#Family is Everything
Today, May 4, it is Remembrance Day in the Netherlands for the victims of the Second World War. That brought me to the following memory: My grandfather and grandmother (on my mother's side) were German, but they emigrated to the Netherlands long before the First World War. They lived in a town close to the German border in the east of the Netherlands. During the last two years of the war they, along with their ten children, sheltered four Jewish men in the house that my grandfather built himself. He had a very large construction company and built a shelter for the men under the house. So they lived with 16 people in that house. Two months before the end of the war, the hideout was betrayed to the Germans by someone in the town.

A truck full of SS men then came to collect the Jewish people in hiding, much to the shock of my grandfather and grandmother, because they would be picked up the next day and probably shot. But because the command center of the Germans was bombed that night by English planes and completely destroyed, the papers and the order to pick up my grandfather and grandmother were also destroyed. That saved their lives. What is terrible is that the 4 Jewish men all 4 perished in Auschwitz. My parents bought the house in the early 60's and took care of my grandfather and grandmother until their death. I grew up in that house and was always very impressed by the bomb shelter under the house. What did I learn from it? That you should be brave in life, be there for other people ... that God disposes. I have wonderful memories of my brave grandfather and grandmother. Family is everything!