“It’s basically my father’s untold story.” This is what Berend Henk Huizing tells us about his first book, ‘Sterrenkijker’. And that book is about Lammert Huizing. He was, among other things, the former editor-in-chief of the Hoogeveensche Courant and an amateur historian in Hoogeveen.
Lammert Huizing passed away 9 years ago at the age of 86. “He has told everything he has done in the past,” says Berend Henk (56 years old) in the Radio Drenthe program Cassata. The book is based on his father’s diaries, which were found by accident. “I delved into his legacy. He wrote an awful lot. That means that a lot has been left behind. Between all the clippings and writings I found a few diaries. I did not know them. My mother did not know them and neither did my sister. Nobody knew those diaries.”
When he read diaries, he was impressed by his father’s thinking as a young boy. “The diaries roughly tell the story from 1942 to about 1950.” The story is set just after the Second World War, in and around Zuidwolde, Hoogeveen and a few European cities that his father visited.
For example, it is often about a trip to Rome that Lammert made. “He never told us exactly how that journey went and what he did. When he arrived in Rome, his entire bundle – clothes and belongings – was stolen. So nothing is really left of it, except for a few reports that were then in the Hoogeveensche Courant.”
Lammert comes from a farming family of twelve children, of whom he was the eldest. “Faith played the leading role,” says Berend Henk. It was Lammert’s great dream to study astronomy. “But that was not the intention. He had to cooperate on the farm. In fact, he was expected to take over the farm. But it was not necessarily in his head.”
In the book his father is called Waldrik van Wezel. “That’s one of the pseudonyms my father wrote under,” explains Berend Henk. It is therefore not a biography. “I think about a third belongs to my father. And two thirds I filled in myself.” The book presentation will take place on Saturday 24 September at bookshop !pet in Hoogeveen.
Listen here to the interview with Berend Henk Huizing in Cassata: