LIVING HISTORY
54
him, burning them.”
Despite the hardships, the workers were allowed to attend
church in the town and to browse through the shops.
“We were very hungry,” he says, “but we did not want to
steal from the merchants. It was not their fault that we were
there and we didn’t want to take anything from them.”
FACTORY BOMBED
Eventually, the Allies discovered the factory and bombed it
one night while Brolmann was asleep in the barracks. There
was a terrific explosion. Their barracks collapsed, forcing
survivors to crawl out of the wreckage. Some men ran into
the woods, trying to escape, he says, but the blast had set the
trees on fire and they were burned to death. Much of the village
was destroyed.
“They made us go in and clean up the mess,” Brolmann
says, adding that it was difficult because there were many
victims and so many had not survived amid the wreckage.”
Shortly after the bombing, the war in Europe ended and the
workers were permitted to go home. Brolmann was 24 when
he saw his homeland again. He considers himself lucky, he
says, as so many did not live to return to their families.
“We spent three days being driven in open wagons,” Brolmann
says. “We could not sleep at all as we were shipped like
cattle. I remember being so tired when we crossed the border
into Holland. They stopped at a farm and we had to clean up
with DDT before we ate. There were fleas, ticks and lice all
over the place and all over us.”
The farmer’s wife fixed the young men some food and “we
ate so much fat food we turned yellow,” he says. “We got so
sick as we hadn’t eaten (that rich food) in so long.”
Although Brolmann had lost a lot of weight, he remembers
when his older brother, Josef, who had been arrested and
jailed in Holland for being a member of the Dutch resistance,
was released from prison. “He must have weighed about 80
pounds,” Brolmann says. “He looked like a concentration
camp survivor.”
RETURNED TO STUDIES
After the war, Brolmann returned to his family home in
Hilversum and to the university to continue his studies in
botany, receiving advanced degrees in plant breeding, advanced
botany and plant structure.
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He met and married his wife, Antoinette “Nettie,” in 1952
in St. Vitus Church, where he had been baptized. With his
doctoral degree completed, Brolmann went to work on plant
breeding in the wheat fields of Arles, France, where three of
his sons were born.
Eventually, his brother-in-law sponsored the family and
they moved to the United States. Discovering that he would
need to redo his degrees in English, Brolmann settled with
his family in Gainesville, Fla., where he found work in the
Agronomy Department at the University of Florida. He
worked for the university while earning his doctorate in
botany in 1968 and adding a fourth son to the family.
In 1969, he moved his family to Fort Pierce, where a plant
breeder was needed at a UF research center.
“They (UF) had a small lab in Fort Pierce,” Brolmann says,
“and they couldn’t get anyone to agree to come there. They
flew me down in a small plane, first to Belle Glade and then
to Fort Pierce. Flying over the town, it looked really small and
was such a rural area. But, I agreed to take the job and moved
my family here.”
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