And those who come after us

Small chronicle of three Dutch families

Truska Bast chose oral history to find out what it meant to people, those events in history.

For the farmer’s son Ko it was a true migration of people when in 1919 he took a steam train with cows and hay from South Holland to the Veluwe. The family lived in abject poverty. How different it is on the island of Wieringen, where Pieter, the son of a superintendent of the Department of Public Works, stays around 1920 with the German Crown Prince Wilhelm, who is exiled to the island. Or on Java, where Sien’s Indo-Dutch father father fathered eighteen children with two native women and Sien was placed with her sisters in the Protestant Orphanage.
In En zij die na ons komen we read how Ko, Pieter and Sien are doing in 2010 – and what has become of their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Through these three families Truska Bast describes how life in the Netherlands has changed in one hundred years. The result is a compelling and colorful document of the time.