"I came here to Bonteheuwel when I was seven years old. My father was a soldier. He was a prisoner of war in Germany after the Second World War. We weren’t very rich. We were 11 children but some of them died and there are only seven of us left. I am 56 now. We used coal stoves then. All the houses in Bonteheuwel had coal stoves – those with the coal chimneys, those types of houses. We had to gather wood because we didn’t have money to buy wood and such things because the old man didn’t earn much. He received an army pension. And my mother suffered from a bad heart. My father was a strange man because he came from the war and wasn’t a very normal father. We weren’t allowed to talk loudly, and we had to go to bed early and that type of thing. And we couldn’t play music at home. I had to go to my friends to listen to music. His one leg was amputated. And he always told us stories about his prisoner of war days. Sometimes he would stop because it was too traumatising for him. He said that in Tobruk they shot people and hung the children from the windows and so on. He couldn’t get over that, so then he drank. And a father that drinks is something else.

My mother had a bad heart and she was very soft. She allowed him to treat us like that because she couldn’t stop him. You couldn’t open your mouth, we were scared of him, to tell you the truth. We did love him, but I was fearful of him. At Christmas, when it was time for carols, then we marched around the table singing, all of us. And then I met my husband when I was 22 and I reckoned I had to get out of the house." 

- Maria Julius, "These are the things that sit with us"