‘My blonde locks will be taken off.’ These are the words of Eindhoven-based Cor Gehrels in a letter to his loved ones from captivity. He would never see his wife and children again. It is 80 years this year since the resistance fighter and founder of Radio Herrijzend (resurgent) Nederland was killed in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany.
Freedom can never be taken for granted. That is the message the National Committee carries every year on 4 and 5 May. It has now been eighty years since the last war on Dutch soil. For many people, therefore, the horrors in Gaza and Ukraine are a distant memory. Not so for the relatives of Cor Gehrels.
23 March 1945. It is a day etched in the memory of Cor’s family. After a hellish one-and-a-half-year journey through various prisons and camps, the resistance fighter succumbs in Mittalbau-Dora camp, near Nordhausen in Germany. The result of beatings – he did not want to betray his comrades – and wretchedly poor living conditions. For instance, food was in short supply, work was hard and hygiene was poor.
By a cruel twist of fate, one of his daughters is also killed in an air raid on his death day. The relatives still feel this black page in the family history.
‘It’s something the family always lives with,’ says granddaughter Kirsten Del Bello. “One of my aunts is now 91 and in a care home. She has Alzheimer’s and only speaks German. She is right back in those wartime days, banging her arms on the table and saying, “I’m so scared, I’m so scared.”
Double life
That fear is not unfounded. Cor, her aunt’s father, led a double life during the occupation. To the outside world, a family man with a big heart, an avid cyclist and a talented radio man who was allowed to start work at Philips without probation. He also had another side within his circle of confidants – a handful of family members and fellow resistance fighters.
That of a resistance fighter who was never afraid to help anyone and fought tooth and nail against the occupiers. Despite being the head of a large family, “I think, on the contrary, he did it because of his family, because he did not want his children to live in a world where injustice took place and where people could just be arrested,” his granddaughter speculates about his motives.
Pilot help
In the resistance, he was a jack-of-all-trades. Sometimes these were relatively innocuous activities. ‘He started collecting money for families left behind by men who had gone to England,’ Kirsten explains, one of his illegal activities.
According to his granddaughter, he did not shy away from riskier work either. “He went to pick up downed Allied pilots in Amersfoort, together with Rien van Bruggen and Harry Aarts” (detective, ed.). Those pilots were transported in Harry Aarts’ police car and put on a police uniform that my grandmother had sewn. In the police car, they were transported to the border of Belgium.”
Radio Herrijzend (resurgent) Nederland
Cor Gehrels gained fame mainly through his role as founder of Radio Herrijzend Nederland. After Eindhoven was liberated, that radio station tried to encourage people in the occupied territory and counter German propaganda.
“It was about the advancing Allies. Indeed, the Germans’ propaganda did not clarify that they were losing. It was also communicated when planes flew over with food parcels. In the occupied area, it was a hungry winter then,” said Sergio Derks, manager Heritage & Company Archives at Philips.
The equipment used for the broadcasts, Cor, was built in the deepest secrecy at the Natlab on Kastanjelaan, under the noses of the Germans. “He was working in a locked room and had told the Germans: ‘It’s electrified. So if you want to come in, you must inform them via the intercom first.’ Then he had time to hide it,” says his granddaughter.
According to Sergio Derks, Gehrels thus played an important role in creating Radio Herrijzend Nederland. “Someone like Gehrels had access to many parts and materials. He made that complete radio station under the guise of building a test device. If Cor hadn’t done that, building a radio would have taken months more.”
Arrested
Cor did not make the first deployment, on 3 October 1944. He was arrested at home a year earlier, in July 1943. How the Germans tracked him down is still a mystery to his relatives. ‘Rumour has it that someone in the neighbourhood saw something at his home, but it could also have been because of the pilots’ help,’ his granddaughter lists some suspicions.
“The doorbell rang around midnight. He opened, and they had him right away. My grandmother, the baby and the visitors – Mr Maas – were also taken away. In the Eindhoven police station, Cor was interrogated and tortured for four days. Then he had to look through the window at my grandmother and the baby, and then he was tortured again,” his granddaughter describes the atrocities.
He did not break. Ultimately, he has to pay for his resistance work with his life. “Sure, we are very proud of what he did. And that he was so inventive and did not allow himself to be crushed. What I do find very sad is that he spent a year and a half in concentration camps.” There, Cor Gehrels turned 38.
Source: studio040.nl
Translated by: Vanya
