01 Oct Nijmegen (17-Mar-2014)

The Dutch media are continuing to show a big interest into the refugee children in the Netherlands. It seems that everyone is as surprised as I was 6 years ago that such a big and interesting subject has never been researched.

Last week I went to Nijmegen with Guido Spring who will be making a radio documentary for the Jewish Broadcasting Cooperation (Joodse Omroep), which will be aired in April. As soon as the exact date is known, I will announce it here on a blog. In Nijmegen at the station we talked about how it must have been for all the children who came in by train. How they must have “landed” in Nijmegen, where most of them were lovingly taken care of by the local refugee committee, headed by Raf Salomons. But we also talked about the group of 20 children who arrived on December 12th 1938 from Berlin, while some high-placed civil servants in The Hague were waiting for the arrival of the first big transport from Vienna:  the children were put back on the first train to Germany! Because they were illegal….

Even more exciting is the interest that the Dutch tv program “Andere Tijden” (different times) has shown. They are planning to make an episode on the refugee children (or Dokins, as people have started calling them), to be broadcast on April 24th. So at the moment I am working hard with them, trying to find the right people to talk to and trying to decide which part of the story can be told in 35 minutes, because it would not be possible to tell the whole story.

In the meantime I am very involved in the Stolpersteinen in Zwolle project. There will be quite some press coverage there as well: an interview with me had already been published in the local newspaper, De Stentor. You can access it in the “publications” section of this site.