Nana's Book Library

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to screaming wind, banging shutters, clanging church bells and wailing sirens – and the sound of sloshing and splashing water.  And then, when you try to get out of bed, you realize the water is not only inside your house – it’s already up to your knees!  

            This happened to the van Rossem family:  Mother, Father, Grandmother, 13-year-old Lisa, her older brothers Dirk and Klaas, and Uncle Pieter and his wife, Tante Anna, who are visiting the farmhouse. They live in Kuyfoort, Holland, in a small, very old town protected from the sea by earthen dikes

            Dirk and Klaas wake up first, alert the family and they all go upstairs to flee the rising water.  Out the attic windows, they can see lanterns and rescue boats bobbing all over the flooding streets, and neighbors already perched in attics and climbing out onto rooftops.  They all need help!  

Klaas dives into the water with his pocket knife to cut their own small boat free from its rope.  The good oars are gone, but there’s a well-known Dutch saying:  “I’ll row with the oars I have.”  So Klaas uses the old oars that remain in the boat.  All able-bodied men are needed to repair the broken dike with sandbags.  The boys take Father and Uncle Pieter to help save the dikes, and long before they can come back, the womenfolk are in serious trouble, desperately clinging to the roof.   A big wave comes, and Tante Anna is swept away!  (Spoiler:  It will be okay.  Rex the dog and Lisa find her!)

            Alta Halverson Seymour wrote this story just five years after a great flood swept over the Netherlands on January 31, 1953.  She wrote it to celebrate the incredible selflessness and courage of people like the van Rossems.  It takes many months before the town gets back to something that starts to resemble normal.  First, there’s the search for survivors – and there are many.  They are housed in shelters near and far.  Neighbors help each other, total strangers come in from far away to help, and the whole country rallies to pitch in and rebuild.  Women with mops and scrub brushes, men with hammers and shovels, and even firemen with their powerful hoses help wash out mud and repair the houses and farms.  Although it is a hard time, the overwhelming feeling is not one of discouragement, but of determination to rebuild, of strength from families and friends helping each other, and of gratitude for what they have, and for small blessings – like Mother’s treasured silver teapot, found in an unexpected place.  As the book ends, the family is reunited in the farmhouse.  Mother starts to sing an old favorite song from church, and the family joins in:

            “The floods have lifted up, O Lord,

            The floods have lifted up their voice,

            The floods lift up their waves.

            But the Lord on high is mightier,

            Mightier than the noise of many waters.

            Yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.”

Dirk, a budding engineer who is helping rebuild the dikes, “looked at the clean, bare room, the earnest, happy faces of the singers around the lamplit table.  They had come a long way since the night of the flood, and now, with the plans for the new dikes, he hoped there would never be such a flood again.”

This book is available as a Kindle and in paperback, new and used on Amazon.  It is also available used in hardcover and paperback on eBay and Abebooks.   

©Janet Farrar Worthington

Note:  I am an Amazon affiliate, so if you do click a link and buy a book, I will theoretically make a small amount of money, but I’m just starting this thing, so I don’t even know how that works.   Still, full disclosure, etc.