“The retreat brings people together, builds community in the forest, gets participants outside and off their screens, and uses nature sustainably to heal and inspire minds and souls,” stated Great Mountain Forest Executive Director Michael Zafros. Retreat registration closes on July 30.
Upon retiring to the Berkshires Velmans wrote Long Way Back to the River Kwai, a war memoir detailing his adventurous escape from the Nazis and his imprisonment by the Japanese.
"On a Monday morning on the thirtieth day of the inhospitable month of two-faced January, in 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power by the standard process of constitutional democracy."
-- from “An Unlikely Hero”
“I was born a writer. I wrote in prison camp, and after the war I worked at a newspaper in Singapore. I’ve always written. I’ve never stopped writing.”
-- Loet Velmans
Sheffield resident Loet Velmans, survivor of a daring escape from Holland in a lifeboat, aptly named The Seaman’s Hope on May 14, 1940, compared his own plight to that of today’s boat people in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, risking their lives for a chance at freedom.
