Pieter and Sanne
Watch, read, answer and think
You will watch a short film about the “hunger winter” that took place in the Netherlands during World War II. This will help you understand the life of Margaret Thompson.
You should read the text, answer the questions and reason with yourself.
Youtube: British Pathé
the story of Pieter and Sanne de Vries
In the winter of 1944, German soldiers controlled most of the Netherlands. Food trains that should have gone to the cities were stopped. Families in Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam faced months of cold and starvation. People called it the Hunger Winter (a time of great hunger in the occupied Netherlands during the last winter of World War II, when more than 20,000 civilians died).
Pieter de Vries, fifteen, and his younger sister Sanne, thirteen, lived with their parents in a small flat near the Jordaan district of Amsterdam. Each morning their mother stood in line for hours, hoping to get a little bread or a few potatoes. Sometimes she came back with nothing at all. Other times, she carried strange things: sugar beets, tulip bulbs, or watery soup from a public kitchen.
The children were always hungry. Pieter’s ribs showed through his thin shirt, and Sanne’s face grew pale and tired. At night, the family burned chairs and floorboards to stay warm. The house smelled of smoke and damp wood.
School no longer felt normal. Many classmates were gone — some had died of hunger, others had moved to the countryside to find food. Lessons were short because there was no coal to heat the classrooms. Pieter tried to concentrate, but his empty stomach growled louder than the teacher’s voice.
Sometimes the postman brought terrible news: a neighbor’s son or husband had died in the war, or a relative in Rotterdam had been killed during an air raid. Other families simply stopped hearing from their loved ones.
At night, Pieter and Sanne whispered their dreams to each other. They imagined eating bread with butter, or even chocolate, and walking again in a warm spring morning without fear. But when they woke, the cold was still there, and the hunger never left.
