Our Year 11 ATAR English students took an excursion to Fremantle College recently for an author talk with a difference.
Hetty Verolme is 88-years-old, her book The Children’s House of Belsen was published in 2000 and won The Fellowship of Australian Writers Christina Stead Award that year. The judges said: “The Children’s House Of Belsen is such an outstanding book that the judges had no hesitation in awarding it first prize. This is an important, moving and beautifully written book and deserves to become a classic – in terms of its importance as testimony and the quality of its prose, it bears comparison with The Diary of Anne Frank.”
In 2010 Fremantle Press published Hetty: A True Story an abridged version of Hetty’s early book aimed at a younger audience.
Hetty was born in Belgium in 1930 and was sent to Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany, when she was 13-year-old. She migrated to Australia when she was 24 and has lived here ever since gaining great success in business as well as with her books.
The North Lake students loved meeting Hetty and were really touched by what she had to say.
