The Boy Who Ate Tulip Bulbs: Hunger Winter to the American City

One boy's hunger. A lifetime of witness. A history worth remembering.

In the winter of 1944–45, a boy in the occupied Netherlands ate tulip bulbs to survive. That boy was Albert Boer. He was ten years old.

In The Boy Who Ate Tulip Bulbs: Hunger Winter to the American City, his daughter Giselle Boer traces Albert's extraordinary journey — from the starvation of the Dutch Hunger Winter, through decades of social work on the front lines of the American Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Boston, and Detroit, to his final act of witness: documenting Kamp Schoorl, the Nazi transit camp where his neighbors were gathered before deportation.

This is a memoir written from the outside in — a daughter's account of a father who rarely spoke of all that he had seen, pieced together from photographs, documents, and the stories he finally told. It is a book about hunger and resilience, about displacement and belonging, about what one person can do in the face of history.

Deeply researched and quietly told, The Boy Who Ate Tulip Bulbs is for readers of narrative history, Dutch-American memoir, and stories of the postwar generation who carried the war inside them long after it ended.