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People | Events/ Backgrounds | Resistance groups | Cities & Towns | Concentration Camps | Valkenburg 1940-1945 |

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Raid 2

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The chief (DB) warns him that he will get many problems with the public prosecutor if he passes him over. Renesse begins to discuss with the chief why I am not in the cell. “This man is my friend and I don’t close him to a cell.”
Renesse lifted the telephone receiver. I could follow the conversation with the prosecuting attorney’s office in Maastricht (who knew what was happening from the lawyer Joop Cremers, my brother in law). They ordered Renesse, to do nothing else but to confiscate the copper and to write a protocol, but no arrest. After that Renesse said to me with a pissed off face: “I have pleaded for you in Maastricht, so this first time we will leave it at confiscation and protocol. As soon as the men come back and report that they didn’t find anything, you will be free to go.” In the evening the men come back and didn’t find anything. Renesse calls my wife with his kindest voice and pretends that he supported it for the judicial authorities to be allowed to let me go.

Towards evening I was free again and heard, when I arrived home, that our friend Toon Lampe was walking in the Plenkert (our street) just as police began surrounding the terrain. He then went to chaplain Horsmans (DB) who then warned my parents. These, in turn, asked lawyer Cremers to provide legal assistance to me if necessary. He then inquired at the Prosecutor for which reason a search was done in such a large format. No order had been given to officer Renesse.

Chaplain Horsmans had kept his word. That same evening, after darkness came in a few trusted men brought (without my knowledge) the weapons to another place. During the liberation I saw O.D. boys with guns walking without the bolts (ours?). One night two policemen came to bring me back the copper and said I better should put those barrels of soap elsewhere.
Shortly after this, a brother of the Jesuits came with a box lined with zinc into which we packed the chalices etc. We hided this box in the garage under the tiled floor, this time without witnesses. One gets clever from damage! I hung the mass gowns into a cupboard of the laundry and attached cards with the addresses of several South Limburg cloisters, as we usually did for our clients. My father and I hided the old books in a corridor around the safe of the former “Twentsche Bank” in Heerlen. (In 1939 Peter Schunck had bought a building of the Twentsche Bank in Heerlen, to build an arcade: the passage between the Emmaplein and the market.)
The story of these weapons had gone, with some exaggeration, like a wildfire by Valkenburg. In the street people whom I hardly knew came to me to congratulate me, one of them even said he would know a place for the weapons. However, I had learned a hard lesson. I knew now that one had to proceed prudently. You could say, I had got a crash course in resistance.
Pierre Schunck

Album : Resistance

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