OPEN TURNS

From Dutch Girl to New Australian - A Memoir

A new memoir by award winning author Hendrika de Vries

Meet the Author

Hendrika de Vries is a retired family therapist, a teacher and writer. Her life experiences with oppression and resistance in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam; migration, competitive swimming, and misogyny in 1950s Australia, and feminism in the US, infuse her writing with historical depth and personal perspective on challenges facing women and anyone deemed inferior. She is the author of When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew, award-winning memoir of her WWII childhood. A mother, grandmother and great grandmother, she lives with her husband Harlan on the Santa Barbara Riviera, CA.

“Intentions are like prayers; you send them out into the universe and if you pay attention they return as destiny.”

Hendrika's Other Book

When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew…
by Hendrika de Vries

Born in the Netherlands at a time when girls are to be housewives and mothers and nothing else, Hendrika de Vries is a “daddy’s girl” until her father is deported from Nazi-occupied Amsterdam to a POW camp in Germany and her mother joins the Resistance. In the aftermath of her father’s departure, Hendrika watches as freedoms formerly taken for granted are eroded with escalating brutality by men with swastika armbands who aim to exterminate those they deem “inferior” and those who do not obey.

As time goes on, Hendrika absorbs her mother’s strength and faith, and learns about moral choice and forced silence. She sees her hidden Jewish “stepsister” betrayed, and her mother interrogated at gunpoint. She and her mother suffer near starvation, and they narrowly escape death on the day of liberation. But they survive it all—and through these harrowing experiences, Hendrika discovers the woman she wants to become.