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PostPosted: Fri Jun 06, 2014 7:03 pm 
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An interesting article how Gerritjan “Gerry” van ‘t Holt, a Dutch citizen is thanking the liberators for there service in liberating Holland.

A face to the names of Holland’s fallen liberators
On D-Day’s anniversary, we look at one Dutchman's mission to piece together the stories of 7,600 fallen Canadian liberators

By: Hamida Ghafour Foreign Affairs reporter, Published on Fri Jun 06 2014

HOLTEN, NETHERLANDS—If every life has a story, then the gravestones in the Holten Canadian War Cemetery have too little to say about the lives, loves and dreams of the soldiers buried in the soft green slopes. Name, regiment, date of birth and death offer only the rough contours.

Take Edward and Winifred Brewster, their headstones next to one another near a bank of flowering rhododendrons. He was a craftsman with the Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, she was a young Englishwoman enlisted in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, looking after injured soldiers in Holland. In the spring of 1946, they were waiting to be repatriated to Canada. The Second World War was over, Nazism defeated and Europe was going to have to be rebuilt.

Edward and Winifred, both 20, were ready to start their lives together. They had big dreams. Winifred had decided to leave England and follow the Canadian boy with whom she’d fallen in love. They would raise a family in Toronto. On the morning of April 15, 1946, Winifred and Edward exchanged marriage vows and sped off in a borrowed army jeep for a brief honeymoon.

That afternoon the jeep tried to cross an unstable bridge. It collapsed, and the couple was killed on their wedding day, their tragedy a tiny brushstroke of heartbreak among millions of others across the vast canvas of the war.

The Brewsters’ story did not disappear to history, however, thanks to the efforts of Gerritjan “Gerry” van ‘t Holt, a retired elementary school principal and volunteer at the Holten cemetery. For the past half-century, he has been collecting photographs and biographies of the 1,355 Canadians buried in the cemetery, located 120 kilometres east of Amsterdam.

On the 70th anniversary of D-Day, Holt is widening his search to collect photographs and biographies of the more than 7,600 Canadians who died in the September 1944 to April 1945 campaign to liberate the Netherlands and are buried here, in Belgium and Germany.

“When you stand in front of this couple’s grave and you know what happened to them, you can better understand the war,” he says, touching the edge of Winifred’s tombstone.

The Brewsters, of course, are an exception. Nearly every one of the Canadian soldiers buried at Holten was killed as the 2nd Canadian Corps pushed into Germany in spring 1945.

Holt wants each soldier to be remembered, not as part of a dusty school history lesson but as flesh and blood, as young people whose lives were cut short by a ghastly conflict.

MORE AT THE STAR.COM: Three Canadian D-Day stories

Forgotten photos re-emerge

“It is important that people read the life stories of the fallen because from their stories they learn that war is cruel,” he says. “A gravestone cannot do that, it is hard and cold.”

The 11,000 artifacts collected so far — pictures, obituaries, diaries and love letters — are scanned and uploaded in a multimedia database available for free viewing in an elegant glass and timber visitors centre, set against a pine and oak forest.

For Dutch men and women who remember the war, like Holt, 73, mention of Canada brings a mist to the eye.

After the Normandy landings of June 6, 1944, or D-Day, the Allies advanced through the north and east of France and Belgium in autumn and winter. The Netherlands proved a tougher fight because of its dikes, floodlands and canals. But by early spring 1945, the 200,000-strong First Canadian Army and tens of thousands of other Allied fighters pushed the Germans back across the Rhine and one by one, Dutch towns and cities in the north and east were liberated.

Holt was 4 when Canadian tanks on April 6, 1945, rumbled through his town, Hardenberg, near the German border. Holt and his 10 siblings rushed outside waving little flags. He remembers a soldier pressing a piece of chocolate into his hand.

“I had never seen or tasted chocolate before and held it so tight it melted,” he recalls.

His brothers shook the Canadians’ hands, while his sisters danced with the soldiers on the streets.

“It was something strange for a little boy like me,” he says. “I didn’t understand what it meant but I noticed something wonderful happened.”

The last winter of Nazi occupation had been particularly brutal. Thousands of people starved to death because the Germans cut off food and fuel supplies to cities such as Rotterdam, Amsterdam and The Hague. People ate flower bulbs to survive.

“We were lucky that we were living in the countryside,” Holt says. “We had a cow and it gave us milk and my mother grew vegetables in the garden.” His parents risked their lives smuggling food to friends trapped in Amsterdam and hid in their home four Dutch boys sentenced to a German labour camp.

“It gave me a sense of duty, to do whatever is right,” says Holt, a father of two grown daughters.

After the war he moved to Holten to teach and began volunteering at the cemetery — maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission — organizing tours for veterans and their families. They would give him photographs of loved ones, diaries and letters.

He was once sent an entire uniform of a private, which was perfectly preserved down to army-issued shoelaces, because it had been stored with a huge cache of mothballs. Holt kept the uniform in the garage and for weeks couldn’t open the door without swooning.

But he never threw anything out.

“I kept them all, mostly in shoeboxes in the attic,” he says. “My friends said it would be a pity to have it lost, and I worried my children would throw it away in the future. So that’s how the idea began.”

The $1.5-million visitors centre opened in 2012 funded by the European Union and the Dutch government and the contents of Holt’s shoeboxes formed the nucleus of the collection.

Nearly every day another email offers a tidbit of personal history, another piece of the puzzle arrives by post.

“Most recently someone sent a soldier’s driver’s licence from 1944,” he says.

It is an ad hoc, piecemeal effort.

There’s much to do, as only 10 to 20 per cent has been collected, says Herman Biesters, 66, another volunteer.

Holt reached out to local Canadian newspapers, veterans associations and regiments with the help of like-minded volunteers on the other side of the Atlantic, who collect and pass on information to the Dutch.

“We want to put a face to every name,” says Peter Gower, archivist for the Princess of Wales’ Own regiment in Kingston, Ont., in an interview by email. “While I do not expect that we will be 100 per cent successful, we can always hope.”

Often, the letters and diaries families send reveal poignant details.

Vancouver-born Lance Cpl. Romeo Ciccone’s tombstone notes that he died May 4 1945. Ciccone, of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada, fought in Holland and was killed late at night by a sniper’s rifle in Spohle, Germany.

“The part that makes fate so damned cruel is that it happened about two hours before we found out that the war was over,” wrote his friend, a Cpl. Tolley, to Ciccone’s sister. The following day, Gen. Charles Foulkes, commander of the 1st Canadian Corps formally accepted the surrender of German forces in Holland at Wageningen.

But are Europeans forgetting the lessons of the war? In May, hard-right parties won dozens of seats in the European Union elections, including France’s Front National. A German neo-Nazi was also elected.

Holt is quiet for a moment.

“Democracy is too strong,” he says finally. “I think in the heart of voters they want democracy but it is good to wake up the establishment to do more for the people because of the economic crisis.”

He wanders to a large red and white mural made recently by local schoolchildren and gestures to the sign above.

The mural reads: “We are born after the war. Let it always be so.”

If you have information that could be useful in painting a picture of one of the Canadians who died in Holland, contact one of the following:

info@canadesebegraafplaatsholten.nl

Peter Gower, greatwar@sympatico.ca

Mike Muntain mjmuntain@gmail.com

Posted in the Toronto Star:
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/ ... ators.html


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