"The Great Distress – Chronicle of a Besieged City." - Martien Blondel

It is a penetrating eyewitness account in diary form about the difficult war months in the autumn of 1944 in the Limburg city of Venlo.

At that time, Venlo was on the front line for months. The city was hit almost daily by Allied bombardments (targeting the strategic Maas bridge) and German shelling. This led to enormous destruction, hundreds of civilian casualties, extreme food shortages and large-scale evacuations. The booklet describes the fear, the devastation and survival in the cellars of the burning front-line city.