Mr Traas grew up in occupied Holland during WWII, was a member of the Dutch Underground and a Stoottroeper in the Dutch East Indies from 1946 to 1948, and made his home in Canada in 1951. He was surfing the internet and came upon this site and send me a wonderful email offering to share with me some of his information from Indonesia for my website. I was very grateful for the offer because I know there is still much to learn and much to tell. I was surprised when he said that he would have to send me the information by postal mail because I didn't know what it could be that it couldn't be sent by email. On Thursday, March 22nd I received the parcel in the mail.

There are no words to explain how deeply moved I was to find that he was giving me the opportunity to look at a publication "de Stoot", about the 1st battalion Regiment Stoottroepen, 1946-1948. This publication, in four books, is filled with photographs from that time as well as a great deal of information, which to my deep regret I am unable to read and understand, but I can understand the photographs. Because Mr. Traas honoured me by entrusting these precious books to me to go through I will be able to share some of the photographs, with Mr. Traas kindly supplying the translation for the captions in English. He has also sent me some of his own photographs from that time to include on my site as well.

Something very amazing happened while I was going through April 1948 de Stoot, which has the portrait and grave sites of the men who died in Indonesia, and one photograph looked very, very familiar. I went immediately to daddy's wooden box and started looking through the photographs and there is was, the exact same photograph as in the book. Thanks to Mr. Traas I now have one more name to go with a photograph - Otto Moonen - that I can put on my site. I know that since daddy had a photograph of him he must have been special to him in some way.

Mr. Traas thank you for sharing with us.

Clockwise - Marinus Traas, Lijn Rotter, Ries Oosterom and Arie Vermaas.