Monday, January 20, 2020
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Frits and I have been friends since as far back as 1955. Frits was a favourite guest for my mother in our apartment in Amsterdam and became part of the household. We studied together, spent our holidays together hitch-hiking through Europe and dish washing in Sweden. In 1960 we happened to travel home on our own, and then Frits met Donna ….. I guess that most of you know their subsequent history together: a year in Beverwijk, a small Dutch town, where Frits started working as a reporter for Het Vrije Volk, a leading social-democrat journal. After that it became and remained Canada. I have great respect for the career Frits made as a journalist and author of the daily editorial in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record!
We met later on occasionally here and there, and we wrote long annual letters, annual reports rather. These reports became more and more dominated by our growing ages and their painful by-products. However: he concluded always with positive and optimistic words. The more it shocked me, and it saddens me that Frits finally could not cope anymore with these pains of getting old.
I cherish my memories from long ago, but both Loes, my wife, and I remember him also when the four of us toured a few years ago through the streets of Beverwijk, through those of Amsterdam where he spent his youth, and when we walked through the centre of ‘his’ city. Similarly Frits and I managed a few years ago to find our way to a cup of coffee somewhere in another Dutch town, Delft, where his sister Tonny and her husband Roel lived. Frits did a lot talking at all these occasions, as usual.
Now we can only convey our sadness to Donna, to their children and grandchildren and tell them that we will miss him.
Hans Schenk
