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Hamilton Arts & Letters
Our story begins in Holland with a little boy running across the front yard of his house and out into the street after his rapidly retreating ball. Then comes a heavy grinding screech as a large truck brakes hard to avoid hitting the boy as the ball scoots under the front wheels. Next we see the driver of the truck marching across the yard, the squirming wailing little boy firmly held between two strong arms, and watch as he is plunked down on the porch in front of his horrified mother. The driver tells her in Dutch to look after this “little bit of trouble”, and he turns and goes back to his truck and continues on his way.
It’s a small growing-up story with a happy ending. But there is an element that lifts it above the mundane. The year is 1944, and the truck driver wears the uniform of the Wehrmacht transport command. He is a German soldier, a member of the occupying force, and maybe he has young children at home, we’ll never know. But as Cees tells me “They weren’t all bad, you know. We were hungry then…very little food, but the soldiers, too, didn’t have much and still they shared from their meagre rations, mostly German bread and potatoes.”
[Distillate © HA&L + David Forsee {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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