Verkijk receives Poland's second-highest decoration
On June 4, 2013, in Warsaw, Poland President Bronislaw Komorowski awarded
Dick Verkijk the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of
the Republic of Poland, the second highest decoration
in Poland. President Komorowski stated that Verkijk was receiving the
award "for [his] outstanding services rendered for the promotion
of Poland's transition to democracy, for acting as a truthful witness
to the situation on the ground during the period of martial law and
for [his] accomplishments in journalistic undertakings."
Other Awards:
-
On November 16, 2010, the Czech Republic celebrated
the Day of the Fight for Freedom and Democracy. At that occasion
the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes awarded
Dick Verkijk the Vaclav Benda Medal for
his, as it was phrased, "significant role in the fight for the
restoration of freedom and democracy of the Czechoslovak Republic
during the Communist totalitarian Power (1948-1989)."
- In August 2010, at the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the
Polish trade union Solidarity, the European Solidarity Center
awarded Dick Verkijk the Medal of Gratitude for
his (non)journalistic support of Solidarity. In 1980, the then-communist
Polish government was forced to accept the first independent trade union
in Eastern Europe, thanks to the famous strike in the Lenin Shipyard
in Gdansk.
-
In September 2007, From Bazooka to Bosnia
also earned the predicate Outstanding Book
award in the Nonfiction History/Heritage category by the League of
Utah Writers at their annual awards event. The book received the Our
History - Our Heritage Publication Award 2007, and Verkijk
received the Gold Quill and Diamond
Award for his work.
About the Book
First published in the Netherlands in 1997, this is the amazing story
of a Dutch journalist who dedicated his whole career to freedom of the
press and respect for human rights.
Dick Verkijk started during the German occupation of the Netherlands
at the age of 14 as a co-publisher of an underground paper and ended his
career in 1995 after he was expelled by the Milošević regime
from Yugoslavia as "an enemy of the Serbian people."
In the intervening years he experienced the German occupation, reported
about the suppression in the communist world, defended the rights of the
so-called "dissidents" in Eastern Europe and the Soviet-Union,
enjoyed the collapse of the communist system and covered the war in Yugoslavia.
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Reviews
Max van der Stoel, former High Commissioner for National
Minorities of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, calls Verkijk
in his foreword to this book a journalist "who
could not be intimidated" and who had "a
rare combination of courage and ingenuity" and because of
that "succeeded again and again to gather essential
information about the developments within the communist regimes."
In 1997, these memoirs were published in the Netherlands. Dr.
Sipke de Hoop, professor at the University of Groningen, wrote
in a March 1998 review in the Dutch scientific monthly on Foreign Affairs,
the Internationale Spectator, that Verkijk’s "passion
has turned him into maybe the best postwar Eastern-Europe-journalist of
the Netherlands."
The Polish-Dutch journalist Sasza Malko wrote in the
literary supplement of the weekly Vrij Nederland on December 13, 1997:
"The book consists of so many stories, meetings,
as if hundreds of people have bundled their experiences. Each of us, traveling
journalists, has been a witness of a historic moment once. But he was
immediately everywhere present. He describes it with an enormous richness
of detail. The emotions are fresh, as if it happened a few weeks before,
the historic account agrees, and you are overcome by the feeling of recognition:
indeed, so it was, so it felt, so it went."
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Content Highlights
The author gives a revealing insight into the influence of what he calls
the "fashionable leftishers" on the political decisions in the
Netherlands and generally in Western Europe of the 1970s and 1980s vis-a-vis
the communist regimes.
Verkijk had many collisions with the Secret Services in the communist
countries, was several times detained and spent a week in the prison of
the Czechoslovakian Secret Service, the StB. He was not only expelled
from Yugoslavia but also from Czechoslovakia and Cuba.
He made many TV and radio documentaries on both the communist and the
national socialist systems. In this book he throws a new light on the
attempt on the life of Hitler on July 20, 1944. He comes with the well-founded
thesis that the failure of the assault was not accidental but intentional.
The book is illustrated with dozens of unique photos and documents.
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