D-Day to Remember
What do I remember of D-Day in Holland? I was 8 in 1944. My nanny came into my playroom and said, “Johnny, we’re going to be freed!” My piano teacher embraced me, hugged me and kissed me on my cheeks. Well, actually we were not there yet. The clandestine radio we listened to had been too optimistic. Strong Nazi resistance in France and Belgium (the “Battle of the Bulge” in the Ardennes, General Montgomery’s (“Monty”) failed assault on Arnhem close to where my grandparents – and Audrey Hepburn and her mother, my Aunt Ella – lived) delayed our liberation by one year, and introduced the worst hunger winter in Holland with heaps of snow and bitter cold during which thousands of people perished.
A mother – like mine – struggling to find food at farms.
Many brave young allied soldiers lost their life trying to break through the Nazi defenses and finally did.
Normandy June 6 1944
For me D-Day came a year later, May 5, 1945. Hundreds and hundreds of horse-driven wagons with German soldiers, faces drawn, moving back to Germany over the roads. Among them poor-looking kids, forced to follow orders, many to their death, like so many of our brave liberators, the essential difference being that the Nazis came to conquer and torture, and the allies came to free us from them, surely a more purposeful mission.
Allied paratroopers coming to liberate Holland
Then hordes of Nazi sympathizers were rounded up and marched through the streets, their hair shaved off, shame and despair on their faces, imprisoned for many years.
Hundreds of low-flying planes dropping bags of food on empty meadows and tulip fields. Cans with sausages we hardly remembered eating before.
Trucks with American black drivers, whose faces we could not see through their windows, and allied forces moving up with German captives arms in the air.
Five years of horrible war gone by that started with bombs on Schiphol airport in May 1940, the explosions we heard and their clouds we saw rising into the sky from our backyard, years that never seemed to end. Having to walk to school, often on wooden shoes because our parents could not get proper shoes, sometimes through sticky snow that clogged underneath your soles so that you could not walk anymore. Soup kitchens in our school, where we hardly learned anything because of the constant fear for the occupier. Bombs falling left and right, chasing us into the cellar or bomb-shelters, huddling together in the cold. Dog fights in the sky with bombers and fighter planes getting shot to pieces and falling to earth, their men sometimes parachuting down to be shot death by cruel Nazi soldiers, laughing at the fun.
But their fun did not last. When the Nazis were gone, we celebrated in the streets. Eating pancakes at long wooden tables stretching out street-long along the sidewalks in bright sunshine. Everything was colored orange. Queen Wilhelmina, Princess Juliana and Prince Bernard and their children returning from their exile in Canada to Soestdijk. The Red Blue and White Dutch flag flying all over. Music, dancing, happy people.
Just one nasty psychopath, Adolph Hitler, who was able to inflict this unmeasurable misery on all of us and his own people as well. Cowardly dead by suicide.
And the man who beat him
It’s good to commemorate D-Day. The best speech to do so was by Ronald Reagan in Normandy on June 6, 1984, when referring to those brave men and women he said,” …let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.” Seventy years later, the younger generations do well to dig into this history. But history has a way to repeat itself: many wars followed, perhaps not on a worldly scale, but large enough to worry us all. People are still suffering from dictators and psychopaths and the new normal of intolerant Islam. Jews are still being persecuted. Our United Nations Assembly, established with so much hope and pomp in 1944 to prevent all this from reoccurring, has turned into a useless debating club.
Yes, D-Day is a day to remember, and to make good speeches for TV. But when will we stop fighting each other? It’s inherent to human kind. So don’t hold your breath.
PS: All pictures have been drawn from Dutch websites, archives and Wikipedia. Specific accreditation proved impossible.
Audrey Hepburn – The Short Story
http://amzn.to/22dYCZH
The few photographs in the short story – link on the right – were given to me by Audrey’s mother in the fifties when I met her at the house of my grandfather’s sister, Aunt Nini van Limburg Stirum, where she stayed sometimes. I had glued them in my scrapbook at boarding school, proud that I was given “personal photographs.” However, on researching their origin, it appeared they were all copyrighted.
Aunt Nini bequeathed to me the photo that is on the cover. Audrey’s mother, Aunt Ella van Heemstra, had told her she should leave it to me. It was an old frame that stood later in our house on my grand piano. To verify if it had a copyright, a professional framer friend carefully opened the fragile back and then we noticed that Audrey’s photo was collated to a photograph of another unknown beautiful woman taken by a high-end studio in Rome! Did they feel at that time that Audrey’s photo was not important enough to buy a new frame for it? Audrey was not “famous“ yet at that time, and that’s probably the reason why this photograph is not as widespread as some of the others.
On the back of the photo figured a stamp stating that photographer Noel Mayne of Baron Studios in London was the copyrighted photographer, but he died in 2011 and we could not find an estate handling his copyrights posthumously.
Noel Mayne had taken the picture when Audrey was modeling and doing cabaret shows in London around 1950, and that was before she was discovered to play Gigi on Broadway.
We found that the photograph of Audrey and Mel Ferrer and their son Sean appeared on the audreyhepburn.com website.
They apparently used it as a Christmas card to close friends in 1962. We copyrighted it to Sean Hepburn Ferrer, as we could not find the original copyright holding photographer. In the process, I became aware that Audrey must have been the most photographed film star ever. Just look at the Wikipedia and Google sites. Even her sons reportedly said that they did not realize how famous their mother was, despite all the paparazzi.
The short stories are published by Willow Manor Publishing of Virginia (www.willowmanorpublishing.com) which also handles cover design. They will be offered to readers in the USA through Amazon Kindle, which sells for the regular low introductory Kindle price of $0.99 cents. On Amazon.ca (Canada), the price may vary around CDN$1. Readers in the Netherlands may want to go to amazon.nl, which leads to amazon.co.uk., which, in turn, is the source for readers in England as well. (I understand that Amazon will open a Netherlands bookstore this fall.) Readers in other parts of the world will have their own directives how to reach amazon.com and get access to the stories.
I would have liked to offer the Audrey short story for free but the Amazon Kindle system does not allow that. Whatever proceeds I will receive from the story will be donated to the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, http://www.audreyhepburn.com. This site also includes many charming photographs of Audrey throughout her life. She never boasted, had no scandals, was always gracious and seemingly self-conscious about her fame as an actress. Audrey says herself that she seemed to have been floating on heavenly air, unaware what was happening to her. She was a natural, who at the end of her life gave herself completely to the poor hungry children of the world, as the unforgettable Ambassadrice of UNICEF.
I admire the work the Children’s Fund and UNICEF do. In my career at the World Bank, I have seen many destitute children as well, but was unable to do much about it as one person. I was able to lift two young women from their doomed poverty cycle in Africa, but even though two lives saved is better than none, it is a drop on a hot plate.
Readers may, therefore, also want to donate to this Fund directly by going to the website. It is managed by Audrey’s sons Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Luca Dotti. Sean was given a preview of the short story and he was agreeable to us publishing it. I hope you like it, too.
I got to know Audrey when I was seven and she a young girl seven years older than me, and while she had that lovely smile and endearing face, how could I expect at that age what she would become?
I have been fascinated – as so many others – by her star, and it is because she gave me that goodbye kiss at seven that I stayed glued to her till she died. A remarkable woman, or as her son Sean titled her for his wonderful book: “Audrey Hepburn, an Elegant Spirit.” You can get it on Amazon, too. It is published by Atria Books (Simon & Schuster, Inc) and warmly written, as you can understand from a son of a wonderful mother, including most interesting and moving views from those who were close to her. It also contains marvelous photographs not found on the “internet”.
When I saw the book’s advert, I felt I wanted this more than any of the many biographies written about her because of its personal nature. An elegant spirit, that’s what she was.
Audrey Hepburn-A Personal Story
The ten Short Stories entitled Some Women I Have Known start with a personal story about Audrey Hepburn. She died way too young in 1993, but her life was such an amazing whirlwind of brilliance that she will remain an icon for many into the far distant future. She was 7 in 1936 when I was born, from a Dutch mother, Ella Baroness van Heemstra and a British father, Joseph Ruston. Audrey spoke English, Dutch and French (from their stay in Brussels, where her father worked for a while.)
Audrey 7 years old with her mother from Wikipedia.nl – Family photo.
Why write about it now, as it is twenty years ago that Audrey left us for another world? Because her disappearance keeps coming back to me. A cousin, Anne van der Laan (http://www.genealogieonline.nl/en/stamboom-smits-van-oyen/I1066.php), and I talked about the women we had met in our lives at a family reunion at the Maarten Maarten’s house in Doorn in The Netherlands in 2002, where Maarten Maarten’s Some Women I have Known stood prominently in the Library. Shaking hands, we agreed we would write our own Some Women together.
John and cousin Anne van der Laan – 2007
He asked me which woman I would write about first. I mentioned Audrey at once. Not because I had been part of her living circle, but because I had met her at a very young age as a normal girl who came to visit us, played with me, and then ten years later suddenly stood shining at the firmament, leaving me bedazzled of her beauty and charm. Was that the same girl? My whole life I remained bewildered by her inspiring personality. Anne and I started writing our stories but then Anne passed away shortly after we took the above picture. Project down. I took it back up only a few years ago.
The Audrey story starts how I met her when I was 7, in 1943, during World War II. She and her mother, then divorced, fled to Holland from England in 1939 when the war broke out, thinking Holland would remain neutral as it did during World War I (1914-18). It turned out different, when Nazi Germany invaded Holland in May in 1940, bombing Rotterdam to smithereens. I was just four and a half, but still remember seeing from our backyard the bomb explosions clouding over Schiphol airport. Her mother, two step brothers, Alexander and Ian Quarles van Ufford from an earlier marriage, and Audrey, stayed with her grandfather, Arnoud Baron van Heemstra, in Velp, a residential suburb of Arnhem in the center of Holland. Arnoud was previously mayor of Arnhem (1910-1920) and thereafter Governor of Suriname (1920-1928), then still a Dutch colony (“Dutch Guyana”, in the Caribbean).
Arnoud knew my grandparents van Coehoorn van Sminia through family (linked with the van Limburg Stirums), and of course, through local life. He took Audrey and her mother one day to see them in the small village where they lived, about ten miles from Velp, when I was there on vacation. The Germans must have given them passage or visiting was still allowed during the day, I don’t know. It was 1943 and Audrey must have looked like this, as I remember:
Young Audrey at thirteen – Wikipedia.nl, probably a family photo
The family suffered enormously from the harsh living circumstances enforced on them by the Nazis, but Audrey’s mother Ella saw to it that Audrey could take ballet dancing lessons, Audrey’s dream of becoming a ballerina, at the Arnhem Conservatory. My personal story starts there.
Photo from Wikipedia.nl, in 1944, a family photo.
Would Audrey have become as famous had she pursued her dream to be a ballerina? I am sure she saw the ballet movie The Red Shoes that reached the theaters in 1948 and was widely acclaimed. Perhaps she would have liked to act the ballerina role of Vicky Page and if a bit older she might have done that very well, but would she have reached her pinnacle and touched us the way she did in the much broader medium of the movies? I doubt it.
With the next blog, we will publish the short story.
OLYMPICS 2014 – WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS SPEED SKATING
Sven Kramer with his Sochi gold of the 5,000 meters in record time continues the great tradition of Dutch speed skaters, as did Jan Blokhuijsen and Jorrit Bergsma of the Netherlands who took silver and bronze. A Dutch sweep, so to say.
Ever heard of Coen de Koning? Born in 1879, he developed into a phenomenal Dutch speed skater, who became all-round world champion in Groningen (northern province of The Netherlands) in 1905, winning all four distances, including the 5000 and 10,000 meters. He won the Eleven City Skating Tour (“Elfstedentocht”, a 128 mile or some 205 kilometers event!) twice, in 1912 and 1917. The first Olympic Winter Sports were held in 1924 in Chamonix in the French Alps (an area where I loved to go skiing) but by that time Coen must have been burned out.
Why I am glowing about this? My grandfather Hector van Coehoorn van Sminia, himself a good Friesian skater like his older brother Hobbe, trainde Coen de Koning in Davos (Switzerland) in the early 1900s in his training camp. Hector also participated in the first “Elfstedentocht” of 1909 and finished 8th out of a field of 32 skaters. He continued training Coen de Koning in Davos and spurred him to participate in the 1912 Elfstedentocht, which he won. And then he won it again in 1917, after practically a solo tour, leaving all other participants and close rivals way behind. The only speed skater who ever did this twice.
My grandmother was the first who congratulated him with his second win (her husband, Hector, was still on his way on the ice…). His feet were bleeding in his skating shoes. Hector finished, too (his brother, Hobbe, gave the starting shot!), though the records show it took him six hours longer than his “pupil”. But finishing it twice is quite an achievement and he was a couple of years older. A “monster race”, de Koning called it.
Coen de Koning – Hector van Sminia – Dutch speed skaters made history.
Coen de Koning also won the Dutch championships speed skating in 1903, 1905 and 1912, and his records on the 500 and 10000 meters held for 20 years!
Hector invented his own steel skates in the 1900s, lighter and sharp as knives, to increase his speed. They were sold in the early days of speed skating glory, before the steel blades from Norway took over the market. All-steel skating blades were also developed in the USA and Canada, where speed skating started as of 1850. Hector’s skates were screwed into leather boots with strong leather soles. Harald Hagen, a Norwegian skater had already built a skate in 1885, with a steel blade supported on steel tubes also fixed underneath a specially designed boot. This design became the standard for competitive speed skating for the twentieth century and up to today.
Hector used his skates in particular for the popular “bandy sport” (“hockey on ice”, rather than “ice-hockey”) and his team from Haarlem, where he lived, became champion in Davos in 1902, beating the Davos team 6-2.
As reported in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad of January 15th, 1902: “We saw excellent sprints by van Sminia, worthy of a speed skater, which belied the fact that he had not been on skates for a long time, due to his long stay in the East Indies”. Willy Dòlleman, the brother of Hector’s wife Marie, also played in that team. Hector’s Haarlem team played hockey in the Dutch national competition, and won the Dutch championship in 1904.
Much of these glorious facts are kept in the Sminia Archives in Leeuwarden, Friesland, in the Netherlands. It includes letters from Coen de Koning to and fro, but unfortunately the photos of those days are not very good. Some comments on Hector’s achievements were that this forgotten sportsman should be put back in the limelight, and that’s what I am doing with this blog.
The Sminia off-spring, and that includes me, lost the spirit for speed skating. You need fresh “Friesian blood” for that and a good deal of training discipline and physical strength. I was born in Amsterdam and never got very excited about speed skating because it tired me out so quickly. My grandfather taught me to skate when I was five, pushing a wooden kitchen chair over the ice, but I never gained his mastery. I remember him swaying over the ice with my grandmother at his arm, waltzing along.
But I love to watch the sport and attended many championships in Holland.
I deplore it that when we were kids we didn’t know all the things that our grandparents achieved and that we could not talk about it with them. Too much of an age gap to understand what it meant to be part of the skating champions of their time. Or of my grandfather’s horseback riding and breeding he excelled in after that, another great Friesian tradition.
So, congrats to Sven Kramer, Jan Blokhuijsen and Jorrit Bergsma, who continue the good old Dutch folklore!
Guyana- The Blessing – Multicultural III
Having traveled the world over and lived in different cultures, I learned there is a huge difference between visiting other people’s societies from the safe harbor of a decent hotel, than actually living among them and adopting their lifestyle, food and cultural habits. As a World Bank official, I usually settled down in a relatively comfortable hotel and got chauffeured or taxied to a government building or private company and returned there after work, then ate and drank in a fashionable restaurant and slept in air-conditioned comfort with a private bathroom. Or I lived as a resident in a comfortable rented house. Even in many field trips, I was relatively shielded from having to leave my comfort zone for long. All sorts of security reasons dictated these rules, but while one may get acquainted this way with the local culture, it does not lead to a true multicultural experience.
A multicultural experience occurs after having gone through the “cultural shock” (the one I experienced the first night when I entered in my wife’s home in Georgetown), something that shakes you out of your comfort zone into a new world where the familiar reference points are lost. This goes both ways, by the way. People from remote cultures coming to the “West” go through the same adjustment process and often find it hard to assimilate. Language, customs, philosophy, food, systems and climate, the things they grew up with and became their life’s trusted beacons, turn out suddenly all different. Those who receive the “displaced” person in their midst expect that person to adjust to their own kin, but that’s easier said than done. Experience shows this really happens only after one or sometimes two generations. In an interracial marriage like ours, it must go a lot faster to sustain the momentum.
As a school kid in Holland, I was told that America was “the big melting pot”. Having lived here for many years, America is full of different races and cultures, but I don’t think it’s melting all that much. Societies still huddle in their own circles along racial and cultural boundaries offering the comfort of their own familiar reference points. Multicultural institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations may be an exception, and being a “World Bank couple” surely helped, but the vast majority sticks to their own habitat, creating the frictions we see repeatedly shown on TV or being used for political posturing.
The great benefit of having crashed through that glass wall of displacement is that the new world one enters offers a wealth of new human experiences that vastly broaden one’s horizon. From little things like feeling that a “cold” shower is actually “lukewarm”, to the larger things of tasting new food and sharing the homes of people who grew up learning math and language as you did but in different settings, you set new beacons and readjust your antennas. Things seen previously as “out of the norm” become “part of the norm”. Feeling comfortable beyond your own comfort zone, and being able to communicate in it as if you had been one of them all your life, and being accepted that way, is the great benefit of a multicultural experience.
Those were the thoughts that went through my head on my way to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church where the Blessing of the Marriage would take place, accompanied by my new brother-in-law, the esteemed sir Lancelot Jaundoo from London, waiting for the bride who led me to that new world and helped me enter it, accompanied by my new father-in-law, Richard Emerson Jaundoo. (A small footnote: when we traveled through India later, the English spelling of the Hindu name in the telephone books was “Chandoo”, pronounced the same way.)
Get me to the church on time…
St. Andrews Presbyterian Church
Waiting, waiting, waiting
There she comes! With the Father of the Bride
The Bride Taken!
In the newspapers
Cutting the cake with the loveliest bridesmaids ever. I wish I had a harem…
Mother and Father, sister Gwen and husband Lloyd with Renée (left), brother Lance with sister Sandra (right), before the Calypso Ball.
The next days consisted of family meals and visits with traditional inputs of curry and rum.
Uncle Enoch cooking curry and peppers the traditional way
Cramped, learning to drink from a coconut without messing up on the beach near Berbize
A glimpse of New Amsterdam, the town the Dutch exchanged for New York with the Brits. Surely less traffic.
Flying to the Interior to walk along the Potaro River in Essequibo county on the way to the Kaietur Water falls.
The Kaietur Falls are one of the highest in the World (250 meters or some 750 feet) and are a mighty presence of power and beauty.
It has an estimated flow rate of over 660 cubic meters per second. Suggestions to build a hydro power dam are bountiful, but fortunately the pristine nature has so far remained protected by the Kaietur National Park.
Back to the family, more than a year and a few months later:
Young David bites his Mom’s finger
Did we see this somewhere else? (Credit: IRIS – Paris XIVe)
Darwin’s theory proven
Next- Some more pictures of beautiful Guyana.