“On March 1, 1965, Dad came home with a terrible headache. The next morning he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 48 years old.
“Mom died four months later. She was 46 years old. Our family then consisted of eleven children, between the ages of two and seventeen. I was fifteen. Suddenly we had no parents anymore.
“Mum has been ill for a while. As kids, we didn’t know what was wrong with her. That was not discussed. It wasn’t until later that we learned that she died of breast cancer.
She spent the last three months of her life in hospital. My mother’s mother had come over from Friesland to keep our family going in Rotterdam-Overschie.
“Uncles and aunts took one child after the other. They simply disappeared. We wouldn’t grow up together. I was taken in by a classmate. Her parents slept on a folding bed in the living room; they were very small. Still, they took me in.
“I remember that time as a lonely, pitch-black period. Fortunately, a close bond has grown between us, as brothers and sisters. Our youth has shaped us as well as deformed us. Each of us has found our own way of dealing with the past.
“I like looking at this picture. My parents were such beautiful people! They gave me happy and safe early years. From that basis I have learned to enjoy life, also because it can suddenly be over.”