My name is Marcel Leereveld. I'm 104 years old. I'm presenting the Esperanto show on radio station 3ZZZ I never heard of Esperanto, but my grandfather had Esperanto was taught in a radio program. He went to all his children, and all his grandchildren, and told them, not asked them... He told them, you have to start learning Esperanto on the radio. We lived in Amsterdam, very close to the center of the city, which is beautiful. Four canals that have been dug around the center. From there, I could see the famous Westertoren, which is a church. My father was an artist, but not so much in painting, but in wood carving. My mother didn't work because women didn't work in those days. I took my bicycle and went and followed, more or less, the Tour de France but not in the high mountains of course. And for five months I did that. Half way, I met girlfriend who became betrothed to me. Violeta was her name. But she lived in France and I lived in Amsterdam in Holland, being a Dutchman. We just wrote letters to each other. At the end of the war, she was influenced by an old woman. And it often happens in France. The old women in France, they feel that they have to make everybody a practising Christian. So she was worked on to become a church goer. A believer. And so she wrote me that she had become a Christian. And then I said, "Well, in that case, I break off relations with you because you either have to love Jesus or me". When I was a young boy, I was a communist because I was against capitalism. But then later I changed my ideas and thought communism is too dictatorial as it is in communist countries. And then I thought, no, it is better to live in anarchist society, but everybody is free to do what he likes. Later, after that, I got hooked by the ideas of Karl Marx, who was called a communist. And he was, but he was not a communist as the 'party communist'. The party communists are dictatorial. You all have to obey the party. And on the other hand, a Karl Marx communism was society all living together to depend on people discussing things and deciding things together in meetings. And so I became an adapt and still am of that political ideal. Well, the Germans, they first bombarded the whole inner city of Rotterdam. Very cruel, but then Rotterdam was not a very beautiful city. The Germans said the next town we are going to obliterate will be Utrecht. And the day after that, we will obliterate the centre of Amsterdam, which is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. So the Dutch government didn't want that. They fled to England and said well we won't fight anymore after five days of fighting. So they let the Germans in and then the Germans occupied Holland, and then we lived according to their rules. And of course one of the rules was that young people, unmarried women and married or not men... These people had to work in Germany, in factories and other places. Most people thought it better to hide and I too. And so we just kept hiding during the whole war, behind walls or underground or wherever you could hide. But they found lots of us. And then the Jews, they especially were after the Jews. And the Communists, they had killed them all already. The wealthy Dutch farmers, they sold their food, plenty of food, but they wanted gold and silver for it. But the poor, to get reasonably priced food from farmers, you had to go to the poor farmers because they were helpful and they didn't charge that much. But I couldn't do that because I couldn't be on the road and the Germans would have stopped me and sent me away. So the women had to do that or my old father had to go on their bicycles to where the poor farmers lived and my wife, when she was only a few weeks expecting a baby, she still went on her bicycle to to get food to eat. My wife became my wife not out of love, but it was a forced marriage. That was at the end of the war. My wife was one of those girls that had made friends with the German soldiers. And these people were going to be heavily punished after the war by the Dutch underground. So for her it would be good to get married and have a child quickly so that they wouldn't punish her in public. And I hadn't been able to find a woman, a wife, for all those years, partly because I wasn't sexually capable so my sister made sure that I got in contact with my wife to marry, just to marry, for necessity for both. And that was not so difficult to get to know each other because both of us were studying self defence in a township there. We got married and we straightaway had a child. I didn't want a child actually, but she did, to hold off the Dutch underground. At one stage we had sex and I must say after not having been able to have sex in the past I could have sex with her. And so I had sex in the bushes close by where we lived. And she just said that she couldn't be pregnant because it was a certain time of her, how do you call it? But that is why I got a first child because my wife lied about it. The first year, perhaps, or half a year, we had good relations, plenty of sex and and it was still war. Still war then. Didn't love each other but loved the sex. Then when the child came, a boy, we became closer but I made advances to another girl that I had loved before. A friend of ours. That was very bad for her [Alida] to take, but there was another [male] friend there who, the next day, went to [Alida's] house at 11:00 and had sex with her then, after having confidence that I was no good. And obviously I was no good because I had tried to advance with the other girl. And so he had sex there with [Alida] at 11:00 every day for four or five years with her without me knowing it. So she had plenty of sex and I didn't... Yes I did. I had sex with [Alida] but she later told me she never had any - how do you call it - sexual feelings for me, and just let me have my sex with her and... and so we lived in different worlds. Well all the same, for 75 years, I stayed with her as her husband and she as my wife. [...] but she had boyfriends, sometimes even girlfriends and for the 70 years that we were married and that our children grew up. [...] long before she died though I already had my own girlfriends. No, we didn't have a good marriage, but we we had a good life often and we enjoyed the travelling together. We travelled together and had fun together. When the children were born they were very happy days. When I see my grandchildren and great grandchildren now, they are very happy days. We had a fulfilling life in that respect too, with our offspring. We thought at that time in Holland and Europe that there would be another world war very soon between Russia and the rest of Europe, and we didn't want our children to have to suffer that. So that was another reason to go to to Australia. When we were a few kilometres outside Australia still. We couldn't see it yet. The ship was still too far away, but we were closing in and we could nearly see it, but not yet but we could smell Australia. The wind came from the coast and Australia smelled, all the flowers growing there, and all that smell came to the ship and we could smell Australia before we saw it. Well, when we arrived, I went just looking for jobs all over the place. And did quite a few different jobs. I had been working in a factory where they where they put, at that time, when they filled in large bags with wool to be sent overseas, that wool had to be stamped in. You know, the idiots, nowadays they say, "Oh, all those people that don't work, they don't want to work, they are lazy". That's not true. Because at that time there was plenty of work and everybody, everybody wanted to work. Nobody was lazy then and the people haven't changed. At the end of the year, we travelled and moved with our furniture to Hobart to live in a house relevant to the school where I was going to teach. I am not a born teacher. I am not very interested in teaching. I manage all right, but I am not that interested and I'm not interested enough in my pupils either. I'm interested in the scientific side of languages. When we came to Melbourne, we thought life, everything, was 50 years behind Europe. When we came to Hobart we thought Hobart was 50 years behind Melbourne. It was very old fashioned, everything. In the controversy between China and the United States which will be the main war, America has always managed to not have the war on its soil. So what they have done in this case is Japan and Australia will be places from where they, the United States, they will attack China, with the result that the Chinese will concentrate on annihilating Japan and Australia. And this is all because we have a stupid system of, well of being a colony of the United States. We are not independent. We should be independent. And besides that we have a head of state who is, who can decide whether to have a war or not. And then we have China who wants to punish us too for helping America. That's why I think, especially in Australia, and Japan, we'll have a hard life and I wouldn't suggest having children. My name is Marcel, after the painter "Marcel" in the opera Bohème by Puccini. My parents loved opera. And I do too. I've seen hundreds of operas. I have tapes of music and mainly singing in operas covering 2,000 hours of music.