Four hundred calories a day. That was what three million Dutch civilians were living on by February 1945. Some weren't living on it at all.
When the first Canadian trucks rolled into the eastern Netherlands that April, the soldiers handed out chocolate bars and chewing gum. The Dutch children who reached for them had never tasted either. But the soldiers quickly realized something — the people they were feeding were the lucky ones. The real catastrophe was sixty kilometers west, behind a hundred thousand German troops, and completely unreachable.
What happened over the next eleven days involved a jeep with a bedsheet, unarmed bombers flying low enough to read rooftop messages, and a decision that no military manual had ever covered.
Eighty years later, the Dutch still haven't forgotten. Every Christmas Eve, an entire town walks into a cemetery in the dark and lights thirteen hundred candles. One for each Canadian buried there.
The reason why starts with a tulip bulb.
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