and her sister woke us up. Saying, “Wake up! Wake up! It’s war! It’s war!” Then I could hear the whistling of bombs. They were bombing Valkenburg. It was an airport not too far away from where we lived. It’s really an eerie sound, the sailing of bombs. It was kind of like a whistling sound. I cannot describe it. My friend’s parent’s left the door open, so people could get off the street. I remember there was a Catholic lady who was doing her Hail Marys, and that was what made us nervous. I made it home okay, but then we had to capitulate in five days because we were no match for the Germans. A lot of cities were bombed. I have even some pictures of when they bombed Den Helder, the Naval base where my dad was. He was there when it was bombed. An interesting thing happened to him. He was sitting by a window and he heard a voice say, “Get away from the window. Move!” So he did. He went inside the house and then a bomb fell in the back yard. It totally shattered that window, by which he was sitting. If he had not listened to that warning, he would have been covered with glass. LR: How did life change after Germany invaded the Netherlands? JK: Well we had all these soldiers in the street, German soldiers everywhere. We even had to take in two soldiers. One was from Bavaria and the other one was 5 from Prussia. The Prussian was proud to be part of the German Nazi party, but the other didn’t want to have anything to do with the war. He gave us chocolate and gave my sister and me both a doll. He was actually kinda nice. This occupation was a bad thing to. That’s when the persecution of the Jews began too. My mother had two friends who were Jews. They both perished in a concentration camp. We had some friends in Haarlem, and they hid Jews. They were not Jewish themselves. Someone betrayed them and they were sent to a concentration camp. The lucky thing for them was that they were tiny people and could get by on very little food. So they came back. They never made it to the gas chambers. A lot of heavy people, died before they even got to the gas chambers because they couldn’t live on that little food they got. MB: You said that you started high school in 1941? JK: Yes. MB: So you started high school during the German occupation? JK: Yes. We were occupied. As a matter of fact, the Germans took our school. They used it as a stable for their horses. So we had school in individual homes. They took everything. We had to go on our bikes without tires to get to the farm to trade with the linens and the coffee that my mother bought. We bartered with that, with the farmers. They didn’t want money. So that was a good thing that we had those items. We traded them for carrots and sugar beets. We would cook the sugar beets and use the syrup and the pulp to make pies. We had a literal trapdoor in the closet by our front door. That’s where we kept our radio, all our valuables, because the Germans took everything. Anything of value, they would 6 take. One time, some German soldiers searched our house for items like that, but they did not discover that hiding place in the closet. It’s a good thing because I would not be sitting here to tell about it if they had found it. LR: Why? JK: They would have sent us to a concentration camp. We would not have survived it. LR: Were you able to stay together as a family? JK: Yes. As I said, my brother was sent to the prisoner of war camp in Germany. He was fortunate; he came back from that. Things became really critical as the war went on. You couldn’t buy much else in the stores anymore. Money wasn’t worth much. I remember my dad buying a bushel of wheat for 400 guilders. It was a lucky thing we could get that. At the end, we couldn’t buy anything anymore. A lot of our meals consisted of tulip bulbs, those sugar beet pies and the canned food that my mother had bought before the war. Tulip bulbs, don’t taste so good. You can boil them and you can fry them, but you have to take out the yellow part. It’s poisonous. They didn’t have much flavor, but it kept a lot of people alive. Bulbs were our main industry. Now they send them all over the world, tulip bulbs and hyacinths, etc. MB: You had that radio. Would you use it to listen? JK: Yeah, we listened to the BBC. MB: What was that like, listening to the BBC? JK: We just heard what was going on, how the war was progressing and what was happening. That was the only form of information that we had. The situation 7 became very critical too. We did not have central heating, no electricity at all or gas. Now-a-days everything is run by electricity. Luckily not in those days. We had a little stove in our living room, so that was a really a blessing in disguise. We went out to the Forest of the Queen to steal wood. One time, we were kind of delayed and it was getting light a little bit and a German officer stood there and looked at me, and pointed a gun at me. I was scared to death. I was 15 years old and I had learned some German. so I started to talk to him in German. I think that softened him up because he let us go. We could keep our wagon, we could keep our saw, we could keep our wood, and leave. Of course, the wood ran out. The next time we went to the Forest of the Queen, called the Raaphorst, an officer appeared again, but this time in front of my sister. I was so scared, I crawled under a bush. I could hear the conversation between the officer and my sister. He asked, “Are you married?” “No, I’m not married,” my sister said. Then too, he softened up and he said “Okay, alright. Go and leave.” We were lucky we were not shot. LR: It was almost like the German officer was flirting. JK: He was. My older sister was good looking. She was 20 years old. A lot of girls went out with German officers. After the war, people would grab those girls that went out with officers and shaved their heads. When you saw girls with scarves, you knew that they had been out with German soldiers. LR: I thought that was something they only did in France. JK: Oh no. They did it in Holland too. 8 MB: This was a very serious time, it was a very scary time, I’m guessing, but was there anything that you did for fun or to relax during all of this? JK: The only relaxation thing that we had, were puppet shows. There wasn’t nothing else. We couldn’t go to the movies or anything like that. There was a place not too far from where we lived where they showed puppet shows. We went to see them regularly. That was our entertainment. LR: You said that you had high school in your homes? JK: Yes. LR: Would you have a specific home you’d go to? Or would you change places? JK: We would change places. LR: Who was the teacher? JK: We had several teachers. LR: So they just followed you? JK: Yeah they followed where we went. They just told us, “Okay, we meet in this house, and we’ll have these subjects that we’ll teach.” LR: Did they also separate the grades, like elementary school? Did they do that in homes as well during that time? JK: I imagine they did. I can’t remember. I remember we were put out of our school, but I don’t know if they took the elementary school over. I don’t remember that. LR: What are some of the things that you would do to help around the home, like a job or anything like that during that time? Like chores? JK: No. My mother had two cleaning ladies. We really didn’t have to do much. We kinda belonged to the middle class. Not poor, not real rich, but my mother could 9 afford help. So we as kids didn’t have to do much. We had to keep our room clean and help with the dishes and that was about it. LR: If money, didn’t mean anything, how were these cleaning ladies paid? JK: I guess they were paid in money. There was only one cleaning lady and we had one lady that would come and do the washing. LR: Was your father still in the Navy during World War II? JK: No, he had retired. LR: So it was just your brother who had gone and was doing that? JK: Yeah. LR: What are some of your other memories of being in the Netherlands during World War II? Do you have any other memories? JK: The other scariest thing that we had, was that they shot V2s from the same forest where we got the wood. That was scary because we would always listen. Often, they failed and would fall right down. We didn’t live too far away from that forest. So we always said, “Will it go up? Will it fall down? Will it fall on us?” That didn’t happen, but it was scary. The germans made us black our windows. They wanted no light to be seen. So there we were in the dark. We tried to read by candlelight. You can’t do that too long. So my dad told a lot of stories. I can’t remember all the stories, but I know he did. That was another thing that we had to do. My dad had me run some errands. I didn’t know what I was carrying, but he was working for the underground. He had me carry the stuff. I had no idea what I did. It’s a good thing, because otherwise I would probably have been scared. I didn’t know what I was doing. 10 LR: When you were carrying these items for your dad, would you just carry them to someone else’s house? JK: Yes. LR: Would you be able to go out at night? Was there a curfew? JK: Oh yes. As soon as it got dark, no one was allowed to be outside. LR: What would happen if you went out after dark? JK: The gestapo would get you. No, you wouldn’t dare. LR: So if you needed something after dark, you just waited till the next morning? JK: Yes. You did not go out. MB: As you were listening to the BBC, did you start to see that the end of the war was coming? JK: Yes. They kept us informed on what was going on. That was great, when finally the end came. We saw the American and Canadian soldiers come into our streets. That’s the best sight I’ve ever seen in my life. We danced in the street. I learned to dance the Hokey Pokey. It was wonderful. There was another nation that helped us too. That was Sweden. After the war, they sent us bread and butter. I can still remember that was the best bread I’ve ever tasted in my life. That was so good. It was a strange phenomenon, when food became available again. A lot of people died because they were so starved that they couldn’t really take the rich food that was coming in again. A lot of people died after the war. LR: When you actually got the news that the war was over on May 6, 1945, what were some of the reactions in your city? 11 JK: Oh everyone went out in the street and we danced and we sang. That was just wonderful. LR: How soon after the end of the war did your brother come home? JK: That was soon after. LR: As the war is over and things are calming down, how long did it take to kind of get back to the idea that now we can start rebuilding? JK: Gradually things started going back to normal. We’d gone back to our school again. They had to clean it up because it was a mess, but we went back to school. MB: Your husband was an American, right? JK: Yes. His parents were Dutch, but he was born here. MB: When did you meet him? JK: I met him in Rosemead, California in 1961. LR: Your father, younger sister and you did emigrate to the United States? JK: Yes. LR: Your family? JK: Yes. When we joined the Church, there was no girls or boys my age in our branch. We were the only members in Wassenaar. We went to Church in The Hague and there was no one, so we decided to emigrate to the States so we could be with other people that were members. I remember my grandmother saying, “How can you join this Church? Now, you will not get married. No one will want to marry a Mormon.” She was really serious about that being a problem. LR: So did your mother join the Church? 12 JK: No. We did the work for her later on. She never did join. It was my dad and my younger sister and I. My older sister never did join the Church. MB: What made your mother change her mind about emigration? Before the war she was pretty opposed to emigrating. What made her change her mind? JK: She never changed her mind. She passed away in 1949. So, we emigration after she had passed away. LR: Do you think that was a result of the war years? JK: She was only 53. She had gotten cancer, but she was kind of a bit overweight. LR: Did your father and all of your siblings emigrate with you? Or was it just you? JK: Yes, except my brother and older sister. When we had the papers ready, our mission president read a letter from Salt Lake, from the pulpit in the Church. There we were asked not to emigrate, but we thought, “All our papers are ready.” Although, I was a little hesitant because a girl my age had joined the church and we really hit it off right away. We became good friends, and I thought “Yeah, but now I have a friend in the Church.” Still, we decided to go. My brother tore up his papers and it’s a good thing he did because he became the first stake president of a non-English speaking country. Then he became a stake patriarch and then years later he became the temple president in London. He married an English girl. He was needed there, but I came here and I got my patriarchal blessing. I mentioned to the patriarch that I felt a little bit guilty that we had left our country when we were told not to. He said, “Don’t give it another thought.” You’re meant to be here.” MB: When you came into the country, did you go to California first? 13 JK: No, we came to Salt Lake. I went to California after I had been on a mission. I had a roommate and my roommate got married so I was left alone. I decided to go to California because my sister lived in California. I thought, well at least I have my sister there. I’ll go to California too. That’s where I met my husband. LR: What year did you emigrate to the States? JK: In 1952. LR: So you were 23? JK: Yes. LR: How was the United States different? JK: It’s hard to say what was really different. A lot of things are really not all that different. LR: In the Netherlands, were you still rebuilding or were things kind of more stable by the time you left? JK: Things were pretty stable there. The only reason we left was for the Church, really. I wanted to marry someone that’s LDS. I was lucky to meet my husband, who was LDS. MB: Where did you serve your mission? JK: In the Netherlands. I was here a year and they sent me right back to Holland. LR: So you met your husband in Rosemead, California? JK: Yes. LR: Was he in the Navy when you met him? JK: Yes. He was stationed at Brownfield. LR: How did you meet? 14 JK: My friend’s mother and his mother got acquainted and they were starting to talk. They decided that he should write to me. He was just divorced and his mother said, “He should find a Dutch girl and LDS.” He wrote to me. At first he didn’t want to meet me, but then after my friend’s mother sent a picture of my friend and me, he decided, “Oh well, maybe I’ll write.” So he did and he came to see me. The funny thing is, when I met him, I could tell that he smoked. I said, “Do you smoke? I can smell it in your hair.” “No,” he said, “I just quit.” I have seen him smoke. He smoked pipes and cigars threw them all in the garbage. LR: When were you married? JK: In 1961. I was 32 when I got married. My patriarchal blessing said, “In the only time of the Lord you will meet your companion.” It was telling me, “Don’t get impatient. He’s there for you, but not your time.” The other strange thing it told me was, “Your days will be many upon the face of this earth.” I’m 88 now. I’m well on my way. I’m already old. LR: With him in the Navy, did you travel around a lot? JK: We got orders for Hawaii. That’s the only place we went. He got very ill in Hawaii. He became very asthmatic. You would think that’s an ideal place to live, but oh did he get sick. So he was flown out of there to Oakland, in California and ended up in the hospital over there. Hawaii was not the best place for us to live. I always thought maybe a kinda damp climate would be good for people that have asthma. Not so. He was very very asthmatic and he has always had a problem with that all his life. LR: How many children did you have together? 15 JK: I had only one, our daughter Nancy. Then we adopted a son through the Relief Society. Years ago they used to have an adoption agency. His name is John. LR: What brought you to settle here in Utah? Did your husband get out of the Navy and you came back here? JK: My dad got acquainted with T. Edgar Lyon, who was a mission president in Holland. He arranged it for us that we could stay with him after we got here. That was, of course, very helpful. Sister Lyon helped me and my sister to get a job at the Genealogical Society. So that’s why we came here. MB: How long did you work for the genealogical society? JK: Only a year. Then I was sent on a mission. After I came back, I started working for the First Security Bank. LR: After your husband got out of the Navy, did you guys come back here to Utah, or did you stay in California? JK: No we came back to Utah. LR: Is this where he was from? JK: Yes, his parents lived in Salt Lake. Matter of fact, we stayed with them for a little while and then we found a place of our own. LR: Do you remember if your parents ever talked about the Americans being involved in the war? Did that make a difference, when the Americans got involved? JK: Oh yes. They saved our lives. I don’t think I would even be alive if it hadn’t been for Americans joining in. They rescued us, absolutely. LR: Are there are any other stories that you’d like to share about your time during the war? 16 JK: Well, no. I think I mentioned most of the things that I had written down. LR: Let me ask you the final question that I’ve been asking. How do you think your experiences and your time during World War II shaped and affected the rest of your life? JK: Well, I think physically it had caused problems because the nutrition that was not the best. I got a thyroid disorder. My thyroid was very low. When my mother got ill, we had to have a nurse in the home. I was quite a bit overweight and she saw that I didn’t really eat very much, so she’d sent me to the doctor and had me have a thyroid test done. I had an underactive thyroid. I asked the doctor why I got this. He said, “Probably because of the poor nutrition you had during the war.” That was kind of a consequence. I had to have Vitamin B shots very young for vitamin deficiency. We didn’t have any salad or fruit, not for years. LR: Other than physically, how else do you think the war affected your life? JK: Well I think we came through just fine, after it was over with. LR: I’m so grateful that you took the time to sit and talk with us. Your stories are fantastic. The things that you experienced, most Americans cannot truly appreciate because we didn’t live through that. We were nice and cozy over here. JK: We could’ve been if my mother had listened to my dad. We would have been here in 1939. LR: If only. Thank you.