History

  • Marijke Godschalk was born in Assen, the Netherlands, on June 18 1941. Less then 2 years later she would be dead. Not because she was ill or had been involved in an accident. She died because of someone’s idea of her. Although she looked like any other Dutch or even German girl, I would even…

    Read more →

  • Stan Laurel was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson on the 16th of June in Ulverston, Lancashire in England, 1890. His father was a vaudeville performer and this led Stan to being a stage performer too. He didn’t get much schooling and this resulted to the joining of Fred Karno’s Troupe where Stan understudied the future star,…

    Read more →

  • Regardless if you are a fan of the man or not, anyone who watched that match last night must have had an awful shock. Shortly before half time during the UEFA Euro 2020, group stage match between Denmark and Finland, the Danish midfielder and star player, Christian Eriksen collapsed. He was taken of the pitch…

    Read more →

  • Dear Anne, today you would have turned 93, but we all know the history why that didn’t happen. Some of that history is written in the diary you received on your 13th birthday, June 12 1942.So many people have read that diary, your private thoughts laid bare for the world to see. But I am…

    Read more →

  • The case of Walter Seifert is a disturbing one. It is also an indication on something that I have argued for a long time, the Denazification program after World War 2 did not work. It was merely a political bit of veneer. For you who don’t know what the Denazification program was;Denazification (German: Entnazifizierung) was…

    Read more →

  • The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, was pressed…

    Read more →

  • Growing up in the Netherlands there was a tradition on Good Friday. Every year on Good Friday the Dutch radio would play the ‘Top 100 of all time’, basically the greatest songs ever recorded. The majority would be rock songs. The top 4 would always be ‘Child in Time’ by Deep Purple; ‘Stairway to Heaven’…

    Read more →

  • Music is not just a few notes strung together to create a tune, often accompanied by lyrics. Music is much more then that. It is therapy. It gives hope where there is despair. It gives joy where there is grief. It can transport you back to the days of yore, when time was complicated. It…

    Read more →

  • Who doesn’t know the Rolling Stones master piece “Sympathy for the Devil”? For anyone of you who don’t know the song, go to YouTube, Spotify or any other music streaming platform and listen to it. I don’t mean that awful Guns N Roses version but the original by the Rolling Stones. The song is basically…

    Read more →

  • Born in Westerbork

    I have 3 children and I witnessed the birth of all 3 of them. The birth of a child must be the greatest miracle, Sure the sex beforehand is wonderful, but just imagine it, a sperm cell from a fertile man swims up through the vagina and into the uterus of a woman and joins…

    Read more →