Digital Storytelling - Part 2

    My father was 3 when WW 2 began and has vivid memories of the bombing of Rotterdam that no young child should ever have.   "In war....there are no children...", says my father in a letter that he wrote to my oldest son for his high school graduation gift.   I had asked my dad for years to write down some of his memories of what life was like growing up in the Netherlands and then immigrating to Canada when he was 10 but he kept putting it off.  I could never understand why he wouldn't write down his experiences until he gave my son the letter.   After reading his letter, I cried for now that I knew how difficult and scared my dad must have been as a child growing up in a war.       
     The 5th graders in our school are studying the 1940's and WW 2 in their history classes and many of my students know that my father grew up in the Netherlands during that time and ask me if I know what it was like.   I have told the students snippets but I never felt I could do his story justice until I realized I could use digital storytelling to tell my father's story.  
     I began by collecting the photos I have of my father and his childhood. There are not many photos of his childhood.  Certainly no photos of him as a baby.  The youngest photo is his kindergarten picture and a photo of him with his teachers and classmates.  The other photos - his family on the ship that brought him to Canada, a family photo where my father looks so serious and candid photos of his siblings.  All of these photos tell a story, but the photos that mean the most to me are the photos of my father when he lived at Kluntz Zoo after the war when he was 9 -11 which was one of the happiest times in my father's childhood.  
     My father was 3 when war began and 8 when the war ended.  From preschool to 3rd grade he experienced a childhood of fighting, fear and hunger.   Of all of the memories of war being hungry all the time seems to stand out more than fear of the Germans.  I created this video so you could hear his story.....

In War....There Are No Children....