Aaltje Berry posing for a Co-op ad for groceries
- Credit: Supplied by Howard Berry
A Welwyn Garden City grandmother who escaped the Nazis and worked with the Red Cross during World War II has died at the age of 97.
Dutch-born Aaltje Berry was employed by a British ship manufacturer at the outbreak of the First World War when the owners just left as German troops approached the Netherlands.
Without work and in a precarious home situation, her family had little money, she found work through an uncle in Berlin. During this time, her parents were hiding people in their attic on an Amsterdam street with the police right outside.
with this other child s body, along with a dog inside the residence. you can look it up. it s a log cabin style. it has a three-car attached garage. it was completely engulfed in flames. but that doesn t mean that all the evidence was burned. i ve been a volunteer firefighter for 18 years. so working on the scene of a lot of arson cases, when fire marshals go in there, they work from the least amount of damage to the most amount of damage to dig up all those clues. it breaks my heart. investigators say it s a needle in a haystack. this is a guy who runs the a amber alert program. this man could be anywhere with this girl. we heard her father say, if you get a chance to run, you know, do that. she has to be horrified. she has to be just beside herself, not sure what to do. this is a man that she trusted, someone she turned to. has even been described as a second father to her. you know, it s said the children
working under and that he may ultimately just be trying to get his words out and this is all about getting the death penalty here. what other reaction did you hear yesterday, scott? well, i think this really highlights one of the challenges of trying this case in a military court. i mean, here you have a lawyer who is still a member of the united states army, a soldier. ethically, it would be very difficult for him to stand up in this case and say my client was justified in doing this because he was fighting a war to protect the taliban as hasan suggested in one of his pretrial statements. so the lawyers are in a tough spot here. they really at the same time, they don t want to see this case appealed down the road, you know, on an argument he wasn t represented adequately, but they really can t make the argument on hasan s behalf that he seems to want to make, which is that he switched sides as he said yesterday to protect islam. well, scott, thank you again and your excellent re
he ll cross examine them and this continued hardship you ve reported on, scott. right, tamron. we interviewed howard for our stories. we ve interviewed other family members. we hear the same thing. they re frustrated with how long it s taken to bring this case to trial, more than three and a half years. they feel the judges have gone out of their way to make accommodations for delays. they re frustrated with the fact that major hasan remains on the army payroll, has made, as we reported, about $300,000 since his arrest in the shooting. the victims, mean while, have not been awarded purple heart medals and combat benefits that they feel they deserve, the way other soldiers were awarded after attacks overseas and after the 9/11 attack on the pentagon. i don t know if you had a chance to talk with any of the families or victims who survived yesterday, but as i asked howard, hearing hasan in court take claim for this and maybe some of the tactics that he is
constantly. the army was a safe place. the fact that he had been described to me as a highly effective and a motivated noncommissioned officer that performed very well and, you know, he thrived. he was very proud to serve our country. the shooting on that day just it took away a safe place. he had nothing he could find no peace after that day. i just wish that more had been done to help him. scott, let me bring you in. you heard howard say his son could find no peace. he took his own life february 13th, 2013. there are others who still can t find peace. they re here and they are struggling to get the benefits they and so many others including lawmakers believe they deserve. we re watching this circus atmosphere around hasan and the trial while they struggle if