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…
During the 1930’s the Netherlands was, according to Dutch statistics, a deeply religious nation. The majority of its citizens were church-going people. In The Call of Conscience, Dr. Johan Hegeman addresses difficult questions about this time in history. What happened when the rubber of all that church religiosity of the 1930s hit the dark road…
It’s still dark when I wake up. A thought pierces my heart: today is the funeral. Four days ago, on February 22, 1944, an American bombardment tore the heart out of Nijmegen, our city, and shattered our family by killing my eight-year-old brother, Jos. Jos is short for Josef, meaning “God adds.” Yes, God adds,…
I am a post-war baby boomer, the first child born after my parents arrived in Canada in 1947 from The Netherlands with five children in tow. In eighth grade at Calvin Christian School in Hamilton, Ontario, my teacher and school principal, Mr. John VanderVelde, showed us shocking photos of huge piles of bodies of Jews…
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,…
Light can be understood in the physical sense as the radiation of energy in our surroundings. It enables sight. Light also symbolizes goodness and hope as opposed to darkness. To Christian believers, light has a rich theological depth because it reveals both the illumination of God and the inner God-like attributes of human beings. Just…
In a recently published book on Dutch war monuments (Ruurd Kok, Denken Over Herdenken. Oorlogsmonumenten in Nederland), one chapter is devoted to some monuments that have been erected in the Netherlands not to honour but to mark the death of German soldiers on Dutch soil in the Second World War. Since the 1990s Germans have…
“I grew up during the war years,” says Joe Schuringa. “In retrospect, from a teaching perspective, these were the best years of my life.” The war years taught Schuringa a crucial lesson that he hopes to share with other Christians across Canada: “Life goes on; the cows have to be milked.” Johan Frederick Schuringa is…
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