Gina W

Yesterday I was helping my neighbor with her garden and a man walked by, nodding to us.

She told me she knew him. She was born in Amsterdam and seems to know pretty much everyone here and I feel extremely lucky to have her as a neighbor. She explained that he is Jona Oberski and he wrote a very famous book about his time in a nazi concentration camp as a child. It is called Kinderjaren.

I of course had to buy the English translation. I have barely started it. I am going to have a lot of feelings reading this. One of them is gratitude for living in a place that has such clear and present memories about what it is like to be occupied by nazis.

Someone back in the US was asking me for my news and I excitedly told him how I had my bike back from the shop and how thrilling it felt after going without a bicycle for TWO WHOLE DAYS. I could practically see his eyes roll back in his head with boredom.

I told my Dutch neighbor the same thing and she commiserated, telling me how she couldn't find her bike briefly at the train station and the panic it gave her to
imagine not having a bicycle.

My Dad told me a story from a trip he took to Europe with a friend after they both graduated from undergrad, in the early 1960s.

His friend had an aunt who ran a convent in Guernsey and she had resisted the nazis during the occupation. This had earned her a lot of appreciation in the nearby parts of France so when they were trying to figure out buying a car to see Europe in, she sent them to a friend in France who had a car dealership.

The car dealer showed them some choices and told them the most reliable would be the 1932 Peugot, so they bought that for $50 and drove it all over.

It did need some maintenance, which is unsurprising for a 30 year old car. At one point they were stuck at the side of the road in Vienna with a leaking radiator hose and someone came by and asked if they would like help. When they said yes, he went into a bakery, came out with a baguette and some tape. He opened up the baguette and wrapped it around the hose so the soft side was pressed against the hose and then he wrapped tape around the whole thing. He added water and then offered to replace the hose at his machine shop a mile away,

I was unfamiliar with what a 1932 Peugot might look like but if this page is accurate, then that was a petty cool way to travel around https://peugeotfrance.blogspot.com/2017/09/peugeot-301-193236.html

They later sold the car for $30 in Belgium because that was the easiest country to sell a car in at the time in terms of paperwork required and finished out the trip by hitchhiking.

I ran across this tricycle that can carry as much as a small car today. Definitely the most cargo capacity I have seen so far