After three years, Christmas is finally back in our own home after the devastating Zwaag house fire

Wherever you look in Marcel’s house, there are Christmas decorations everywhere. On the table, on top of cupboards. After the fire, only a skeleton of the house remained. “You could see right through it. My children already joked: ‘Well, Dad, if you had gone to heaven we wouldn’t have had much to clean up.’ But I quickly filled it up again.”

Valuables have become precious memories. “I had nothing left. My record collection, my mother’s photo album of the Second World War, the shuffleboard that I had since I was a child. Everything burned. It feels familiar again in the house, but in fact we have been away for three years.”

In June 2021, disaster struck Hoefblad in Zwaag. A car fire, which was believed to have been started, spread to a block of houses. Four homes were destroyed, including those of neighbors Maureen and Marcel.

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Major question marks still remain. “The perpetrator is on camera, but has never been found. Reason for the fire? That remains a mystery.” Marcel was able to return to his home in January, but a lot still had to be done. “There was a dixie (mobile toilet, ed.) in the garden, because the sewers were clogged. I had a bed, but otherwise I had nothing.”

Especially with Maureen the bad luck follows her. Due to the discovery of asbestos and plans that went wrong with the furnishing of her house, she was only the last to return to her home. In February the time had finally come. She sits at the table emotionally. “Especially when we talk about it, it still surprises me. I think about it often,” she says.

Logical, in a place where there have been precious memories for decades. “My children grew up here. We were the first here when it was built in the early 1980s,” says Maureen. Marcel was able to give it a place. “It has had a lot of impact, but I have no remorse anymore. Life goes on,” he says.

They both celebrate Christmas Day with their families. But they celebrate Boxing Day together. With both dogs. A Christmas like old times. “We have been neighbors for decades, drink coffee together almost every day and at Christmas we go for a delicious cheese fondue.”