⁹Nine Days After the Bombing

On 14 May 1940 German bombers set the centre of Rotterdam alight, and the fire stopped short of this corner: its edge ran to the east. Middelland, the 's-Gravendijkwal and the Rochussenstraat lay west of the fire line. They were spared that day, and spared again on 31 March 1943 by the American vergissingsbombardement, the mistaken raid¹. The rest of this era follows from that accident of geography.

The map drawn to record the destruction shows it: the burned zone stops well short of the 's-Gravendijkwal, and no. 169 sits comfortably outside it². The corner stood intact while much of the city did not. Photographers came back to the same spot across the whole century, and the corner picture gallery lines up what they saw. In these same years the crossing itself was being remade. The deep dive on the remade junction follows the tunnel, the traverse and the fire line together.

A second sheet of the same survey marks the city in a different way. Black dots and saltire crosses are plotted by hand in ink over the printed 1:10000 plan, singly and in loose clusters across Rotterdam and its outskirts. The sheet has no key and no date, so it does not say what the marks record. We show them as the hand marks they are. The sheet does not support reading them as a map of where the bombs fell.

An intact building in a flattened city is worth something at once, and the firm that took it had reason to move fast. It had learned the drill eleven years before. On the night of 27 to 28 April 1929 a laaiende vuurzee, a raging sea of fire, destroyed Piet van Reeuwijk's furniture warehouses in the Kipstraat¹. The flames spread through a block of adjoining buildings, over about 4,500 square metres. Some twenty-five neighbouring families were evacuated from their homes, none of them insured, and the director carried a child down the stairs².

The fire had driven the firm from the Kipstraat to the Nieuwe Binnenweg, and that was where the bombing found it on 14 May 1940³. Burned out once and now bombed out, the N.V. Maatschappij voor Woninginrichting P. van Reeuwijk did not wait. It opened its voorloopige toonkamers, its temporary showrooms, at Rochussenstraat 169 on Thursday 23 May 1940, nine days after the raid⁴. The opening notice announced the nieuwe tijdelijke Showrooms Rochussenstraat 169, the new temporary showrooms, and gave a telephone number: 30047⁵.

The number belonged to the corner. The line 30047 had rung at no. 169 for van Duyn before the emergency tenant arrived⁶ and would ring there for van Duyn again long after it left. The stay was brief, and always meant to be. A report of 11 September 1940 describes the firm's purpose-built noodmagazijn, its emergency store, on the Nieuwe Binnenweg. Within days of the bombing, it says, the management had planned to resume trading, and showrooms on the Rochussenstraat were being fitted out as a stopgap while the permanent building went up⁷. The replacement opened in September 1940, and the emergency use of no. 169 is recorded running on into December^8 9.

The man whose name was over the temporary door did not live behind it. Pieter Nicolaas van Reeuwijk, born in Rotterdam on 22 November 1889, was the firm's founder and president-director¹⁰. His household card puts the family well away from this corner: after the Kipstraat years they moved to Hillegersberg in 1929 and to Hilversum in 1930¹¹. He ran a furniture business at no. 169 and lived in another town the whole time¹². The firm's own long history, from its founding in 1915 to its takeover by Vroom & Dreesmann in 1981¹³, is told in the deep dive on the firm. The staff register sets down the five employees whose service jubilees the press recorded.

Five years later the firm's name appeared in the paper again, in a very different column. On 2 August 1945 Het Parool printed four lines under the heading P. van Reeuwijk aangehouden, P. van Reeuwijk detained.

The notice read, in full: De directie van de N.V. Mij. voor Woninginrichting, P. van Reeuwijk, namelijk de heeren P. van Reeuwijk, N. van Reeuwijk en de heer O. D. Popken, zijn aangehouden tot nader onderzoek, in verband met de verdenking van collaboratie, die op deze firma rust¹. In English, the management of the firm, three named men, had been detained pending further investigation. The suspicion of collaboration is described as resting on the firm rather than on the men personally. The notice records no charge, no proceeding and no finding.

Two cautions apply to those four lines. First, the printed initials are unreliable. The board named at the firm's shareholders' meeting in August 1942 was P. N. van Reeuwijk as president-director with K. van Reeuwijk, J. A. van Reeuwijk and C. D. Popken as directors, so the paper's N. van Reeuwijk and O. D. Popken are almost certainly newspaper or reading errors^2 3. Second, detention for investigation in the summer of 1945 was ordinary and did not amount to a verdict⁴.

Then nothing. No prosecution, tribunal ruling, conviction, confiscation or Beheersinstituut administration following the August 1945 detention appears anywhere in the digitised press⁵. The firm's directors were signing notices to shareholders again by 10 December 1945, and the company held shareholders' meetings in June 1946 and June 1947⁶.

The deep dive on the 1945 detention sets out what the digitised record does and does not contain around it.

A separate question needs a separate answer: did any firm that used no. 169 take part in the Möbelaktion, the wartime clearance and resale of Jewish household property? No evidence has been located linking either firm at this address (van Duyn, present throughout the occupation, or van Reeuwijk, present for about seven months in 1940) to the Möbelaktion or to the storage or resale of Jewish inboedels, household goods⁷. A systematic search of the digitised press returns nothing⁸. No published Rotterdam study is known to name either firm in that role, and the occupation's own Rochussenstraat register lists municipal officials rather than furniture contractors⁹. So this is not an acquittal. It records only that no evidence has been found; it does not show that none exists¹⁰. The street-wide survey behind it, and the Rochussenstraat households the occupation's register does name, are in the Möbelaktion deep dive.

All this time the corner's long-term tenant was where it had been since before the war. On 7 November 1939 J. A. van Duyn had advertised furniture, fabrics and carpets wholesale from Rochussenstraat 169, on telephone 30047, and asked buyers to come and see the showrooms¹. After that the printed trail goes quiet, and it would be easy to take the quiet for an empty shop.

In January 1947 van Duyn is back in print at no. 169, still on 30047². The quiet of 1945–46 before that was a gap in Rotterdam newspaper publication caused by the post-war paper shortage, rather than a vacancy³.

A different column shows the family still there. The van Duyn household was still advertising for a live-in servant from the address at the turn of 1942 into 1943, so the family was at the corner well into the war, even though the firm's own notices are missing from the thinned press⁴. Where the paper trail runs thin, a gap in print is no sign that business stopped. The deep dive on the corner's advertising reads its display advertising firm by firm across the decades.

The neighbourhood's wartime landmark leaves a trace at one remove. The white-plastered emergency nightclub l'Ambassadeur was put up about 1941 as a noodvoorziening and the Stadsarchief catalogues it at Rochussenstraat 172, a different address from no. 169; the catalogue does not say how the two stood to each other^5 6. It has its own deep dive.

When the paper came back, so did the same name over the same door, on the same telephone number. The firm that resumed in 1947 kept the corner until its closing-down sale in 1987, after roughly forty-nine years⁷. The next chapter takes up that long tenancy.