the Netherlands
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First of all, let me tell you I am Dutch, and I am proud to be Dutch. I love the country where I was born and where I grew up. But I am not proud of some of its black pages in history. I can understand why some Dutch bureaucrats and civil servants colluded with…
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I am Paul , like every 4 year old boy I like to kick a ball. Give me a blank sheet of paper and some crayons and I am happy as can be. I am Paul I feel like a big boy but I know I am small. I like to play outside, come rain…
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The buzzword nowadays is “immigrants” and in hardly any context it is used in a positive way.Here is the thing though, who is an immigrant? This is just a micro snapshot in history. It is basically a background of my family well at least from my Mother’s side. The picture at the start of the…
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In September 1944, most of the southern part of the Netherlands had been liberated. Unfortunately, the rest of the country faced a very harsh winter. Extreme cold combined with a lack of food resulted in a famine, causing the death of about 20,000 citizens. Dutch railway workers had gone on strike with the hope of…
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Little did I know when I was aged 7, that 2 headlines in a regional newspaper would have links to my life in ways I could never have imagined. On November 7,1975 2 events were in the Dutch newspapers. One event was a disaster which happened in a chemical plant, the other event was the…
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I would love to say there was not a single person in the Netherlands who turned a blind eye to the brutal Nazi regime and especially in relation the treatment of their fellow citizens, who happened to be Jewish. But I’d be telling a lie. There were many who at risk of their own lives…
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In the southeast province of the Netherlands is Limburg. It used to be a rural area with mainly farming as employment opportunities. However, in the late 19th and early 20th century, something nicknamed “black gold” was discovered in the southern part of the province. This ‘black gold’ was coal. The Dutch government exploited the discovery…
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The Holocaust didn’t start with the mass extermination of Jews, it started in ways which could even be considered non violent, with gradually excluding Jews from society. In this blog there are some examples of signs saying ~Forbidden for Jews” or”No Jews allowed” from several locations in the Netherlands. On the signs above it says…
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October 5th,1942, was one of the darkest if not the darkest days of WWII for my hometown of Geleen, at the time it was a small mining town in the south east of the Netherlands, in the province of Limburg. Shortly after 21.30 the alarms sounded,warning the population of an imminent attack. The bombing did…
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One might be forgiven that the title implies a current school trip to Dachau, but the title refers to another kind of trip to the notorious death camp. The Dutch Nazis, the NSB. did not have the same level of hatred against, Jews,Roma and disabled people as their German counterpart. Himmler was aware of this…
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