Wearing a faded navy-blue dress, a 12-year-old girl looked in a mirror to see her brown eyes. She closed her eyes and wished for the day when she wouldn’t have to sew two dresses together to make one.

This hopeful girl was 76-year-old Hollandale resident Ans Van Erkel. But at that time, a shortage of textile was the least of Van Erkel’s worries during World War II. Artillery airplanes flying over her home in Zaltbommel, Holland, on May 10, 1940, ushered in many years filled with terror.

“Everybody was in the same boat,” Van Erkel said. “There was nobody that had it better. We were all living in a town that was under constant fire.”

Many Jews in Van Erkel’s hometown lost their lives, but her family was never intimately involved with death. She enjoyed the company of her Jewish neighbors, but eventually they all went into hiding.

“All at once they were gone,” Van Erkel said. “I knocked on the window to pick up their daughter to go to school and no one was there.”

Near that same time — two years after the war broke out — Van Erkel remembers Germans began shooting at the trains, making them unsafe to ride to school. Because of the danger, she began attending school in her hometown, Zaltbommel.

Later on in the war, her mother sent Van Erkel to a store where she paid for food using textile points. During the last year of the war, she roamed the streets to find water. Even four years after the war ended, her family was short of sugar, meat and flour.

“I think a war makes people stronger because you have to do with what you have,” Van Erkel said. “I remember my mom having to say, ‘I don’t have any more. That’s it.’ We don’t know that here in the U.S.”

In 1944, the bombings became so terrible that Van Erkel needed to evacuate to a friend’s farmhouse, which was an hour away on bike. Beginning Sept. 3, 1944, for two months, she slept in her friend’s cellar, praying every night that the war would end. The evenings were long and everyone had to be off the streets by 7 p.m. due to a curfew mandated by the Germans.

“Terror was around you, but we had good days in there, too,” Van Erkel said. “Don’t get me wrong that it was so bad every day.”

Hibernating at the farm ended on Nov. 25, 1944. It was wonderful to return back home, but entering the front door was no longer possible. Nine active land mines had been planted outside the Van Erkels’ house and the inside had been destroyed.

“I remember my mother crying and crying because a lot of stuff was stolen,” Van Erkel said. “And they had butchered a cow upstairs in the bedroom. The skin was lying on the floor. Oh, it was terrible.”

The Germans’ misuse of her family’s house meant that they couldn’t settle in immediately. Instead, they occupied five different houses that had been evacuated, always sleeping in a cement cellar. When the owners of one house returned, her family had to move into another.

Though radios were confiscated in 1942, her brother, Jan, who was 10 years older than she, stashed one in the cellar and listened to the BBC. Jan was a member of the Underground Railroad and as such hid Jews in a restaurant.

“Nobody knew when your brother had a meeting for the Underground,” Van Erkel said. “That was a secret.”

One June night he had plans to attend a meeting for the Underground Railroad, but for some reason the meeting was cancelled. That cancellation saved Jan’s life because that same night Germans invaded the restaurant. Many of the Jewish people were killed right there and two bodies were found buried between the floors.

“I remember using his canoe on the river and hearing the shots,” Van Erkel said.

Grenade attacks lasted until April 1945 and Van Erkel and her family continued to sleep in the cellar. On May 5, 1945, Van Erkel’s prayers were finally answered, Holland was liberated. Now she could dig up the brass water kettle and copper vase, because the Germans’ right to confiscate them was gone. However, life was still a struggle.

“I’d say we never were normal,” Van Erkel said. “Today you appreciate things more. You can buy what you want. I don’t throw food away so easy like everyone else.”

Even though the war was a bleak time for her, she loves history. If she had gotten married later in life, she would have gone back to school to be a history teacher. But Van Erkel loves the life she has in Hollandale.

When she joined her husband, Hank Van Erkel, in Hollandale during the 1950s, she grew to appreciate how bountiful the United States was. As a homemaker, she enjoys cooking, especially Indonesian food.

Hosting meals is a favorite activity of hers, but living a private life is important. Every week she plays bridge with her friends and as a member of the Naeve Hospital Auxiliary, she helps out with the oncology department. Even though she fills her time with activities, memories from the war creep in from time to time.

“I think it’s a shame how they put people so many people in these death camps,” Van Erkel said. “There was no rhyme or reason for that, but Hitler wanted to rule the world.”