For a better quality of life

I was born in 1942 in The Netherlands, during World War II, when my country was under German occupation. I have no memories of that war, but I do remember several vestiges of it. As a child I played in the ruins of bombed housing blocks near my home and I had Sunday school in what had been a synagogue, its members had been gassed. The city where I lived had been former part of the German’s Atlantic Wall and remnants of this fortification were all over the place, such as bunkers and an anti-tank ditch. These things fascinated me but I was hardly aware of the tragedies behind them. I grew up in the safe post war era in an upper middle class family. My parents were both university-educated, my father a historian and my mother an economist. My father worked as a history teacher, my mother was a homemaker when I was young and worked later as a journalist. I was the eldest of three children.