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Translating my Grandfather’s biograpy

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.

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. I did have to do a lot of manual work as well - mostly things like handling unusual letter pairs like ij, and long words split at line endings with hyphens. I also added maps and images, and quite a few explanatory footnotes, some based on Claude’s notes and some where I thought a phrase might not be obvious to a younger audience, not brought up on terms like “National Socialism”.

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