Bibi Hasenaar has had two lives. One began in November 1976, when she was about four, arriving in the Netherlands to meet her adoptive parents. “I remember it vividly. There’s a photo of us at the airport with other children arriving from Bangladesh – it was published in a Dutch paper.” Her older brother Babu was there, too.
Her other life appears only in fragments. She remembers being in a children’s home with another older brother and having her food stolen by older children. “It was not a nice place to be,” Hasenaar says. Her only memory of their mother is her long black hair. But of the flight out of Bangladesh, she remembers every detail. At her kitchen table in the village of Muiderberg, 30 minutes’ drive east of Amsterdam, sipping hot water and fresh ginger, the 51-year-old slowly recounts the long journey that changed her life.
