Moeder Bien was in dire straits after the war. She had lost her house and most of her possessions. What had not been destroyed by the bombardments she had put into storage, due to constantly having to move house. When she came to collect her belongings after the war, she found all of them had been sold to the Germans by the storage depot. Her prewar pension, which had just about kept her going previously, had now dwindled to nothing.
Sabine returned home from the war in poor health and traumatized. Her fiancé, Taro Roeper-Bosch, had been shot down in his Spitfire at the beginning of the war, most of her friends had perished, and many of those who survived had emigrated. Her two brothers, having spent years in Japanese concentration camps, were also in poor health and traumatized. They had barely survived the camps.
Moeder Bien had been alone during the war, not knowing what had happened to her children. So many of Sabine’s friends were lost: Taro Roeper-Bosch, Gerard Vinkesteijn, Dr. Krediet, Broer Moonen, Jan van den Hoek and many more. The suffering in the aftermath of the war for those who had been in the Resistance and had survived is hard to describe. All the lives of often young people were brutally ended by execution or fighting or being sent to concentration camps.
However, Sabine had to start her life anew. But where to begin? She had no accommodation, furniture, clothes or any possessions left. Only her mother and a few close girlfriends. Her first task was to find a job and earn some money. During a party at Villa Maarheeze in Wassenaar, a suburb of The Hague where the Bureau of National Intelligence was housed, she was invited to join the Secret Service. She began her training straightaway by learning codes. I found instructions and samples of her “homework” practicing codes in her archive. But she soon decided that this was not a job for her. I can understand that she could not handle any more secrecy and stress at this stage. Being a spy did not appeal to her.
For a short time, she became engaged in November 1945 to Leslie Chater, a handsome English lieutenant colonel. He was attached to the Canadian army that had liberated Holland and was involved in negotiations about the German capitulation. After the war he interrogated German Nazis in Holland, in particular in Camp Amersfoort. The mystery of how my mother came to be in possession of the papers relating to the tribunal of the three guards and her interrogation was finally solved. Leslie had found them in the Amersfoort archives and had passed them on to Sabine. The engagement did not last long. Sabine had not recovered emotionally or physically from her experiences. She probably also did not want to move to another country at this stage and leave her mother and friends behind again. Getting used to normal life was hard enough.
For years she suffered nightmares. She had seen and experienced such horrors for so long, and at nighttime she could not avoid reliving them. She had permanent trouble with her digestion due to long-term starvation and became obsessed with food. No crumb was ever allowed to be thrown away or wasted.
She found it difficult to pick up the threads of normal life again and, like many other survivors, suffered from a profound sense of sadness and probably guilt that she had survived when so many of her friends had not. After the war, the emotional dam broke.
She herself said, “These memories are so awful. I managed to hide them from myself for a long time, but after the war, when normal life resumed, they kept resurfacing, and I began to understand what I had endured and survived, which created shock waves and abnormal reactions in me for a long time.”
In a questionnaire called “Women in the Resistance 1940–45,” her verdict on herself was down-to-earth, though: “I did nothing special, I just helped where I could.”