"The Sisters of Auschwitz" ("'t Hooge Nest") by Roxane van Iperen (2018)

First thing first, let's face elephant in the room: translation by Joni Zwart is clumsy and there were few moments at the beginning of the book where I could clearly tell sentence does not make sense, but I persevered trough initially slow introduction and the patience paid off - once the story started cooking, I could not put the book down. It is fascinating that the authoress Roxane van Iperen accidentally discovered the history of the forrest villa where she just moved in with her family, but perhaps it was not an accident. Perhaps the house waited for her to tell its story. It could not have been anybody else but van Iperen who became deeply involved in her research and eventually created this exciting book.

During the renovation of the house, van iperen discovered way too many hiding places around the house - what initially she thought was perhaps just a storage, turned out much more interesting. It turned out the house was a hiding place for Jews during WW2 and there was a whole group of around 25 people. Here is what van Iperen have discovered: two sisters (Lien and Janny Brilleslijper) with their families, friends and whoever needed hiding space, rented this well-hidden summer house (their husbands posing as non-Jews and fooling some sweet old ladies who were the original owners) and were hiding here from February 1943 to the summer 1944 - while the rest of the country suffered horrible transportations, arrests and murders, these people lived pretty comfortable with their books, music and birthday parties, right in the middle of what was actually a wealthy Nazi neighbourhood. 

There were instances where group's activities and apparent carefree attitude alarmed me (you would expect a bit more common sense than banging on piano until neighbourhood hears it) but this is all just in hindsight. Its easy to see things differently from our present perspective, who knows how will posterity judge ourselves in a current position. Later the story gets even more interesting, as sisters encounter Anne Frank and her sister. It is a story that needed to be told and van iperen burns with desire to tell it: her fire and inspiration easily grab the listener and therefore I can't give it less than five stars - clumsy translation and all - its just too important to criticise it. 

The Redgrave Women

 

Natasha Richardson (left) with her grandmother, Rachel Kempson; niece, Daisy Bevan; mother, Vanessa Redgrave; and sister, Joely Richardson, photographed by Annie Leibovitz at Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson's home in New York, April 1998 for Vanity Fair.

Vacation time: Portugal

I have recently returned from vacation in Portugal.

It was interesting experience - not because of the usual desire to change the scenery and because of what we have seen there - in many ways Portugal is beautiful and definitely worth a visit - but because of what this experience taught me. To my biggest surprise, once when we actually arrived in Lisbon, I found myself perpetually tired and exhausted, since there were so many things to do but everything was so tiring - not to mention that the weather was against us and we were constantly drenched and wet from the pouring rain - Lisbon is extremely hilly and every single walk turned out to be a Sisyphus mythical climb, it was non stop one climb after another. Porto was just slightly less hilly but even here we puffed and panted and were constantly sweaty (and afterwards sick with cold, after riding sightseeing bus or such) - it was almost as we were punished for having a sunny day, immediately we started to cough. 

So yes, it was beautiful. And interesting. But the best part of vacation was our return home, to our regular comfy nest, shower that actually works, soft and comfortable bed, etc. We were so tired of physical efforts to manoeuvre hilly streets, that coming back to a flat surface was wonderful. Seriously, we had enough of this unexpected fitness and came to conclusion that in the future, vacation should be deserved rest which means that from now we might select a small town or even a village with no traffic jams, no crowds and no tourist traps everywhere. I would not mind a walk in the nature but walks we suffered in Lisbon were not enjoyable. From now on, we will plan the vacations differently and we might simply stay somewhere local, out of town, no planes, no stress, no climbing hills. To recharge the batteries and to rest properly, I need a tiny place with silence, perhaps a sound of the rain, open space, some nature and please dear God, flat surfaces. It took me another week to recover from all this climbing (and cold) and that last week of just resting at home was the best part of my vacation. 

Ivica Krajač (1938 -2024)

Just found out a sad news that Ivica Krajač has died. Everybody who was growing up in the 1970s remembers his name, as Krajač was extremely busy and successful lyrics writer for anybody and everybody in Croatian pop music at the time. On every single than-popular pop festival, his name was often quited ceremoniously before the performance - "and now, the song composed by XY with lyrics by Ivica Krajač (and orchestra conducted by Nikica Kalogjera)!"

In a way, his zenith might have been 1970s when local, home-grown music enjoyed particular success and Krajač was particularly versatile as not only lyrics writer but also songwriter himself, serving everybody from peppy Ljupka Dimitrovska to big stars like Drago Diklić, Tereza Kesovija, Gabi Novak and zillion other names. In fact, without him it would be difficult to even imagine our local pop music, since he was one of the most creative people around. Apparently he was also a theatre director, which I didn't know. 

Krajač came to prominence in the late 1950s as one of the founding members of very popular vocal quartet 4 M - they were beloved as mainstream entertainers, but this was way before my time and I struggle to find any appeal in their recorded music. (They even represented Yugoslavia on Eurovision). When the quartet disbanded, Krajač created a name for himself as a songwriter and ever since he was a busy man, serving other singers with either lyrics or music or sometimes both. Basically, he is connected to every artist of his generation. While the posterity might remember him as lyrics writer of countless "schlager" pop hits of 1960s and 1970s, my connection to Krajač is his friendship and collaborations with Karlo Metikoš - as a tandem, they created two rock-operas (Gubec beg and Grička vještica) that I still own on the records and know every single lyric + in 1973 they teamed to create a debut LP album for than 23 years old Josipa Lisac and the result was "Dnevnik jedne ljubavi" (The diary of one love), to this day highly praised and beloved concept album and one of the first rock albums in a country. It was because of his collaborations with Metikoš that I noticed lyrics of Ivica Krajač - I also noticed that he carefully tailored his songs according to performer (very much like Arsen Dedić also did) so he would serve pop fluff to some and highly poetic lyrics to others. Decades ago, when I was young and hopeful journalist, I have actually meet and spoken to him, I still remember how excited I was when he mentioned casually that he still owns rehearsal tapes for both rock operas created with Metikoš - they will probably never be released in public, though I would love to hear how the work was created. 

Bonnie Raitt

 

A very young Bonnie Raitt during her 1976 visit to The Netherlands 

You can read ger interview here