In the night of January 31 to February 1, 1953, a violent storm caused dozens of dike breaches in the southwest of the Netherlands. 1,836 people lost their lives. As a twelve-year-old girl, Mina Verton (82) floated for a night on wreckage and survived the Watersnood disaster. She did lose her brother, grandmother and uncle, among others. Seventy years after the disaster, she tells her story to NU.nl. “We have been in agony. We were so afraid that the water would come again.”
“We zaten op het dak van de schuur en toen ik ‘s middags over de nok keek, zag ik dat de boerderij van mijn oma er niet meer stond. Ze dreef op een vlot, samen met mijn oom Pau en de huishoudster. Even later zag ik ze niet meer. Ze waren verdwenen in de golven.”
Het zijn de herinneringen van Mina Verton aan de Watersnoodramp van 1953. Ze heeft haar verhaal als vrijwilliger in het Watersnoodmuseum in Ouwerkerk al honderden keren verteld. “Maar elke keer weer zie ik ertegenop. Ik ben er ook altijd moe van.”
Toch vertelt ze ook nu wat ze meemaakte in die rampnacht zeventig jaar geleden. “Ik vind dat iedereen het moet weten.”
‘Het water kwam als een grote grauwe massa’
Op 1 februari 1953 wordt de dan twaalfjarige Verton (ze heet dan nog Kooijman, haar meisjesnaam) om 6.00 uur gewekt door haar neven. Die zijn vanuit het dorp Ouwerkerk, dat aan zee ligt, naar het verder in het binnenland gelegen Nieuwerkerk gekomen.
Overal op het eiland Schouwen-Duiveland heeft het water dan al gaten in de dijk geslagen. De kerkklokken luiden als teken dat een ramp zich voltrekt. Snel probeert de familie Kooijman spullen naar boven te brengen.
“Maar het water steeg zo snel. Het kwam als een grote, grauwe massa uit Ouwerkerk aangestormd”, vertelt Verton. Ze vlucht met haar familie naar zolder en ziet daar aan het begin van de middag de eerste mensen op vlotjes voorbijdrijven.
Die mensen wijzen de familie op de zolder erop dat een sterke stroom het huis ondermijnt. Omdat het huis begint te schudden, vlucht de familie naar het dak van de schuur, dat een halve meter hoger ligt.
“Ik was de laatste die het haalde. Een vrouw die we eerder gered hadden, haalde het niet. We hebben nog een touw naar haar gegooid, maar ze had de krachten niet meer. Die vrouw was de eerste die ik zag verdrinken.”
Floating on driftwood for a night
She calls what Verton saw from the roof of the barn “indescribable”. “You saw a lot of people floating by. One on straw, the other on a plank or beam. We hoped the shed would stay.”
While the first flood flooded a large part of the southwest of the Netherlands, the second flood caused another disaster on Sunday afternoon. The water rises even higher and many people die.
The shed where Verton lives with her parents, two brothers and sister collapses. “The barn roof broke into pieces. I sat on the center piece with my five-year-old sister, my brother and my mother. My father sat separately and my other brother Han also sat separately.”
We were completely hypothermic and exhausted.
“We drifted into the dark night. It was hailing and it was freezing cold. I was more or less in the water. I had to take care of my five-year-old sister and she sat on my lap. Not so bad afterwards, because that’s how you got a little warmth from each other.”
“We could turn at any moment. That dark night was terrible. Everywhere you heard people singing psalms and crying for help. We saved another woman who was already in the water, but you couldn’t do much.”
‘A miracle that we managed to get ashore’
After a night of drifting, Verton, her mother, her brother and her sister reach an inner dike. They climb up there. Although that was still quite a job. “There was 20 meters of wreckage and dead animals in front. We were of course completely hypothermic and exhausted. I think we laid planks and crawled over it. It is such a great miracle to me that we managed to get ashore there. “
After lying down for a while, they stumble (“you couldn’t move normally anymore”) to a little house. To achieve that, they also have to cross a hole in the inner dike, which they cross with ropes.
They stay in the cottage with a hundred others. Her father also meets Verton there again. “He had floated on a lump of hay. He had helped someone else and all the tendons in his hand had been cut. The water was heavily polluted, so that hand was already starting to swell up considerably.”
“We’ve been in agony,” says Verton. “We were so afraid then that the water would come again.”
Skippers pick people up
On Tuesday afternoon – 2.5 days after the dikes broke – a helicopter takes the people who are in the worst condition. Verton’s father is also coming along. Not until Tuesday evening is Verton, together with her mother, sister and brother, picked up by skippers from Yerseke. They have not eaten or drunk for almost three days.
They are taken to a large hall in Goes and find shelter with people in that city. For weeks, Verton and her mother go to the Red Cross three times a day to check lists to see if her brother Han has been found.
“For three months my mother hoped that he had arrived somewhere else, because of course it was chaos. But after three months my father had to identify him. Only then was he found. His raft had collided with a tree and overturned. He was a very good swimmer and someone who saw it happen said later that he tried to get on another raft, but he died of the cold.”
Verton’s grandmother was never found
Verton’s grandmother was never found. She is one of more than a hundred missing whose bodies have never been found.
Verton still often thinks of her deceased brother Han. “He would have been the same age as my husband. Then I think: oh, you would have been 85 now. What kind of man would you have become?”
After the flood disaster, Verton has always been afraid of storms. “The disaster is a sign of the fact that we live in a country that must be protected from the sea. When the wind blows hard, I sleep badly. It may be a trauma.”
Verton has seen several people drown in front of her eyes and lost several family members in the flood disaster. Yet she picked up her life again. “You can’t get stuck in something that has been. You have to move forward. I’m so thankful that I made it out alive. My brother doesn’t and neither do girlfriends. Then you have to try to make something of your life and mean something to someone else.”
