BBC World Service. And now, witness history. Today we're taking you back 69 years, when

high winds and huge tides brought disaster to the Netherlands.

Rhea Hullock was at home when the flood began. In 2011, she spoke to Trish Flanagan.

It's the night of the 31st of January 1953, and six-year-old Rhea Hullock and her family

are fast asleep on their farm in the southwest of Holland.

In the middle of the night, they came to warn us. We had to put our clothes on, and the

water came, and that was very early in the sunny morning.

A combination of a high spring tide and severe gale-force winds has overwhelmed the

Dutch sea barriers and dikes that protect its low-lying land from flooding.

Like many times, we had the neighbors over with their children, so the parents played

a card with each other. And because we were all kind of little children, between the eights

or five and twelve, the children went to bed in our house. Normally, they went home then

on the Sunday morning, and the other parents, the neighbors, went home.

And how did your parents guess a warning?

The local doctor, he was in the polder, piece of land surrounded by dyke, and a polder mostly

is laying below sea level. A woman was pregnant and had delivered a baby, so he had to be there.

The dyke had broke already, so the water already came in the polder, and he just drove around

and knocked on doors on farms. To warn the people, two of the workmen of my father came to help.

They started, in fact, to milk the cows. They had no idea how quickly and how high the water should

come. So they started to milk the cows, and they had to stop that, because the water came so

quickly higher and higher. They couldn't even get the kettle out of the barn. The two men couldn't

go home, so they stayed with us too. So all together we were nine people, and the only thing we could

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