It started with my place of birth in the middle of nowhere. The village where I was born played an important role in hiding people from Germans. The village got a Yad Vashem award from Israel. The street I was born in carried and still carries the name of the leader of the regional resistance, Johannes Post.
Later I lived in Westerbork, a village which name only makes people shiver. From the concentration camp in the fields near Westerbork men were deported to Germany. We all know nowadays what happened there until 1945.
35 Years later I cycled a couple of years through those fields, nowadays partly forest, and could smell the odour of history. The same air Anne Frank breath so many years ago.
Nowadays we're looking at the stars.
Discovery of heaven, but actually a monument.One day on my way to school I was hit by a car driven by a man called Speelman. That brings me back to the war because not a few Speelman's were transported via Westerbork to Germany. It makes me feel sad.
In 1988 I visited Israel where my sister volunteered in a kibbutz. I had a spring-break and made it a working-holiday. Visiting many place which the primary school teacher, mr. Dolman, in my place of birth, told about in his biblical lessons 8 years before.
And even nowadays, when I travel to my parents in the north by train, I use the same track which carried deported people from the west of The Netherlands to Westerbork and further to Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, Theresienstad.
I could tell you more links with the war but than it would be like Zwartboek the movie of Paul Verhoeven. Sometimes it's difficult to keep one's word. But I am not a traitor.
