• For several years I have been on a quest to find answers, initially about the death of my Grandfather, but also about why the Holocaust happened. In the case of my Grandfather, I have found something like an answer or at least something I can live with. However, when it comes to the Holocaust I…

    Read more →

  • One thing that always surprises me in any war, particularly World War II, is that so many aspects of normal life still happened. The Dutch celebrate Sinterklaas (St Nicholas aka Santa Claus) on December 5, but he usually arrives in the country in mid-November. This is one of the celebrations which continued during World War…

    Read more →

  • Sometimes I feel like just giving up posting about the Holocaust, but I know I can’t. It is not always the images that upset me, more often it is that lack of images that gets to me. There are no images because the victims were just too young and were born in captivity, so there…

    Read more →

  • On November 27 1936, the movie ‘Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor’ was released. The movie has brought me quite a bit of childhood trauma. It was used to facilitate a lie. I was told that if I would follow the diet of Popeye I too would get his superhuman powers. But I never…

    Read more →

  • Happy Birthday Doctor Who

    At 5.16pm on the 23rd November 1963 the BBC premiered “An Unearthly Child” and UK television viewers were introduced to the incredible world of Doctor Who for the first time. William Hartnell was the Doctor, a strange old man who could travel through time and space in his police box. Little did anyone know that…

    Read more →

  • Improvised Wedding Photo

    I remember when I was getting married, one of the aspects that needed to be perfect was photography. It was going to be a special day and the photographs needed to reflect that. But what do you do when your every move is watched and you are seen as an enemy of the state? You…

    Read more →

  • Lenny Kravitz

    Read more →

  • Felix Max Paul Leefsma

    Dear Felix Max, You were born 29,220 days ago. Approximately 701,280 hours or 42,076,800 minutes, or even 2,524,608,000 seconds ago. These numbers are so hard to comprehend, just as hard to fathom that you were murdered only 550 days after you were born. The only consolation here is that you had one extra day of…

    Read more →

  • Remembering Fré Cohen

    One of the aspects of the Holocaust that is often forgotten about, maybe on purpose, is suicide. There were so many who in their desperation only saw one way out and that was by taking their own lives. Frederika Sophia (Fré) Cohen was born on 11 August 1903 in Amsterdam. She was the oldest daughter…

    Read more →

  • The Journey of a Child

    Edith Roseij Beek was born on April 12, 1934, in Oss, the Netherlands. She was the youngest of the two children of Arnold Beek and Clara Betsy de Jong. Brother Johan Rene Simon was born in 1930 in Oss. On November 19, 1943, she was murdered in Auschwitz, at age of nine. When she was…

    Read more →