Dear Friends,

1995 was a very important year in my life. In fact I met my sweet Nancy already in 1994. It was love at first sight. We were together in action in politic movement. We were fighting for justice, for the poor, for legalisation of cannabis, for everything we knew that went wrong in Belgium. I left the Green Party in 1994 and joined a new movement. It had nothing to do with ideas, but the leading lady in Antwerp of the Green Party was very greedy, in fact a crook and a alcoholic. She was very two-faced. Going to meetings she left her Volvo behind the corner and arrived on her bike. Most of Belgian politicians are alcoholics. Here they vote not the one who promises most, but who boozes most.

1995 I played my dream-play, together with sweet Nancy. Her character was my daughter in that play. I wrote it and played the main character. But the same year I played for the same company “The Fool of Rekem”.

In a second-hand bookshop I found a very small book, in fact too long to make a monologue from it. It was the first and maybe only monologue in three acts. It lasted 45 minutes. The book was written by a history-professor from the university of Gent. It is the story of Louis Naelaerts and that is what I want to tell you. According to my turbulent life, I had to flight too many times. So several times I lost almost everything. I lost even that book and have to mention now what is still in my memory. My own text is also missing.

Louis was born in 1912. He was still a minor when he was arrested for stealing small things and homelessness, what at that time was still a crime in Belgium.  His father asked the judge to incarcerate him in a severe re-education centre. That was Rekem, a small place at the Dutch border in Limburg. He never had a decent trial.

In the beginning of the war (1940) Louis escaped from the forensic psychiatry in Rekem. The Gestapo picked him up in the Netherlands and brought him to a concentration camp. He survived the whole war there. He helped several important prisoners. Among them the mayor of Wilrijk, near Aartselaar where Louis came from. After the war these important people pleaded for Louis without any result, because of the separation of the forces in Belgium. That means the so-called justice cannot be controlled by government or parliament.

All the others who survived the concentration camps got a remuneration from the Belgian government. Louis war arrested again, brought back to Rekem, punished for being escaped. He wrote a small book to obtain a review of the arrest, without any result. The organisations for politic prisoners who survived concentration camps did utmost their best, without any result. The mayor of Wilrijk...

In Rekem Louis was placed under severe control, isolated, etc.

Several years later he could escape again. He went to France and lived a normal life in Lourdes a well-known pilgrim-resort.

I asked the professor in 1995 if I could visit him in Lourdes, but the professor told me the situation of Louis’ heart did not stand too strong emotions anymore. I don’t know when he died. But it is important to keep his memory alive. These things still happen in Belgium. And nobody knows.