The Netherlands By Henry

Windmills or Moulins in Holland

Made of wood and maybe with a thatched roof. They were massive with elaborate wooden gears. Pegs, perfectly timed with the cogs to rotate. Gears and cranks turning a smaller shaft coming from the blades to the cog called a brake wheel to the wallower or cogs so that the shaft goes from the top to the very bottom to grind up flour or anything you want with the humongous stone wheels (at least 5000kg each)

The blades at the top were made entirely out of wood with a canvas sail covering to catch the wind. The mill keeper would take the canvas sails off at night and tie down the blades to make it safe. The millers lived in their mills and worked very hard. Since Holland or the

Netherlands is near the sea and is quite flat there would usually be wind. (The mills were built 300- 400 years ago and were used for a mini-industrial age before the invention of steam engines. Holland had a large trade and manufacturing base and the area around Amsterdam was very wealthy due to this. The water ways and connection to the sea allowed all sorts of materials to be moved in and out efficiently. - ed.)

We saw two big mills in the Zaans Museum and village. One was used to grind pigments, for example chalk for white, cinnabar for red, lapis lazuli for blue/green and copper minerals for greens and a dark wood for

brown. Also colours of Earth from Italy like burnt Sienna. They came from al over the world. Paint was made with the pigments and oil. We saw glass sheets and glass rubbers to

mix it together. (Leonardo da Vinci liked to experiment with pigments and make his own paint, some of it didn’t last too well though –ed)

There was also an oil mill. It was violently loud and made a deafening din. Bang,

bang, bang, bang! People did used to become deaf, it was called pounding deafness. I found the noise very unbearable. A huge block of wood hitting a wedge of wood that then

presses all the previously ground nuts in a bag. To squash the meal and gradually get the oil out, the banging must go on for ages.

The museum was good and there were plenty of tourist shops. One of which was burgled, and diamonds stolen by three armed men. Someone was hurt ad pushed through a window. The police had “do not cross

tapes” when we were looking round as the burglary had just happened.

We stayed in Broek in Waterland near Amsterdam during our stay. It is a small village close to Amsterdam. The houses were very old, many from 1700 and built in an old style. Or house was from 1770. It

had logs for beams in the ceiling. They had collected all sorts of olden day stuff. The walls were painted with scenes of the countryside and a ceiling with birds and clouds. We slept in sleeping cupboards. We walked through the village and visited the church which was also very old and had graves under all the floor stones with writing and carving on them. (The church was burnt down in the late 1700’s as the Spanish conquered and

ruled the Dutch. They tried to stamp out Protestantism. For this reason the women still sit on chairs in the inner part and the men sit on the edges on pews. This is from when the church goers had services on the grass and feared being attacked when their church was burned. Astained glass window shows this part of

their history. –ed)

By Suzanne….

We wanted to visit Flora, my mother’s cousin when we were there. Her father had been decorated after the war for his efforts in the Resistance. He has a tree planted for him

in Israel. We hoped to talk to Marte, my grand father’s sister about the war. She is almost 90. She is the last one from that generation alive now from our family. I had seen her 23 years ago and she looked very similar really. I noticed, again all the mannerisms shared by Albert, my grandfather! She did talk to us a lot. But it was all in Dutch and a bit circular. I can only understand the simplest things, but we taped her so that my mother might be able to translate and we would have a recording of her voice. We know that she was imprisoned for a while as the Germans wanted to find her sister and brother in law who were in safe houses at the time. The boys have been reading fiction and non-fiction books about the wars and trying to find out more about it all in Britain and Europe. We haven’t looked at the German perspective however, as I haven’t found much suitable for children. I think that Max especially realised that there is no clear division between right and wrong and good and bad from Watching War Horse in London.

We visited Osterbeck, the cemetery for the 1700 troops who lost their lives in the parachute drop of troops to try to capture the bridge over the Rhine in Arnhem. “Operation Market Garden.” The troops were not able to be supported by divisions from the south as expected and what should have been a three day operation became a nine day house to house battle that they had to be withdrawn from. We found some New Zealand graves and many unknown graves. There were many, many stones. The boys were confused at first by the Polish insignia as they thought the eagle was German. Flora said that there were no Germans buried there. This was not the only cemetery for troops and airmen from the Second World War in Arnhem

. It is hard to imagine the waste of human life and all the sadness that flowed on from those deaths.

Flora gave Henry Anne Franks Diary to read. Anne Frank was a 13 year old Jewish girl who went into hiding in Amsterdam with her family to escape the holocaust by the Nazis. Her family were betrayed and their hiding place discovered. Anne and her sister were killed in Concentration Camps. Her father published her diary so that she could “live on” as she had said she wanted to in her dairy. Can you imagine being rounded up and killed? It was all very sobering.

On a brighter note, we met Flora in the old first class lounge in Amsterdam's railway station. There was a cockatoo there. He was funny. We thought he was called Afbluven but that means "Do not touch" He was called Elvis!