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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.
Thanks To
Maia Hansen, Helden Leereveld
Marcel Leereveld
"better to live in an anarchist society"
104 years and speaking candidly about love, life and relationships
Centenarian Marcel shares stories about his life and his open marriage with refreshing honesty and openness.
He lived his early years in Amsterdam, toured France on his bicycle in the 1930s where he fell in love with a French woman, then had to hide from the Germans for the duration of WW2.
After the War he was forced to marry before migrating to Australia.
At 104 years, he continues to present his live-to-air Esperanto radio program and has fascinating insights about the future of the World.
Age in Video
104 yearsDate of Birth
4th December 1917Place of Birth
Amsterdam, NetherlandsThanks To
Maia Hansen, Helden Leereveld