Chapter 10. Pieter Johannes Saeij and Mathielde Sophia Lohman, 1887 to 1968

A Dutch-born son

Pieter Johannes was born at IJzendijke on 27 October 1887, the fifth of Eduardus and Louisa's eight children, and the first of the direct line to be born in the Netherlands.¹ He grew up among field labourers, in a family that moved from IJzendijke to Oostburg around the turn of the century. He lost two of his sisters and a brother as young adults. Unlike his father, he learned to write.²

Mathielde from Waterlandkerkje

On 7 May 1914, in the town hall of Sint Kruis, a village near the Belgian border just east of Aardenburg, Pieter Johannes, twenty-six years old and a field labourer living at Oostburg, married Mathielde Sophia Lohman. She was twenty-five, born at Waterlandkerkje, the village where Pieter's father had first lived in Zeeland, and living at Sint Kruis with her parents, Charles Lohman and Adelaïda Paulina de Roose, whom the act calls visschers, fishing people. Both sets of parents came to give their consent: Eduard and Louisa, field labourers of Oostburg, and the Lohmans. The witnesses were the bride's brother Charles, a field labourer, and the groom's brother, Alphons Saeij, thirty-one, a police officer at Hulst. At the end the clerk wrote that the parents of both bride and groom could not write, uithoofde niet te hebben geleerd, "never having learned".³

Mathielde had been born on 27 September 1888.⁴ Both her parents had died by 1920, when her sister Rosalia married a tailor at Oostburg, with their brother Carolus, a field labourer, as her witness.⁵

The war next door

Three months after the wedding, in August 1914, the First World War broke out. The Netherlands stayed neutral, but Belgium, a few kilometres to the south, was invaded and almost entirely occupied by the German army. Refugees poured across the border, and by the end of 1914 there were a million Belgian refugees in the Netherlands.⁶ In the spring of 1915 the Germans began to build a fence along the whole of the Dutch-Belgian border, from Aachen to the Scheldt, over 200 kilometres long and charged with 2,000 volts. The Dutch called it the Dodendraad, the wire of death. Between two and three thousand people are thought to have died on it, trying to cross. When the war ended in November 1918, the power was cut and people on both sides tore the fence down.⁷

It was in the first spring of that fence that Pieter and Mathielde's first child was born. At half past two in the afternoon of 20 May 1915, their son was born at Oostburg, and the next day Pieter went to register him:

The child was born in deze gemeente Sint Baafsgang nummer vijf, in this municipality at Sint Baafsgang, number five. Pieter is described as a landbouwersknecht, a farmhand, aged twenty-seven, and Mathielde as having no occupation. The witnesses were a polder worker and a field labourer of Oostburg. The boy was named Achille Eduard, Eduard after his grandfather. Pieter signed the act.⁸ No street called Sint Baafsgang appears on a modern map of Oostburg. The old town was largely destroyed in 1944 and rebuilt to a new plan, and the lane may have disappeared then.⁹

Between the wars

Ten years later, in July 1925, Pieter was living at Waterlandkerkje and working as a field labourer. On 2 July of that year he came to Oostburg to report his father's death, and signed the act P. J. Saey, in the Belgian spelling his father had brought across the border.¹⁰ A second son, Herman Charles, was born in 1930, according to the family trees.¹¹

The war comes to Oostburg

In May 1940 the war that had passed the Netherlands by in 1914 came to it. Oostburg was under German occupation from 1 June 1940 until 26 October 1944.¹² In the autumn of 1944 West Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, the land south of the Scheldt estuary, became a battlefield. The Germans held it to block the approaches to the port of Antwerp. From 21 September the Canadian army fought to clear what it called the Breskens pocket. The main assault across the Leopold Canal began on 6 October, led by the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, and village after village was taken in the fighting that followed, IJzendijke among them.¹³ Oostburg paid a terrible price. The Canadian bombardment of 23 September to 18 October 1944 destroyed eighty per cent of the town. It was rebuilt after the war to a new, spacious plan by the engineer E. H. Flokke of Amersfoort.¹²

What the Saeij family went through in those weeks the records we have do not say.

The end

Pieter Johannes Saeij died in the Catholic hospital at Oostburg at a quarter to one in the night of 8 December 1960, aged seventy-three. The same day his elder son, Achille Eduard, forty-five, a shopkeeper in Oostburg, reported the death to the registrar and signed the act. It names Pieter's parents, Eduard Saey and Louisa Clementia Zwartelé, and so ties three generations together in a single record. His death notice in the newspaper is shown in chapter 11.¹⁴

Mathielde outlived him by seven years. She died at Oostburg, a widow, on 21 March 1968.⁴