Later Years
Coster was politically involved. In 1938 he traveled to Berlin to convince Lise Meitner that she had to leave Germany to escape the persecution of the Jews. Together they went by train to Groningen; from there she went on to Sweden by way of Copenhagen. During the German occupation of Holland, he also helped Jews hide from the Nazis and listened to the BBC on a daily basis using a bicycle-powered radio. He died in Groningen.
The asteroid 10445 Coster is named after Dirk Coster.
Read more about this topic: Dirk Coster
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Seventy years have I lived
No ragged beggar man,
Seventy years have I lived,
Seventy years man and boy,
And never have I danced for joy.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)