Two Years in Berlin
In early March, accompanied by my travel companion I., I spent a few days on a city trip to Berlin. Exactly eighty years earlier, my father, Willem Blok, was there too, but for a much longer period. He wasn’t there for fun and certainly not voluntarily. He was one of the millions of forced laborers brought by the Nazis from occupied territories to keep the wartime economy running in Germany. Our visit was a good opportunity to visit some places where Willem lived and worked between 1943 and 1945. I made grateful use of his memoirs titled “From Abacus to… Read More
