Welcome to a series of blogs as I count down the days to the release of “Escape from Amsterdam”.
Wherever I travel, I think about my writing. And I wonder in the travel if there’s a way I can write a book about what I experience. So it was when my husband earned a trip to the Netherlands while working with a foreign exchange student hosting service. We decided we were going to be tourists in this country and ended up becoming explorers of history that revealed a severely depressed and damaged nation. At first we relished the quaint Dutch countryside – the windmills, the lazy boats on the canals, the hundreds of bicycles.
On the second day of our trip to Amsterdam, we explored the Jewish Quarter area and learned the dark secrets of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust that began there in the Netherlands during World War II.
It was humbling to step into the theater area that once served as a deportation center for the Dutch Jewish people and is now a memorial. From there many eventually went to Auschwitz, and most never returned. They were families with children, couples, old men and women, and singles. Across from the theater stood a nursery and a college. It was from these visitations that the essence of “Escape from Amsterdam” began to take root. With a little investigation, I discovered how deeply involved the college was in helping rescue Jewish children from deportation, as was the nursery through the efforts of staff workers and those on the inside in the theater. Many were involved in the plot, and some gave their lives. It became a very humbling experience and one that eventually led to the creation of this book. Today, monuments and museums now replace these institutions, but their supreme sacrifice will not be forgotten.