“The Era of Manifestations” was a period from 1837 to the mid-1850s when Shakers came under a spiritual revival marked by visions and ecstatic experiences among the followers.
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.
