23.5 million Dutch speakers, 23.5 million New Yorkers, 23.5 million hungry people, 23.5 million blog readers

Tulips from Amsterdam, seen in Schiphol Airport … 23.5 million people speak Dutch as their first language (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Once again, this blog continues to reach more and more readers as it reaches the milepost of 23.5 million readers this morning (17 February 2026), having reached 23 million readers only five days ago (12 February 2026) and 22.5 million earlier this month (4 February). These figures follow so soon after passing the landmarks of 22 million hits late last month (20 January) and 21.5 million hits a week before that (13 January). At the end of 2025, this blog had 21 million hits by New Year’s Eve (31 December 2025), with almost 2.5 million visitors throughout December (2,423,018).

So far this year, there have been almost 2.5 million hits or visitors for 2026 by this morning. This means, this blog has passed the half million mark three times this month alone, twice last month, and five times in December.

I first began blogging in 2010, and it took almost two years until July 2012 to reach half a million readers – a number reached within the past week alone. It then took more than another year before this figure rose to 1 million by September 2013. This blog reached the 10 million mark a year ago (12 January 2025), almost 15 years later. In less than 12 months since then, another 13.5 million hits have been counted.

Throughout last year, the daily figures were overwhelming on many occasions. Seven of the 12 days of busiest traffic on this blog were in December last, three were in January 2025, and two are in this week in February alone:

• 289,076 (11 January 2025)
• 285,366 (12 January 2025)
• 261,422 (13 January 2025)
• 166,155 (15 December 2025)
• 146,944 (14 December 2025)
• 144,935 (16 February 2026)

• 144,866 (14 February 2026)
• 140,417 (16 December 2025)
• 122,398 (17 December 2025)
• 116,911 (30 December 2025)
• 112,221 (13 December 2025)
• 106,475 (27 December 2025)

The latest figure of 23.5 million is all the more staggering as more half of those hits have been within less than a year, since March 2025. The rise in the number of readers seems to have been phenomenal throughout last year, and the daily figures are overwhelming at times, currently running at more than 60,000.

With this latest landmark figure of 23.5 million readers, I once again find myself asking questions such as:

• What do 23.5 million people look like?

• Where do we find 23.5 million people?

• What does £23.5 million, €23.5 million or $23.5 million mean?

• What would it buy? How far would it stretch? How much of a difference would that much make to people’s lives?

Aston Villa paid 23.5 million in transfer fees for the Nice forward Evan Guessand last year (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Astronomers have also calculated that the diameter of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole is around 23.5 million km . But this is  tiny compared to the Milky Way itself, which is 100,000 light-years wide and 1,000 light-years thick.

Despite Trump’s persistent claims about ‘voter fraud’ in the US, a Brennan Center for Justice study of 42 jurisdictions, covering 23.5 million votes cast in the 2016 general election, found that election officials referred only 30 cases of suspected non-citizen voting for further investigation. This represented approximately 0.0001% of the total votes in those areas.

About 23.5 million people in the US live in low-income areas that are more than one mile from a supermarket, often referred to as ‘food deserts’.

An estimated 23.5 million people in the US are living with an autoimmune disease, and almost 80 per cent of them are women.

Climate extremes have been the main driver of acute hunger in eight African countries, pushing 23.5 million people into emergency levels of hunger. Humanitarian organisations say 23.5 million people in the Sahel face food insecurity, and that 23.5 million people in Bangladesh are facing high levels of food insecurity.

The number of households in England is projected to grow from 23.5 million in 2022 to 25.9 million by 2030.

The population of the New York Combined Statistical Area (CSA) or the New York Metropolitan Area is approximately 23.5 million. Both Syria and Taiwan have a population of about 23.5 million people.

A report this month estimates around €23.5 million in public money is paid to sitting Dáil politicians every year.

Aston Villa signed the Nice forward Evan Guessand last year, with the transfer costing an initial £23.5 million that was expected to rise to about £28 million.

The Netherlands and Belgium have a combined total of 23.5 million Dutch speakers with another half a million more Dutch speakers in former Dutch former colonies such as Curacao, Aruba, St Maarten, and Suriname.

And 23.5 million minutes is 44.68 years, or roughly 391,666.67 hours or 16,319.4 days. In other words, if this blog was getting one hit a minute, it would take almost 45 years to reach today’s 23.5 million mark.

So, yet again, this blog has reached another humbling statistic and a sobering figure, and once more I am left with a feeling of gratitude to all who read and support this blog and my writing.

Once again, a continuing and warming figure in the midst of all these statistics is the one that shows my morning prayer diary continues to reach up to 70-90 people each day.

It is almost four years now since I retired from active parish ministry, but I think many of my priest-colleagues be prayerfully thankful if the congregations in their churches totalled 500 to 600 people or more each week.

Today, I am very grateful to all the 23.5 million readers of this blog to date, and in particular I am grateful for the faithful core group among you who join me in prayer, reading and reflection each morning.

23.5 million people in the Netherlands and Belgium speak Dutch as their first language (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Why Denmark’s fears about Greenland may be shared by many EU member states in their Caribbean islands

Katie Miller, wife of the White House insider Steve Miller, has posted a map of Greenland in the colours of the American flag emblazoned with the word ‘Soon’

Patrick Comerford

JD Vance is meeting the Prime Ministers of Denmark and Greenland next week to push Trump’s bullying demands to hand over the island. In advance of those talks, Greenland’s prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen says the island’s 57,000 residents will not be bullied by the US into selling its sovereignty to the US.

It is 80 years since Denmark said no to the Truman administration’s offer of $100 million in gold for Greenland. The answer remains unchanged.

Donald Trump in his bluster and threats, says he wants to annex Greenland, by purchase or, if necessary, by force if necessary. ‘We need Greenland,’ one senior US official. ‘It’s so strategic.’

A third option mentioned by the White House is a new form of association between the two, although the scope of this is not clear.

Under a 75-year-old agreement, the US already has the only military base in Greenland and the island government has been open to it expanding its presence and to encouraging US investment in extracting rare minerals.

Under the terms of this agreement, the US is supposed to consult Denmark and Greenland before making ‘any significant changes’ in its military operations on the island and the US explicitly recognises it as ‘an equal part of the Kingdom of Denmark’.

But the US military presence in Greenland in the past has regularly involved egregious breaches of those legal agreements. In the 1960s, the US tried to build a subterranean network of secret nuclear missile launch sites in the Greenlandic ice cap, without ever seeking consent from the Danish Government.

Project Iceworm was run from Camp Century from 1960 to 1966 before it was deemed unworkable and abandoned. The missiles were never fielded, the reactor was removed and Camp Century was abandoned. However, hazardous waste remains buried under the ice and has become an environmental concern.

The Danish government did not know about the programme at the time and only heard about it three decades later in 1997, when Danes was perusing declassified US documents and searching for records of the crash of a nuclear-equipped B-52 bomber near the Thule air base in 1968.

On the other hand, Denmark and Greenland have always shown an ability to reach amicable settlements to territorial disputes with Greenland’s nearest geographical neighbour, Canada. A border dispute began in 1973 over the ownership of Hans Island, a small island in Nares Strait directly between Greenland and the Canadian territory of Nunavut. The dispute was amicable and was resolved in 2022, when Denmark and Canada agreed to divide the island in half, meaning Greenland’s one and only land border is not with Denmark or the US, but with Canada.

Canadians may well fear that if the US forcibly acquires Greenland, Canada will be surrounded on three sides by the US, with Alaska to the west.

The flag of Greenland … the well-founded fears of Canada and Denmark may also be shared by many EU member states

Indeed, the well-founded fears of Canada and Denmark may also be shared by many EU member states whose sovereign territories may become the target of US covetous eyes. Any US aggression in Greenland may give permission to Putin to think he can be aggressive, and with impunity, towards other member EU member states, particularly Finland, the three Baltic states that were once part of the Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and perhaps Poland and Romania too. The US claims to Greenland, and recent unilateral actions in the Caribbean – abducting Nicolás Maduro in Caracas and imposing a blockade on and attacking ships and boats – show the Trump regime regards the North Atlantic and the Caribbean as its backyard, and has no fears about how once friendly NATO and EU member states respond.

If Trump can claim Greenland, which is Danish, what’s to stop him from claiming Guadeloupe and Guiana which are French, or any of the other islands that are French Dutch, Spanish, Danish and Portuguese sovereign territories and that are parts of the European Union in a variety of ways.

Although Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, it is not officially a part of the European Union, yet it relates to the EU through the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) and receives support from the European Development Fund, Multiannual Financial Framework, European Investment Bank and other EU programmes.

It is often forgotten that the EU includes sovereign territory of a number of member states not just in Europe, but on all continents. French sovereign territory, for example, includes the five overseas departments and regions of France: French Guiana in South America, a part of the Guianas; Guadeloupe in the Caribbean Sea, a part of the Leeward Islands in the Lesser Antilles; Martinique in the Lesser Antilles; Mayotte in the Mozambique Channel and the Comoro Islands; and Réunion in the Indian Ocean.

Collectively, the special territories of the EU have a population of 6.1 million people and a land area of about 2,733,792 sq km, and Greenland makes up around 80 percent of that area. The smallest by land area is the island of Saba in the Caribbean (13 sq km). The largest region by population, the Canary Islands, accounts for more than a third of the total population of the special territories. The French Southern and Antarctic Lands is the only special territory without a permanent population.

The European Economic Area (EEA) has 32 special territories of EU member states and EFTA member states that for historical, geographical, or political reasons have a special status with the EU and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).

The special territories of EU member states fall into three separate categorises:

• 9 Outermost Regions (OMR) that form part of the EU, though they benefit from derogations from some EU laws due to their geographical remoteness from mainland Europe;
• 13 Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT) that do not form part of the EU, but co-operate with the EU through the Overseas Countries and Territories Association;
• 10 special cases that form part of the EU.

The Outermost Regions were recognised in the Maastricht Treaty (1992), and confirmed by the Treaty of Lisbon (2007) form part of a member state of the EU. EU law applies in these outermost regions, but because of their significant distance from mainland Europe they have derogations from some EU policies. They are part of the EU customs area, although some fall outside the Schengen Area and the EU VAT Area.

The status of an uninhabited French territory, the abandoned island of Clipperton – in the North Pacific and 1,280 km off the coast of Mexico – remains unclear and it is not explicitly mentioned in primary EU law. It is an interesting place in this discussion because it was briefly occupied by the US in 1944-1945.

Today, the nine Outermost Regions of the EU are parts of the national territories of France, Portugal and Spain:

• France (6) : French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, St Martin, Mayotte, Reunion;
• Portugal (2): Azores, Madeira;
• Spain (1): the Canary Islands.

We all know of Trump’s golf courses in Scotland and Ireland. But he has also owned a holiday home in one of these EU Caribbean islands since 2013. Le Château des Palmiers in a beachfront estate on Plum Bay in the French part of the island of St Martin, which is shared by France and the Netherlands. The estate once had a price tag of £21.5 million; after a tropical storm he dropped the asking price to £13 million but he still has not been able to sell it.

The 13 Overseas Countries and Territories of the EU are parts of Denmark, France and the Netherlands:

• Denmark (1): Greenland;
• France (6): French Polynesia, the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, New Caledonia, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Wallis-et-Futuna;
• the Netherlands (6): Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, Sint Eustatius, Sint Maarten.

As a group, the Dutch islands are still known as the Dutch Caribbean. Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao form the ABC islands, 80 km off the coast of Venezuela, and in Dutch law Aruba and Curaçao are defined as countries; Saba, Sint Eustatius and Sint Maarten are known as the SSS islands. These islands are so close to Venezuela, the Netherlands can identify with Danish fears about Trumps threats to Denmark’s sovereignty in Greenland.

In addition, there are 10 special cases involving territories that are part of Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain but with unusual political borders and geographical locations:

• Cyprus (1): the UN Buffer Zone;
• Denmark (1): Faroe Islands;
• Finland (1): Åland;
• Germany (2): Büsingen am Hochrhein and Heligoland;
• Greece (1): Mount Athos;
• Italy (2): Livigno and Campione d’Italia;
• Spain (2): Ceuta and Melilla.

The cities of Melilla and Ceuta have had an autonomous system of rule since 1995. In addition, the plazas de soberanía or ‘strongholds of sovereignty’ are a series of Spanish territories scattered along the Mediterranean coast bordering Morocco. They are closer to Africa than Europe.

Quite separately, there are five European microstates that are not EU members: Andorra, Monaco, Liechtenstein, San Marino and Vatican City. Gibraltar left the EU with the UK at Brexit, but an agreement last year (June 2025) creates a special relationship, joining Gibraltar to the Schengen Area and establishing a customs union with the EU, yet preserving UK sovereignty.

If Trump gets his small grubby hands on Greenland this year, could it be Guiana, or Guadeloupe soon after? He has already spoken of Gaza as desirable real estate; could he also have eyes on Gibraltar, with desires for the Mediterranean as a playground to twin with the Caribbean? Nothing is beyond the realm of possibility when it comes to the capricious whims of an autocrat. The fears of Denmark today should be the fears of all EU member states too.

A humorous Danish response to US claims on Greenland

Nicolás Maduro and the claims of the kidnapped president of Venezuela to Sephardic ancestry

Nicolás Maduro Moro claimed Sephardic Jewish ancestry in an interview 13 years ago

Patrick Comerford

The kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moro claimed Sephardic Jewish ancestry 13 years ago, although he has never identified himself as Jewish in terms of religion, nor has he ever practised Judaism. In an interview in 2013, Maduro spoke of how his grandparents were descended from Sephardic families but had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in Venezuela.

The Antilles and the Caribbean have long had an important Jewish presence, and a large proportion of the Jewish families in the region are Sephardic in origin, as I learned during a course in Sephardic genealogy and history that I took during the Covid-19 lockdown. The series of weekly Zoom seminars or webinars on Sephardic history was organised by the Bevis Marks Synagogue and the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community in London in May and June 2020.

Researchers recently claimed Christopher Columbus may have been a Sephardic Jew from Spain rather than being from Genoa. They announced their conclusions in October 2024 after 20 years of DNA and genetic tests on part of his remains that are said to be held in a tomb in the Cathedral in Seville.

Maduro’s claims to Jewish ancestry are not unique for a Latin American president: President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo of Mexico, whose 83% approval ratings make her one of the most popular leaders in the world today, is the first Jewish president in a country with one of the largest Catholic populations. Although she is not a religiously observant Jew, Dr Sheinbaum identifies as culturally Jewish and has spoken proudly about her heritage. Her father Carlos Sheinbaum was of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, from a family who emigrated from Lithuania in 1928; her mother Annie Pardo is from a Sephardi Jewish family who fled to Mexico from the persecution of Jews in Bulgaria during World War II.

The first Jewish immigrants to Venezuela were found in the Dutch colonies in South America in the 17th century. Jews escaping the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions found refuge and freedom of worship in places such as Recife in Dutch Brazil, although, even after Simon Bolivar’s wars of liberation, Jews faced anti-Jewish discrimination.

Maduro is a classic Sephardic name and is a common name on the island of Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles, which has an extensive Jewish heritage. Both of Nicolás Maduro’s parents – Nicolás Maduro García (d. 1989), and Teresa de Jesús Moros (d. 1994) – were descended from Sephardic families whose ancestors were among Iberian Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century and who moved to the Netherlands.

The Maduro family moved from Amsterdam to the Caribbean in the 18th century, first to Curaçao and then to Aruba in the Dutch Antilles, where they were among the islands’ earliest settlers. Over generations, members of the family migrated from Aruba to Colombia and later to Venezuela, through the coasts of Falcón state and then on to Lara and Zulia states, where some family members converted to Catholicism.

Salomon Elias Levy Maduro (Papa Monchi) bought the Maduro plantation in Curaçao in 1853

The first family member to move to Aruba, Moses Solomon Levy Maduro, arrived in 1754 while working for the Dutch West India Company. Salomón de Moisés Levy Maduro and his wife Sara, daughter of Jacob de Samuel Levy Maduro, were living in Aruba in 1764.

The Mongui Maduro Museum is housed in the former Rooi Catootje plantation house in the Dutch Antilles island of Curaçao. The house dates from 1735, and the museum tells the story of four generations of the Levy Maduro family and its Sephardic Jewish ancestry, with displays that include the family tree of Salomon Abraham (Mongui) Levy Maduro.

Their stories and influence on the social and economic history of Curaçao are told in the museum, and the displays include antiques and heirlooms. Mongui Maduro’s grandfather Salomon Elias Levy Maduro (Papa Monchi) was a businessman who bought Rooi Catootje in 1853 and built a legacy that continues today. Mongui Maduro was raised by his uncle Manchi and spent a lifetime collecting Judaica and Antillana books and newspaper clippings. His collection evolved into a fully functioning reference library through the efforts of his daughter Ena in 2010.

The history of the Jews in Venezuela dates from the mid-17th century, when groups of marranos or Spanish and Portuguese descendants of baptised Jews who may have secretly continued to adhere to Judaism, lived in Tucacas, Caracas and Maracaibo. The Jewish Cemetery in Santa Ana de Coro is the oldest Jewish cemetery in continuous use in the Americas.

The vast majority of Venezuela’s Jews left during the past two decades, under Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez. They left for Israel and the US, as well as Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala. Maduro may have been anxious to assert his claims to Sephardic ancestry in an interview in 2013 as a response to accusations that his regime tolerated or even encouraged antisemitism in Venezuela.

After Chávez was elected in 1998, he began to engineer a campaign against Venezuela’s Jews, and his anti-Zionism often descended into antisemitism. During a demonstration outside the main Sephardi synagogue in Caracas, the wall was scrawled with the words ‘Jews, killers – leave’. Police raided the Club Hebraica in Los Chorros, an upmarket neighbourhood in East Caracas, in November 2004, after the murder of a public prosecutor, Danilo Anderson, and accused the club of storing Mossad weapons alleged to have been used in the killing. Chávez later said ‘the descendants of those who killed Christ had taken possession of all the wealth in the world.’

Maduro was Foreign Minister and then Vice-President under Chávez. At times, Maduro publicised his contacts with Jewish figures in Venezuela. When he announced in 2013 that his grandparents were Sephardim and had converted to Catholicism, he may have been anxious to counter accusations of antisemitism made against his regime. He met Jewish leaders in Caracas, including Rabbi Isaac Cohen of the Asociación Israelita de Venezuela, in 2017 framing the meeting as a dialogue on coexistence. In Maduro met Rabbi Shlomo Moshe Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi, who was visiting Venezuela in 2018, and during that visit awarded a medal to Rabbi Isaac Cohen.

On the other hand, Maduro’s recent election rival, Henrique Capriles Radonski, who was raised a Catholic, also has Sephardi Jewish and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry: his maternal grandparents, Andrés Radonski and Lili Bochenek, survived the Holocaust and emigrated from Poland with his mother to Venezuela in 1947. His great-grandparents were murdered in Treblinka during the Holocaust; his maternal grandmother, Lili Bochenek, lived for 20 months in the Warsaw Ghetto; and his paternal grandfather, Armando Capriles-Myerston, was a Sephardi Jew.

The attacks on Jews lessened during Maduro’s presidency, but by then many Jews had left Venezuela. After his kidnapping, the now acting President, Delcy Rodríguez, alleged his capture of Maduro and the US attack were a ‘Zionist’ attack. Her claims were seen as a thinly-veiled attempt to scapegoat to the ever-shrinking Jewish community in Venezuela. Venezuela had a Jewish community of about 22,000 people when Chávez took office in 1999. Today there are fewer than 6,000 Jews in the country.

• These links offer closer looks at the family tree of the Maduro family in Curaçao: a genealogical profile of Susana Maduro, grandmother of Nicolás Maduro on Geneanet and her ancestral connections HERE; and the story of Sephardic Jews in Aruba, with details of the arrival of the Maduro family in Aruba HERE.

Four generations of the Levy Maduro family were owners of Landhuis Rooi Catootje from 1853 to 1974

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

18 million welcomes to Greece, 18 million Sikhs in Punjab, $18 million for Trump and 18 million blog readers

Tulips from Amsterdam, seen in Schiphol Airport … 18 million people live in the Netherlands (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

This blog continues to reach more and more readers, and reached yet another staggering total at the weekend, with 18 million hits by late Sunday afternoon (2 November 2025). I first began blogging back in 2010, and the 17.5 million mark was passed on 18 October and the 17 million mark about three weeks earlier (30 September 2025). In all, there were almost 900,000 hits (887,314) last month (October 2025).

The latest figure of 18 million is all the more staggering because about half of all those hits have been within the past 12 months, since October 2024. The rise in the number of readers has been phenomenal throughout this year, and the daily figures have been overwhelming at times. With this latest landmark figure of 18 million readers yesterday, I once again found myself asking questions such as:

• What do 18 million people look like?
• Where do we find 18 million people?
• What does £18 million, €18 million or $18 million mean?
• What would it buy, how far would it stretch?

A welcomes sign at Athens International Airport … Greece welcomed nearly 18 million foreign tourist in the first half of last year, January to July 2024 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Netherlands has 18 million inhabitants. Other countries with a similar populations include Guatemala, Senegal and Ecuador. Cities with a population of around 18 million include Mexico City, Mumbai, Delhi and Shanghai.

About 18 million Sikhs live in the Indian state of Punjab, about 58% of the total population, making it the only Indian state where Sikhism is the majority religion.

A new airport being near Kastelli, south of Hersonissos in Crete, is due to open in 2027. It is going to replace Greece’s welcomed second-biggest airport at Iraklion, and it is designed to handle up to 18 million passengers a year. That’s the same as the number of people who visited all of Greece in the first half of last year (January to July 2024). For all of 2024, Greece welcomed about 36.9 million foreign travellers. So this new airport could transform not only Hersonissos, but quiet mountainside village resorts I have known for the past 30 years or so, including Piskopiano and Koutoulafari, perhaps even the whole of Crete.

About 18 million people visit the Lake District each year.

There are plans to build a new £18 million primary school with spaces for 630 children in Milton Keynes. The school will be on the fast-growing Whitehouse South estate, where hundreds of new homes are being built. Milton Keynes City Council agreed in October to start the process of choosing a contractor to build the school, with an anticipated start date of summer 2027. The school is expected to open in September 2028.

Sub-Saharan Africa hosts over 18 million of the world’s refugees, a number that has grown due to crises in regions like the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and Nigeria. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, sub-Sahara Africa hosts more than 26% – over 18 million – of the world's refugees.

The number of refugees has soared over the years, partly due to the crises in the Central Africa Republic, Nigeria, South Sudan and Burundi. The causes include conflicts, civil unrest, environmental disasters, oppressive regimes and the abuse of human rights. The countries with the highest refugee burdens are: Ethiopia (659,000) Kenya (551,000), Chad (453,000), Uganda (386,000), Cameroon (264,000) and South Sudan (248,000).

Nearly 18 million people in Sudan, or almost one in three people there, are grappling with acute food insecurity, due to the armed conflict there.

In Yemen, over 18 million people are dependent on humanitarian assistance and protection due to the civil war.

Over 18 million adults in the UK are deaf, have hearing loss or have tinnitus. In other words, over half the population aged 55 or more has hearing loss. Researchers at the University of Manchester and the University of Nottingham have found that 18 million people are affected by hearing loss, 6 million higher than previously reported.

Another study of 18 million people by the University of Bristol last year found increased mental illnesses incidence following severe COVID-19, especially in unvaccinated people.

Aston Villa rejected an £18 million bid from Everton for captain John McGinn in August. Villa made its first signing this year with the £18 million fee paid to move Donyell Malen from Borussia Dortmund.

18 million sq metres is 18 sq km, the size of Iraklia, a quiet island in the Cyclades, near Naxos and Amorgos and with fewer than 100 residents.

18 million minutes adds up to about 34.2 years.

Donations from crypto-currency executives and companies to Trump’s inauguration fund totalled about $18 million. His insistence on spending his weekends in Florida playing golf cost US taxpayers in excess of $18 million in his first two months in office alone. Which just goes to show that $18 million can buy influence and indolences, power and conceit all at the same time.

The Jewish population across the world reached the highest figure of around 18 million immediately before World War II. But figures show that although World War II ended 80 years ago, the Holocaust continues to has had a lasting and devastating effect. Based on population data from late 2024 and early 2025, depending on the criteria used, the number of Jewish people in the world today is estimated at between 15.7 million and 15.8 million.

Once again, this blog has reached another humbling statistic and a sobering figure, and once more I am left with a feeling of gratitude to all who read and support this blog and my writing.

A continuing and warming figure in the midst of all these statistics continues to be the one that shows my morning prayer diary continues to reach up to 80-90 people each day. It is 3½ years now since I retired from active parish ministry. But I think many of my priest-colleagues would be prayerfully thankful if the congregations in their churches averaged or totalled 560 to 630 people a week.

Today, I am very grateful to all the 18 million readers of this blog to date, and in particular I am grateful for the small and faithful core group among you who join me in prayer, reading and reflection each morning.

Holy Trinity Cathedral, Shanghai, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott … Shanghai has a population of 18 million people (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Audrey Hepburn’s brave role during the Holocaust and her father’s life in Dublin

Patrick Comerford

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January 2023). Over the past few days, the World Jewish Congress has drawn attention to the role of Audrey Hepburn as a teenager living in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, and how she helped the Dutch Resistance and saved Jewish lives during World War II.

Audrey Hepburn died away 30 years ago this month, on 20 January 1993. She starred in many memorable roles, from Manhattan socialite Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) to Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (1964). The 1953 classic Roman Holiday — in which she played Princess Ann, a royal exploring the Eternal City with Gregory Peck — earned her an Academy Award. She is one of the few stars to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony award.

Yet few people know that was also a Dutch aristocrat, raised by parents with controversial political sympathies, who aided resistance to the Nazis while enduring tragedy and starvation.

In his biography, Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II, the author Robert Matzen reveals his discoveries about Audrey Hepburn’s life growing up in the Netherlands during World War II, and how her parents’ Nazi connections haunted her for the rest of her life.

With meticulous research, he tells the story of her heroic efforts during World War II, and how those difficult years led her to a life of humanitarian service. During that time, she was also becoming a prima ballerina on her way to Hollywood and stardom.

Robert Matzen’s book is based on research in the Netherlands, where he had access archives, interviewed people with war-time memories of Hepburn, unearthed rare photographs, documents and mementoes, and visited Arnhem, where she lived there during World War II.

Her Dutch mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, met Hitler in the 1930s and wrote admiringly about him in British fascist publications. She changed her mind during the brutal Nazi occupation of the Netherlands from 1940 to 1945. Her father, Joseph Ruston, ended up in jailed because of his Nazi sympathies.

The baroness aided the Dutch Resistance after Hepburn’s uncle, Otto Ernst Gelder, Count van Limburg Stirum, was executed by the Nazis. After the execution of her uncle, Audrey and her mother relocated from Arnhem to the village of Velp five km away and heard hear the destruction of their former hometown during the 1944 Allied defeat in the battles of Arnhem and Oosterbeek.

Audrey Hepburn volunteered for the resistance, aided Jews in hiding, and raised funds through dancing to keep them safe. Despite everything, fewer than 25 per cent of Dutch Jews survived the Holocaust.

Audrey Hepburn was invited in 1958 to play Anne Frank in the film version of The Diary of Anne Frank. But she found the subject too close to home and turned it down, although she met Otto Frank. Two decades later, in 1976, she turned a role in A Bridge Too Far.

Hepburn’s war years explain her later work as a UNICEF ambassador working with children affected by war.

Audrey Hepburn was born Audrey Kathleen van Heemstra Ruston on 4 May 1929. Her family had aristocratic connections on both sides. Her Dutch grandfather, Baron van Heemstra, was a former governor of the South American colony of Surinam and a former mayor of Arnhem. Her English father claimed a royal descent from James Hepburn, the third husband of Mary Queen of Scots in the 16th-century.

Young Audrey, or Adriaantje as she was known in her family, grew up between Belgium, England and the Netherlands. Her parents visited Germany with Sir Oswald Mosley and other British fascists, and met Hitler in Munich in 1935.

Ella returned to Germany for the Nazi Party Congress later that year and praised Hitler in British fascist publications. She continued supporting the Nazis after they occupied the Netherlands. Ironically, Hepburn’s ballet teacher, Winja Marova, was Jewish and hid her identity from the occupiers.

The Nazis arrested her brother-in-law, Hepburn’s uncle Otto, a court prosecutor, and he was executed on 15 August 1942 in a mass killing with another relative, Baron Schimmelpenninck van der Oye.

Otto’s execution was a turning point and shook the family to the core. Ella relocated with Audrey to Velp, where they lived with Audrey’s grandfather, Baron van Heemstra, and Otto’s widow, Meisje. There the family joined the resistance. The refusal to join a Nazi artists’ committee ending Audrey Hepburn’s burgeoning dance career.

In Velp, Audrey assisted Dr Hendrik Visser ’t Hooft, who helped shelter hundreds of Jews. She brought messages to families protecting Jews. She danced to raise money for the resistance and to feed Jews in hiding.

In an unexpected development, when Audrey Hepburn and her mother lived in Amsterdam after liberation, their fellow lodger was the editor working on publishing the Diary of Anne Frank. Audrey and Anne were born less than five months apart in 1929, but Anne Frank was apprehended in 1944 and died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Audrey Hepburn would later describe Anne Frank as a soul sister.

‘I believe Audrey felt survivor’s guilt,’ Robert Matzen says. ‘She survived. Anne Frank did not.’

Eventually, she left with her mother for England, where Audrey Hepburn found success not through ballet but in film. In time, she came to terms with her past. Years after becoming a household name, she took part in public readings of The Diary of Anne Frank and became a Unicef ambassador.



Audrey Hepburn was born in Belgium, spent the war years in occupied Holland, she sounded English and her first acting roles were in British films, became a Hollywood success, and had a second international career as a Unicef ambassador and a humanitarian campaigner. Yet, there was also an Irish element in her life story too.

Her father, Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, was born Joseph Ruston in Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, in 1889 to an English father and his German wife, Catherina Wels.

He was an Englishman living in Belgium when his daughter was born in 1929. In the years before World War II, he expressed unqualified enthusiasm for Hitler. He left Audrey and her mother in 1939. After detention in the Isle of Man, made his way to Dublin where, assisted by the Carmelite order, he found lucrative work in the insurance industry.

Joseph Hepburn-Ruston became friends with the Guinness family and Sir Alfred Beit, the art collector and philanthropist. He and his third wife, the model Fidelma Walshe, more than 30 years his junior, were living near Merrion Square, Dublin, when Audrey first reconnected with him in the early 1960s.

She tracked down Joseph with the help of the Red Cross. A meeting was arranged in the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin, in 1964. But it was not the occasion she had hoped for. When Joseph saw Audrey, he made no move towards her. She took the initiative, stepping forward to hug him. She soon realised that the man she had pined for as a child was distant and emotionally detached. They did not speak for another 20 years.

He lived in Sydenham Road Dublin for over 35 years. His daughter supported him financially until he died in Baggot Street Hospital at the age of 91 on 16 October 1980. He is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold’s Cross. Audrey did not go to her father’s funeral, but returned to Dublin in 1988.

Audrey Hepburn died in Switzerland 30 years ago this month on 20 January 1993.

Shabbat Shalom