Interview by Wereldomroep at Rotterdam Noord
Busy day for me, November 10, 2008. My first book was published the week before.
My day started with a half-hour train delay. Eventually, I arrived at Rotterdam Noord station around 11:30 am, where a reporter from the Wereldomroep (Radio Holland Worldwide) was waiting for me for a radio interview in a nearby café. Café ‘t Viaduct no longer exists at that location, it was truly one of those old-fashioned, brown pubs (large photo above). The name of the journalist was Eelco Walraven and we had a very nive conversation.
Rotterdam Noord: because this is where the Oswalds arrived on the morning of June 3, 1962. After their arrival, they walked to the tram stop at Lisplein: left to right, as noted in Oswald’s address book (see below). The cubist station building is almost unchanged nearly fifty years later. You can see my photo on the right, below a photo made in 1960.
You can listen to the audio file here, it takes about seven minutes.
(Text continues below the image)
Then, on to the Groothandelsgebouw, next to the enormous building lot where they are working on the new Central Station. In a cosy restaurant there, I spoke with Daan Dijksman, hired by HP/De Tijd to write a nice piece about the book. It’s no coincidence they asked him: Dijksman wrote in 1993 about the Rotterdam weekend for the opinion magazine. Fortunately, we now know a lot more than we did back then. I already spoke with the journalist from Amsterdam on September 8, 2007, in a bar on Spui (in our capital): a very nice man. And his article in 1993 was inspiring for me in the beginning of this century – I saw it as a starting point for my investigation, along with a great book by Willem Post and Hans Veldman (also written in 1993).
I then went to bookstore Donner in Rotterdam to see how my book would be displayed, in the largest bookstore in the country. There were two nice stacks, and the book is selling well. And rightly so: the book is, after all, largely about Rotterdam… After my visit, I was called by a very kind employee from the Belgian TV guide Primo – the book will be featured in that magazine next week. Spoke with him for about half an hour; he had read the book thoroughly, so it was undoubtedly going to be a nice article.
After that, I went to The Hague for entirely different reasons, and you understand: back in the southern part of The Netherlands, I was really tired. I had a very useful, enjoyable day.
