A mother and her daughter stood on the beautifully manicured grounds of the Canadian Cemetery in Holten, the Netherlands, on May 4, 2025. Dutch children laid white and red roses on the more than one thousand graves of the Canadian fallen soldiers. Thousands of poppies fell through the sky from a helicopter above, while the…
At this time of year, many of us turn our thoughts to Europe, and to the tyranny of the German Nazi regime during World War II. Many of us have stories we remember, or that have been told to us, about what our families experienced in the early 1940s. One such story I remember well….
For me, reading about the Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands can bring about a visceral response. Recently, for example, I was seized with waves of terror while listening to an audiobook version of The Diary Keepers: World War II in the Netherlands, as Written by the People Who Lived Through It by Nina Siegal. In…
This summer, my family and I spent the better part of a day at the former Dachau Concentration camp in Germany, now a memorial site, museum and archives. It was a terrible and important experience. Among our reasons for going was a personal connection: Francois Guillaume – the grandfather of my wife Elizabeth – was…
Author and scholar Daniel Taylor has a succinct definition of the genre of memoir: “Memoir is remembered pain.” Ineke Neutel’s One Thousand Fears certainly fits that category as she probes her wounded childhood in the frontline city of Nijmegen during WWII. Neutel’s father was Reformed pastor Wiebe van Dijk, a man responsible for his wife,…
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