Translating my Grandfather’s biograpy
November 17, 2024 9 minute read
My grandfather, Dr Kornelis Sietsma was a Dutch Reformed Church minister in wartime Amsterdam. He preached in ways that offended the Nazi occupiers, and they deported him to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died.
This was a fascinating family history to me growing up - I was named after my grandfather, and his heroic attitude and tragic death informed my view of the world.
Now I have kids of my own, and I started thinking about how I could explain their great-grandfather to them. I knew quite a few broad facts, but hadn’t dug into the specific details. Also information about him is scattered all over the place, and is mostly in dutch - there’s a dutch Wikipedia article for example, but no English one. I thought it’d be good to start building something I could put on the sietsma.com website.
One important source I knew of was a short biography, written by a colleague of Dr Sietsma in 1946. It was titled “Een Waarlijk Vrie” which translates as “a Truly Free person” - and I already had translation made by my Uncle Arie in the 1990s. I thought of just putting that online, however, looking at it, it was quite wordy and hard to read. I could have cleaned it up and simplified it, but I didn’t feel confident just altering his translation, I thought it’d be good to cross-check it against the original dutch text.
