“Seeing the Nazi soldiers and all that leaving Holland after 5 years of misery and occupation – that’s the happiest memory of my life. Five years of constant never knowing where you’re at… They put my parents in a concentration camp for a couple of months, nothing to eat for a long time and you couldn’t go outside in the streets so you couldn’t go to high school…

I was caught 3 times by SS soldiers, twice I got away and the third time they got me at gunpoint so luckily somebody said ‘I’ll go get your father.’ My father spoke fluent German so he went to the SS man and said “what do you think you’re doing?”  And he said ‘he’s got to go to the bunkers on the coast and build concrete bunkers there.” My father said “Well, I’ve got news for you, he’s not even allowed there, because he’s an American citizen.”

Holland was completely stripped of everything, so everything had to start off from the ground up. Well after a few years I didn’t see any purpose any more to stay there. And I said ‘well if you go back to America the Korean War is just going on there’ and I had already got my papers from the American Army to be drafted. So I thought if I finish up in Korea I’ll get killed there for nothing. So I go to Australia instead, and that’s why I’m here.

I paint international water colour and acrylic portraits. I never had proper tuition until a couple of years back, someone living in Bundanoon, I got in touch with him and he said ‘if you’ve got anything I’ll bring it out in you,’ and he did and the result is still hanging around.”