Personal Narrative: My Interview With Aaltje Hansl

In my Interview I interviewed my grandma Aaltje Hansell. My grandma’s family lived in the Netherlands during the Second World War. Aaltje was not alive during the war but she experienced the aftermath of the war through her parents and their struggles adjusting after such a traumatic experience. When Aaltje was three years old her parents emigrated. This interview was important because I got to learn more about my family and the conflict they went through to give me the life I have today. Although the people in Hiroshima and my family went through separate conflicts I was surprised to learn that they cooped in many of the same ways.

During world war two the Netherlands was right in the middle. Germany invaded Holland on May 10th, 1940. The

Her father stayed in France at the slave camp for two to three years. He felt lucky because he was doing something he loved which was gardening except that he was growing food for the German army. The prisoners were not fed any of the food they grew and were fed very little. After his time in the slave labor camp he returned to his home town in southern Holland, but she never learned how. He did not return back to his family, instead he met her mother near the end of the war. Soon after the war ended they had two children, Dirk and Aaltje. Her parents continued to work even harder to make a better life for themselves and for their children. They knew they had to leave the country to make a better life for the family. They then applied to emigrate to South Africa and Canada, and were accepted into both. Her mother refused to go to South Africa because there were tribal up rises at that time and she was told she would have to carry a gun. “After having seen so much death and tragedy around her during the war she knew this was something she could not do.” (Personal