Celina spent most of free time practicing the piano, painting pictures, writing dramatic plays and stories, choreographing dances, and studying how to use the computer to help her in her art. She seems to be the consolidation of her father’s side of the family: Her father is a professional musician and her paternal grandmother and grandfather were both artists. Her paternal great-grandmother was an award-winning writer.
Every day Celina would get up before anyone in the house and go to her grand piano and play heavenly music to wake up the rest of the family. The first thing she would do upon returning from school was do her real practicing. Then very often, she’d compose pieces that her father would engrave using music software he helped design. When she played recitals two or three times a year, many people in the audience would approach her and her father to ask how it was possible that someone so young could play so maturely.
Still she found time to paint pictures and her teachers acknowledge that she is a rare talent in the visual arts as well. For years, she designed and created the posters for her school class plays. Last year one major work was an 8-part series of watercolors of ponies. She photographed these, scanned them into the computer and with her father’s help, created an art exhibition on her home-page (the site which she has been developing with her father’s help since 1994). She has received email praise for this exhibition from all over the world.
Celina focuses on the introspective arts music composition, painting, story-writing, play-writing, and choreography.
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In contrast, younger sister, Stephanie is the extrovert. She’s out there performing, playing her violin, dancing the dances that Celina choreographs, solving amazingly high-level puzzles and problems, inventing things to change the world, and above all singing.
Stephanie has had the supporting child role in the professional production of the musical “Annie” for the past 2 years. She’s played in all the major theaters in Holland and Belgium with Nelly Frijda and Will van Selst. She’s spent a good deal of time with the grownups in the cast and in many ways she is mature well beyond her years.
Her extroversion radiates as a happiness that energizes everyone in a room with her. To entertain the world she sings and has memorized very difficult songs (for example, hundreds of works by the vocal jazz quartet Manhattan Transfer, the Mamma’s and Papas, Carman, The Oslo Gospel Choir, Donovan, etc.).
But besides mature singing and stage performing, she also plays violin with a feeling that is well beyond her years. Every Queen’s Day she comes back with nearly 100 guilders in quarters from playing in the center of town. Almost every day right before dinner, she practices with her father accompanying on piano. It is one of the high-points of the day for both of them.
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When I finally saw Celina after Monique had abducted her the first thing she said when we were alone was, “Don’t worry Dad, it will be just like all the other kids with divorced parents.” And her eyes said “We’re not special anymore, it turned out we’re not going to be the lucky ones. That wonderful part of life is over; there’s no Santa Claus and none of the fairy tales are real...” And I could see things dying in there, closing down forever, one by one, flames dwindling, lights going out, disappearing...
And Stephanie, who asked me the Sunday before she was abducted, “Why do you two have to get divorced for us to have our new rooms?” There aren’t any words to begin to talk about what’s happening inside her. We’re too old to understand how this looks to her, what this means to her. I can almost remember but I can’t remember, ... or I’m too scared to remember. A girl who never stopped smiling and laughing but is now talking about killing herself.
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Whoever reads this: Please help them come home and rebuild the life they have always known. Most of it is still intact: I have always been there for them 100% of the time, caring for them, protecting them. Their mother has spent as much time as possible away from them, disappearing for an average of 55 hours per week. Thus, for them to live at home with their father, and see their mother from time to time would essentially be exactly as it always has been.
Please help us turn on the lights in Celina’s eyes again. Please let us give Stephanie’s castles back to her. Please let us show them that some dreams do come true.