Jakob (these days known as Jaap) Liek was born in 1929 in Zonnemaire, a village
on Schouwen-Duiveland, the northern island of Zealand (a southwestern
province of the
Netherlands).
His father was one
of two carpenters in the village. Later on Jaap bicycled daily 10 km
to Zierikzee, the most important (medieval) town on the island,
to visit the secondary school (HBS, high school). In February 1944, the German
occupation forces ordered that the island be flooded. The family had to leave
the island and landed (by fishing-boat) as refugees in Yerseke, a place on
the Eastern Scheldt river, famous for its mussels, oysters and lobsters. As was
typical
in the Netherlands, Jaap did not like the Germans at that time. Therefore
he was very happy when in October
1944 the village was liberated by Canadians.
In 1948 Jaap finished
high school and had to leave Zealand for further education at a technical college
(MTS) in Dordrecht. There he got his certificate in
1952. His first job was at the Rijkswaterstaat (a part of the Netherlands’ Ministry
of Civil Works) in Zierikzee.
Half a year
later, February 1, 1953, nearly the entire island was flooded by a strong northwesterly
gale in combination with high tide. Until September
1952, Jaap was very busy in his part in repairing broken dykes. Afterwards
he left his island again for further study at Delft Technical University. In
1958 he got his civil engineering diploma. In the meantime he got married and
became the father of the first of four sons. The family moved to Emmeloord
where Jaap started a new job as an engineer at the Hydraulics Laboratory at
the
Northeast Polder (Noord-Oostpolder), a former part of the Zuyderzee that had
been reclaimed during the war. After two years he found a job in his beloved
Zealand. For the rest of his career he held several jobs, all of them involving
water and dykes. After his retirement he started with software engineering.
He programmed in C and a few years ago he learned HTML to develop websites
using
Linux.
Frontpage
The family had to leave
the island and landed (by fishing-boat) as refugees in Yerseke, a place on
the Eastern Scheldt river, famous for its mussels, oysters and lobsters. As was
typical
in the Netherlands, Jaap did not like the Germans at that time. Therefore
he was very happy when in October
1944 the village was liberated by Canadians.
