• History is sometimes remembered through great battles, political revolutions and the rise and fall of empires. But sometimes a single moment quietly marks the end of an era. On the morning of 10 September 1977, a 28-year-old Tunisian man named Hamida Djandoubi was led from his cell in Marseille’s Baumettes Prison. Just hours earlier, he…

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  • If someone is running round like a headless chicken or rushing around like a headless chicken, they are panicking when they should be thinking carefully about what needs to be done. This is of course a figuratively expression. However for one unfortunate, or fortunate. chicken this saying had a literal meaning. On 10 September 1945…

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  • The remark is associated with Lieutenant-General Frederick “Boy” Browning, deputy commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, during the planning of Operation Market Garden in September 1944. Browning is widely reported to have expressed his reservations to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery with the words: “But, sir, I think we might be going a bridge too…

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  • For most people, the name Geleen will mean nothing, but to me, it means the place where I was born and raised. Although it is far from perfect, my roots are there, and I am proud of that. It is a city in the southern part of the province of Limburg in the Netherlands. With…

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  • A Failure as a Father

    If you did not know the man in the photograph, you would think he was a loving family man, doting on his daughter. However, since we know the man is Joseph Goebbels, the dynamic of this photo changes. Goebbels did portray himself as a good family man and a loving father. Clearly, he had no…

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  • When the rain falls, my face gets wet. When the sun shines, it blinds my eyes. When the snow falls, I want to go out and feel the crunch of the fresh new snow beneath my feet. When it is muddy, I get dirty. When I am hungry, I eat. When I am thirsty, I…

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  • The Day Before 9/11

    On September 10th, the sky was clear,A Monday like so many others here.The sun shone bright, the air was still,And time moved on with its steady will. The city hummed, the world unaware,Of the storm of sorrow that soon would tearThrough streets of steel and hearts of stone,Leaving scars where hope had once grown. People…

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  • The Computer bug

    Don’t worry I am not going to go into details what a computer bug is and what to do how to resolve it. Nor will I explain what the implications of a computer bug are. That would be a long and tedious blog. In fact this blog will be short and sweet, it will be…

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  • History is not only shaped by great victories, cultural flourishing, or moments of unity; it is equally defined by the tragedies that scar communities for generations. One such tragedy is the Treznea Massacre, an atrocity committed on September 9, 1940, in the village of Treznea (Hungarian: Ördögkút), in Sălaj County, Transylvania. This event remains one…

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  • People sometimes tell me that the pictures of the piles of corpses, in the concentration camps are the most disturbing ones from the Holocaust. However, I am not in total agreement because I found the photo above much more disturbing. It shows the cause of the Holocaust. Hitler understood for the Nazi ideology to work…

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