Leo Cappel Life and Works

13/12/2024

This work is on Trade Me for the first time. All proceeds go to support Karen. Just search for Leo Cappel.

16/11/2024

Titled McKenzie Country, this sculpture celebrates the beautiful scenery of the McKenzie Basin, between Christchurch and Queenstown in the South Island of New Zealand. The braided McKenzie River reaches right outside of the sculpture, because Cappel felt it was wrong to limit painting and works of art to neat picture frames. Mt Cook stands sentinel in the background. This is a sculpture made by someone who loved this land.

McKenzie Country of course gets its name from the Scottish shepherd and convicted sheep rustler James McKenzie, who was sentenced to 5 years in jail and managed to escape 3 times. He only served 9 months and was pardoned to an apparent miscarriage of justice. He went to Australia, never to be seen again in New Zealand.

12/10/2024

Leo Cappel: A Timeless Masterpiece

Discover this captivating 3D wall sculpture by the renowned New Zealand artist, Leo Cappel. Created in 2013, this intricate piece measures 600mm x 400mm x 1200mm and features a delicate wire figure of a naked woman holding up a painting with the word "Maybe" inscribed. The backdrop showcases a lush New Zealand native bush scene, adding depth and context to the artwork.

This stunning sculpture is a testament to Cappel's mastery and his ability to evoke emotion through his art. Don't miss this opportunity to own a piece of New Zealand's artistic heritage.

This exquisite artwork will soon be listed on Trade Me. Stay tuned for more details!

09/02/2024

Part of Alkmaar was not on the sewer yet in those days, but at least the school had proper plumbing. On Wednesday mornings we always met the night cart - which in Holland did the rounds during the day: a big flat horse-drawn cart. Men with leather shoulder pads and aprons took wooden buckets to all the houses and carried the full ones back to the cart. I always wondered what would happen to really big families if one bucket a week was not enough.'

Art is a Serious Business

19/01/2024

In those days nobody had a telephone. Say you wanted to contact Opa in Edam. You might send him a telegram, or you'd get the post office to arrange for a phone call. You had to fill in a form with the name and address of the person you wanted to talk to. The post office then sent a telegram to the post office in Edam, and there they would send someone on a pushbike to tell Opa. Then, at the pre-arranged time, Opa would go to his post office, and you would go to yours. 'Your call has come through,' the postmaster would call out, and you could talk!

Making a call was a complex process.

06/12/2023

Looks like I've been hacked. Sorting now. Please do not accept any new requests from me. They are not from me :(

21/11/2023

Dad had recurring nightmares and early that summer he decided to see a specialist in the hospital in Alkmaar, a small town not far from Bakkum. I attended High School in the same town and one afternoon I saw Dad get off the train just ahead of me. He could hardly walk, stumbling along as if he was ill. They had given him electroshock treatment to help him forget some of the nastier memories.

They had to help so many people, and there was no recovery ward. Just listen to the patients for five minutes, hook them up with the electroshock machine, let them walk back to the railway station, get on the train, and walk home. This happened once a week for the rest of the summer. Afterwards, he still had his nightmares, only he couldn't always remember very clearly what they were about.'
'That must have been horrible.'

'It was. He had horrible memories.'

I remember one day in Amsterdam when he told me he had put his name down for an operation. The Germans had distributed a cyclostyled pamphlet saying that the families of Jewish men who were to have that operation voluntarily would not be transported to the concentration camps. They would change the big black 'J' for Jew stamped on the identity cards everyone had to carry, into a red 'J' instead, so you could prove you had had the operation.
'A simple operation,' Dad said, only he warned me that afterwards, he would get a funny high voice. It was called castration. They would cut off his testicles, and Dad had put his name down.

Fortunately, it didn't happen after all. A man further down our street had gone to the hospital for the same operation, but he never came home. He was sent straight on to a camp. And in the end, the whole scheme was dropped.

Lately, I have told some people about a few of my war experiences. They often asked me if I was scared. No. I was roaring mad at the Germans and their collaborators. But scared? That feeling was somehow switched off and has stayed switched off ever since.
I often was worried about the safety of other people, but my own safety was irrelevant.

Some fear must have been there though, deeply buried. I once got caught up in an air raid on a German convoy. I got angry: those spitfires shouldn't have shot at me, I was on their side! How dared they. Half a century later, when I saw a spitfire at an air show perform the same manoeuvre, it hit me. After all those years the terror suddenly surfaced. For maybe fifteen minutes, then it was gone again. Completely.

Mum and Dad had given me a children's pushbike for my seventh birthday, and on the day in question, I was riding that small bike to get home for my twelfth birthday. Saddle at the highest position and my knees came up on either side of the handlebars. I had spent some months at that very same milkman's home in Castricum, as he had a little more food available just then.

Anyway, I was biking along the open highway. Three Spitfires came flying in just as a German convoy was overtaking me. Those planes are armed with heavy machine guns that shoot through the hollow propeller shaft, so they actually have to aim the whole plane at their target. They circled around once, and then the first one began its dive. As I was taught I crawled into the shallow ditch between the cycle track and the main road, my bike on top of me. As soon as the first Spitfire pulled out of the dive, the second one took over. Each dived three times. Straight at us. The bullets left rows of exploding pockmarks in the asphalt but you couldn't see too much because of the stone dust and other stuff that was flying around. During one of the dives the row of pockmarks came straight towards me, bullets hit the spokes of the rear wheel of my bike on either side of my legs, and then the pockmarks swept back, went across a horse that had been pulling a cart next to me. That was the one thing that scared me: what it did to that horse. But when it was all over, I was only angry. I had to twist the remains of two spokes out of the way and the horse was lying on the road, bleeding, dying. Yes, I was really angry.

Maybe that set a pattern. I may be scared for the safety and welfare of others, but never for myself. I remember a time in Switzerland when my foster parents had taken me for a trip to the top of a mountain. I think it was called the Ebenalp, but that may have been a different mountain. It was really amazing: the footpath went straight into a large cave. At the entrance of the cave was a small church, and deep in the cave was a vertical shaft, a chimney. The footpath actually spiralled up in the shaft and at the top opened onto a sloping meadow. A bit higher up the ground was covered with a thick layer of hard snow, so what did I do? I sat down on the snow and started to toboggan down the slope. My foster parents must have come close to a heart attack then, but it never occurred to me that there was any danger at all. Sure, it was maybe only ten meters to the edge, and sure, from the edge it went down vertically some hundreds of meters, but I only had to dig in my heels to stop myself well before the edge, didn't I? And I did stop myself in time. What's the problem?'

'You must have been crazy! Are you not even scared of dying?'

'No way. I am scared of what it will do to Karen when I die, when she will be left alone, but for myself? Look, I don't know if life after death exists. Millions of people say it does, but how can I know? If, after I die, I'm still aware of something, I'll be happily surprised. If I am not, I won't be there to be disappointed. Either way, there's no reason to be scared, and that means I can feel at peace with it. And anyway, I've got far too much to live for. I've got my family, and that in itself would be enough. Karen, of course, and our kids, our four grandchildren, and now even a great-granddaughter. I already have so many good memories of them. Simple images like the adoring look of 3-year-old Sarah, when she was being driven around by her 6-year-old brother in their toy Jeep. They deserve to have grandparents. I want to see them - and be there for them - as they grow up.

And if that's not enough, I still have my music, my writing, my sculpting. I lived in one of the most beautiful places you can imagine, Kawau Island, with the bush and the sea, with good neighbours and our yacht.

08/11/2023

'I don't remember much of the train ride back to Holland after my stay in Switzerland, but when we arrived in Amsterdam, Dad was waiting at the Central Station. 'Just in time to catch the late evening train home,' he said. That was so special, seeing Dad there, waiting for me. I thought he still looked a bit pale and skinny, but that may just have been the poor lighting on the platform. And it didn't matter anyway. Dad was taking me home.

The postal system in Europe was still rather erratic, and all that time in Switzerland I had received only one postcard. A card that Mum and Dad had sent straight after they received my first letter with the Swiss address. My letter had taken more than two months to get to Holland. Until Dad told me, I didn't even know my parents and the kids had been allowed to go back to our village, to Bakkum. But yes, they had been allowed to live in the same house again, with the old furniture that had been stored in Edam all around them.

It was pretty late when Dad and I got home, and there were Mum and Trudi, standing in the open front door. And that night, for the first time in three years, I slept again in my own bed, in my own room.

I had returned in time for Christmas, the first real family Christmas since the early years of the war. No, that's not true, Tom was still in the hospital, but he was improving. He was almost back to his birth weight, and Mum said she would bring him home shortly, whether the doctors agreed or not. Apart from Tom, everyone was there. Oma had come back from Nijverdaal and she stayed with us for the Christmas days. Uncle Herman, Aunty Greet, and Opa from Edam, were all there under the biggest Christmas tree ever. What more can I say?

In Holland you never gave presents with Christmas, that was reserved for another festival, 'Sint Nicholaas'. But I did bring them presents from Switzerland, to celebrate my homecoming. A big packet of pipe to***co for Dad, chocolate, and a bag of dried mushrooms for Mum and a soft nightie for Trudi. All those things were still severely rationed in Holland. In Switzerland though, the shops were full. To be honest, I can't remember what I brought for my brothers. Most likely some toys. Sorry, some of the details are gone, it's so long ago and I don't want to tell you anything of which my memory is not completely clear.'

'And then you could start a normal life again, Grandpa?'
'I wish it had been that simple, Tracy. No, for one thing, food was still very scarce. Our milkman had a three-wheeled motorbike to deliver milk and there were millions of rabbits in the coastal sand dunes. So, every night he put some chicken wire between the front wheels and drove up and down the road to the beach as fast as he could. Then he drove straight into the bike shed and his brother quickly closed the doors behind him. He always scooped up a few dozen rabbits that way. Early the next morning he would deliver our ration of milk and a fresh rabbit. Great. Only Big Oma wouldn't eat rabbits. She was not orthodox and didn't insist on kosher food, but one time, when she had come to stay with us for a few days, Mum had cooked a beautiful roasted rabbit. Oma was shocked and refused to eat it. Almost everything else would have been fine, but the rabbit was too much.

There were still a lot of unpleasant things, but they are still to come in the next post.

27/08/2023

JOURNEY TO SOMEWHERE

The older people just stood there, trying hard to smile.

'Write to us,' Dad said from behind the rope barrier.

'Of course I will.'

'And don't forget to thank the people who are going to look after you,' added Mum.

'I won't.'

I got a window seat. A window seat, but the platform was on the other side of the train, hidden beyond a corridor full of people. I had so much wanted to wave goodbye to Mum and Dad. See them just one more time.

Ten kids in each compartment. Skinny, war-worn kids with big name tags and little suitcases. Five hundred of us from Amsterdam, and on the way our train will pick up another five hundred from Rotterdam. All were selected by the Red Cross, all of us on our way to Switzerland.

The boy facing me adjusts his nametag. 'Hendrik de Waal' it says. 'How old are you?' he asks.

'Twelve. And you?'

'Thirteen. I'll be fourteen next month.' He looks away again. One of the smaller kids, a girl, takes a book out of her suitcase. A book with large letters and pictures. She doesn't turn the pages for a long time.

I notice a bronze plaque above the window: NO SMOKING.

I keep staring at that plaque, reading it forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards. It helps me to switch off, to stop thinking.

NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON

A woman with a blue armband pushes a trolley along the corridor. She opens our door: 'Breakfast. A bread roll and a cup of milk.' Afterwards, Hendrik crumples up his paper cup and squeezes it into the ashtray under the narrow window. One of the girls throws her cup into the luggage net above her head and the last milk drips out, into her hair. Nobody laughs.

Mum and Dad must be home again by now. Mum will be getting Trudi out of bed and my little brothers. She'll tell them to put the towels back on the rail and to brush their teeth. And Dad will be putting the plates on the table for breakfast. The plate with the geese for Trudi, the one with the rabbit, and the other one with the sheep for my little brothers. No plate for me - - -

NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON

We don't stop all that long in Rotterdam. Five hundred more kids. Now there are exactly one thousand of us. It doesn't feel real. Only our little compartment is real.

A woman with a Red Cross armband looks in. 'You kids all right?'

I begin to think of them as armbands. Not people.

An orange armband pulls open the door: 'Toilets at both ends of the carriage, but no running in the corridor.'

The train is moving very slowly. Because of land mines, Hendrik says. Later on, there'll be hills, real hills. I don't think Trudi would like that: she likes open country, where you can see the horizon. Trudi never liked Amsterdam. Mum didn't either. Mum - - -

NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON

An orange armband opens our door: 'We'll be at the Belgian border shortly. If you want to go to the toilet, you'd better go now. Once the customs officers are on the train you're not allowed out of your compartment.' Nobody moves.

The train stops. A lot of men in uniforms, black, green, and blue, move up and down the corridor. One comes in, a big bundle of papers in his hands. He counts us, writes something down, and leaves again, slamming the door behind him.

Nothing happens.

One of the kids says: 'I need to go to the toilet.'

Another says: 'You can't. We're not allowed.'

'I know.' She sits there, knees tight together.

Again one of the men in uniform comes in to count us. Still ten of us, what does he think?

Now I'm in a strange land. Shortly I'll see those hills Dad talked about. Mum and Dad went to Belgium once, before the war. Dad - - -

NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON

No smoking, it says. I smell the smoke from the engine, smoke and steam.

A blue armband comes in, and brings our lunch. Sandwiches and a paper cup of soup. 'You're in Belgium now,' she says. 'With a bit of luck, we'll get to France tonight.'

With a bit of luck? I doze off, glad of my window seat. The train jolts to a stop, and starts again, waking me up. Outside are the hills. Big. Much bigger than I expected. Trees are growing all over them and enormous rocks are sticking up through the grass. Rocks as big as a house, bigger even.

Dad had told me real mountains are easily ten times as big as the hills in Belgium. Ten times? How could they stay up? And Dad had said there is no flat land at all in Switzerland, only mountains. Mountains everywhere. Scary.

Nobody talks. Sometimes an armband walks through the corridor, but they don't look into our little compartment.

Dinner is a mash of potatoes and beans. On paper plates and with a kind of flat wooden spoon. Like an ice cream spoon, but three times as big. Is that how people in Belgium eat?

It begins to get dark outside. The train slowly zigzags between the hills. If I keep my head very close to the window I can see the two locomotives whenever the track curves to the right. Sometimes there is a bright red glow from the locomotives against the clouds of grey smoke. The hills look black now. Are they bigger than before? The sound of the wheels changes. We're going over a bridge. Big, big rocks down there. And deeper yet? What is there? Nothing, just empty darkness.

Sometime during the night, I wake up. The train has stopped and customs officers are walking up and down the corridor. One opens our door and says something I can't understand. French? Are we in France now? I fall asleep again.

The French hills are different and bigger, no more large rocks sticking up out of the ground. Breakfast is different too. Tastes all right though.

All the kids want to go to the toilet at the same time, so an orange armband tells us to go back to our own compartment and wait. 'One compartment at a time,' he says. Ours has the seventh turn.

I fall asleep again, and wake up for lunch. Nobody says anything. The only sound that never stops is the slow rhythmical thrumming of the wheels.

France is boring. The hills look like enormous dunes. The train is going very slowly again. More land mines? Sometimes we come past burned-out houses, but mostly it just looks like ordinary farmland. What would Mum and Dad - - -

NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON

Again it gets dark. Again I fall asleep, the kid beside me sagging against my shoulder.

Another border, customs officers, another large railway station. Basel. This must be Switzerland!

They take us to a large hall with a concrete floor and showers along one wall. More showers than I've ever seen before. An endless line of them, all close together. No partitions, just showers. We are told to undress. Boys, girls, everyone. We undress completely and wash ourselves in those showers. Nurses and men in white coats inspect every one of us. Most of us are allowed to get dressed again, some have their hair cut off first. For all to see. All their hair. Everywhere.

We are loaded into busses, a whole fleet of them. It's way past midnight and Basel is deserted. No people around, but all the street lighting is on and the shop windows are all ablaze with lights.

A building like an enormous warehouse, filled from one end to the other with bunks, three high.

We sleep.

And wake up to a breakfast of bread rolls and cheese.

Into another building yet, all thousand of us.

'Now line up under those large letters. Children whose surname starts with A under the sign A and so on. Hurry up, please.'

A lady with slightly grey hair looks at my nametag. She nods, points at herself, and says 'Frau Willy-Kern.' The Red Cross armband next to her nods too. 'Frau Willy-Kern will be your foster mother for as long as you live here in Switzerland. You go with her now. All the best.'

'Thank you,' I whisper.

Frau Willy-Kern takes my suitcase, and gestures to follow her. We go back to the railway station. She has brought little bread rolls with ham and a lot of cheese. And she gives me real chocolate with nuts. I can't understand a word of what she is saying, but somehow that doesn't matter.

Her house is really large, white, with dark brown woodwork all over.

Frau Willy-Kern shows me a booklet like a small dictionary in three columns. Her own language; Dutch and how to pronounce the Dutch words.

'Are you hungry?' she tries to say.

'No, you don't pronounce it like that.'

She clearly does not understand me.

'Do you have to go to the bathroom?' she reads off, again in Dutch.

'Yes, that's how you say it,' I tell her. 'We'll be able to talk together yet.'

She shows me where the bathroom is. And my bedroom.

The house is a little way up a slope next to the village. And beyond the village stands a mountain. A beautiful mountain, glowing red in the light of the setting sun. So beautiful. I don't know how far away the mountain is, but it feels like I can almost touch it.

Frau Willy-Kern says that the mountain is called Säntis.

Säntis.

From my bed, I can see the mountain. Protecting me. Guarding me.

Säntis, standing there like a sentinel.

20/07/2023

The newly liberated Netherlands:

Straight after we were liberated Uncle Herman began to teach me the gentle art of water colouring. Six weeks later I thought I was doing all right for a twelve-year-old. However, being sent to Switzerland put a stop to my serious art studies until I entered the Rietveld Academy. I didn’t really mind: Switzerland would give me plenty of memories to work with later on.

A few weeks after liberation the authorities organized a so-called spontaneous sing-in. All ten schools had to assemble in the playground and sing some carefully selected psalms and patriotic songs. We all thought it was stupid, but we had no choice.

I had got more than a little interested in a girl in my class, Lucie Rinkel, and she came to stand next to me during that sing-in. Like Greetje earlier on, Lucie sang beautifully, even those boring psalms. I always felt attracted to musical girls with dark hair. Anyway, some weeks later all the sixth-year kids from those schools had to assemble in the gym and our names were read out one after the other. Some were told that they had to do the last year once more, but to most of us, the man said: 'You have now passed the entrance exam for High School. Congratulations.' And we were allowed to go home.

Just like that. I didn't know anything about exams; I had hardly been to school at all those last years. But I had passed an exam which none of us had ever sat. Things were crazy then. Lucie passed her exam too, but I never saw her again.

I spent a lot of time at Uncle Herman's apartment. He had taught himself to do little oil paintings while he was in hiding, and he showed me how to do watercolours.

He had an air rifle, so I did hours of target practice in their bedroom.

And I sang. The old folk songs, school songs, anything I could think of I sang. The Dutch national anthem 'Wilhelmus' has 15 verses. Most people knew only the three verses which were sung on official occasions, but I knew them all. Another favourite song of mine was 'It's a long way to the prairie,' as I had learned it from the Canadians. I only knew the first two lines and fitted those to the whole melody.

I know now it's 'to Tipperary', but at the time I didn't speak English, only a few words I picked up from the soldiers. And I knew the word prairie from a book by Karl May. You know, about those Indians like Winnetou.

It was a time of enormous contrasts. At times we felt pretty good. Especially after we got a letter from Oma that she was alive and healthy and that she would come home as soon as public transport was restored. 'Not long now, maybe only a few months,' she wrote.

But the list of people who were confirmed dead was growing. My friend, who had been picked up in a razzia, was on that list, and Dad's cousin Dries, whom I had visited in his hiding place, and Oma's brother Uncle Henri P***k, and the chemist lady who had hidden Oma and Uncle Herman.

Nowadays, sixty years later, I come close to crying for the misery of other people, and sometimes music makes me cry. I never cried for my friend, or for any of the others. I never could. When they died in the gas chambers, my ability to cry died with them.

Tom was still in the hospital in a special room with several more babies, and I was only allowed to look at him through the window in the door. It would be at least six months, they told us, before they could give any real hope that he might survive. By then I would be in Switzerland.

11/07/2023

After liberation day people from the resistance movement, the underground as we called it, appeared out in the open, and others, who had been 'wrong' didn't show themselves. Some young women suddenly took to wearing scarves around their heads: young women who had befriended German soldiers. They had been dragged out of their homes by their neighbours, and had their heads shaved. We thought it was rather funny: nobody else would dream of going outside with anything even vaguely resembling a scarf.

The Germans stole our food, and the Canadians stole our hearts

02/06/2023

A camping trip to Belgium and France in 1953 forced Leo to look at Germans in a different light, although one person told him that he wished the war had lasted longer so they could have finished the 'Final Solution'.

But made me realise there had been good Germans in WWII too