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Inspired by true events, Corrie and the Rose Accordion is a heart-rending story of a family set in the middle of Hitler’s war in The Netherlands. The book spans from 1938 when little Corrie is only four years old, during a time when the Dutch were very well aware of what was brewing in Germany. Though neutral, some of the Dutch did not trust Hitler and watched as he systematically walked into surrounding countries to expand the German Lebensraum.
Suddenly, in early May of 1940, Germany invaded Holland and bombed the city of Rotterdam as a tragic warning, changing Corrie’s life forever. The Dutch royalty and government left for England and stood by helplessly as Hitler placed his representative, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, as the commissioner in charge of all the Netherlands.
Corrie’s father, Henk Gelauf, is a labourer and an accordionist, and is a one of 16 children in the close-knit Gelauf family. Henk is married to Cornelia Elizabeth van Ijsden and they have two daughters and a son-little Corrie, her sister Beppie (two years older), and her brother Pietje, (four years older). But the war shattered their peaceful and basically happy existence as the Nazis steadily and systematically changed their day to day existence.
Rationing, and the seizing of the Dutch peoples’ resources, left the Dutch in sometimes dire circumstances. Little Corrie’s family felt it the hardest: already just making ends meet, Henk lost his job and while still working in the reserves, Corrie’s mother and her siblings were uprooted from their home to make room for a German officer, leaving only with what they could carry on their backs.
Henk returned home to find he had no home and finally located his family at his father’s house, the Gelauf patriarch, Piet Senior.
Finally, after six months, they received orders to move into a tiny house in a small back alley off Spinozastraat. Conditions worsened as they witnessed the seizing of Jewish friends and neighbours, and even more so, after the Nazis seized their father as slave labor.
Henk’s red accordion adorned with a mesmerizing pattern of roses on its bellows, became an unlikely symbol of hope for little Corrie and her family, who passionately believed he would return alive so long as they kept the accordion safe. But will he when so many do not?
As the war dragged on and worsened, their mother was close to dying of disease, starvation and malnutrition. Pietje, Corrie’s brother, took over the caring for the family and the children bravely choose starvation and possible death rather than bartering their father’s prized accordion for food.
Instead, defying a strict life-threatening curfew, the children secretly crept nightly into the dead of night to scrounge for scraps of food, potato peels, and bits of coal, all the while hiding from the Nazi patrols.
Corrie and the Rose Accordion is an unforgettable testament to the remarkable will and courage these children showed during Hitler’s brutal and senseless war in one of the world’s worst-hit cities of World War II.
