Kinderen uit m'n Klas

A collection of intimate portraits of children attending a Rotterdam people's school in the early 1920s, originally published in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant. Cohen de Vries captures her young pupils with a novelist's eye for detail and a teacher's tender observation, rendering each child as both an individual and a window into working-class Dutch childhood. These are not sentimental sketches but honest, often wry portraits: a shy boy in his Sunday best, a clever girl with sharp eyes, the class troublemaker who secretly helps younger children. The book endures because it treats its subjects with neither condescension nor pity, simply letting them exist in their full, particular humanity. Nearly a century later, these children from a forgotten classroom step off the page as vividly as they once did for newspaper readers, reminding us that the small moments of schoolyard life are as historical as any political event.