Another contemplative moment

There are many stories about lost treasures and subsequent heroic adventures to find them. Some of these stories made it onto the silver screen, like “King Salomon’s Mines” or “The Maltese Falcon” or Indiana Jones and other stories of marauding evil doers who hid their loot and then got killed in a shoot out, leaving those treasures never to be found again. But there is one story that is close to home.This “tempo dulu” story which started on the Braga way in Bandung, Java and ended in Australia, during WWII grew an interesting tail, half a century later in 2006. Just about when everyone thought “that’s all she wrote…”. It became of special interest to me anyway because, besides contemplating wartime tragedies and heroic attempts of survival, the focus of this story, rightfully or wrongfully, attracted much attention due to the lost, found and lost again treasure belonging to my estranged grandfather David Davidson and his partner: A cache of diamonds packaged post haste in a carton box and hand carried to the airport for the last plane out, while the sounds of artillery from the Japanese invaders was approaching rapidly. I would never have known about this if my cousin Arthur of Newport, Australia didn’t call me one day and told me about it. And he heard it from someone else. Initially I was only halfway interested. I did not know my grandfather and who was to say that this man, written about in this book was indeed my grandfather. After all, how many Davidsons are there. Even after reading the book I was not entirely convinced. Only after meeting with David Davidson’s niece in The Hague, Holland was my curiosity confirmed. . Oma (grandma) and Opa (grandpa) Davidson. (Grandpa's first marriage) “….an extraordinary story of daring and luck, life and death, and fortunes found and lost”: The Diamond Dakota Mystery, By Juliet Wills.

The following links will serve to read more about it, and save me some work typing it. I can recommend buying the book. It is well written and suspenseful and I like a book which is documented with pictures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PK-AFV

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Amazon.com