Stewart MacDonald on the banks of the Ijssel.

PHOTO: SHARON ADAMS

In mid-April 1945, 18-year-old North Shore (N.B.) Regiment Private Stewart MacDonald sheltered under a bridge near the rail station in Zutphen, the Netherlands. He was chest-deep in the Ijssel River, waiting for a lethal rain of shrapnel to stop. Across the river, townspeople, including 17-year-old Frits Hasper and his family huddled underground in vaulted basements and tunnels, waiting for the Second World War to end.

MacDonald doesn’t remember much about the next day when Canadian soldiers moved into the city southeast of Apeldoorn and found that only a handful of buildings had escaped damage or destruction. What he does remember still haunts him: fighting house to house, searching basements for Nazi soldiers only to find dead citizens, often mothers with babies in their arms. After Zutphen, his unit pressed on to liberate other towns and villages.

Ellen Praag lived with fear during the Hunger Winter.

PHOTO: SHARON ADAMS

Hasper remembers April 8, the day Zutphen was liberated. And now, 65 years later, he is able to shake MacDonald’s hand. In halting English, Hasper thanks the war veteran for the freedom he and others enjoy today. This moment is one of many during the first week of May when the Dutch spend a lot of time and effort remembering the war dead and giving thanks for their freedom.

The dark events of the Second World War and the occupation of Holland have moved from experience to memory and now recorded history. I keep this in mind as I visit the country to see for myself how well war and liberation are remembered as the world moves further away from those years.

This is my assignment as I accompany MacDonald and other Canadian veterans and companions to Zutphen. Every fifth year since 1980 a national program has been arranged so visiting Canadian veterans can take part in commemoration ceremonies and liberation festivals. Two organizations—Thank You Canada and Allied Forces, and Welcome Again Veterans Foundation—have matched Canadians with host families at dozens of locations along the liberation route. However, notice has been given that this could be the last program of its kind. And so MacDonald, 84, has come to take part in what may be the last march of veterans.

Chrisje Hanebrink recalls when bombs fell.

PHOTO: SHARON ADAMS

“Fifteen years ago there were 5,000 veterans,” says Gerry van’t Holt, chairman of Welcome Again Veterans (WAV). Verstraete Travel & Cruises, in Aurora, Ont., WAV’s official agent, booked just over 200 passages for veterans and companions, compared to nearly 1,400 in 2005.

Although some opt for a hotel, many stay with host families. We participate in local observances and national ceremonies at the Canadian war cemeteries in Groesbeek and Holten and the Liberation Festival in Apeldoorn. My hosts are retired judge Joke (pronounced Yoka) van Staveren and her husband Michael Harbinson, a retired software developer. Their house is across the street from St. Walburgiskerk, parts of which date from the 11th century, and backs onto the city’s medieval walls. During my visit, they arrange impromptu dinner parties and short visits with friends and neighbours to discuss the changing nature of remembrance.

Veteran Stanley Fields of Ottawa hugs a Dutch child at Holten Canadian War Cemetery.

PHOTO: SHARON ADAMS

The Dutch believe “there can be no celebration without commemoration” and they have woven the skeins of remembrance and thankfulness into the tapestry of their national life. They observe Remembrance Day on May 4th, then celebrate Liberation Day the next day. Over the years postwar silent processions commemorating fallen resistance members and Dutch citizens murdered by occupying forces were broadened to encompass liberators, and now others. This year at 8 p.m., the “two minutes of silence (is) for these victims, but also for the victims in other wars or armed fights in the world,” explains Zutphen Burgemeester J. A. Gerritsen moments before a thousand people, many of them children, participate in the procession.

Church bells mark its solemn progress along curved, cobbled streets to the memorial where we join a simple, but moving remembrance service that includes the placing of wreaths.

Traditionally, Liberation Day is a joyful time of festivities, including open air concerts. But for visitors and hosts, the day starts on a solemn note. We attend the dedication of a bridge in honour of one of 11 Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders killed while liberating Leesten, now a suburb of Zutphen. During the night, a member of our tour party has died: Leroy Lawes had made this journey in order to dedicate a bridge in honour of his father, Marshall, who died here, and his uncle Cecil, killed elsewhere in Holland. Instead his niece Debbie Lawes of Ottawa dedicates Lawes Bridge.

Attaching Canadian pins to their sons’ jackets are Corinne Willems with Jelle, and Riek Rosegaard with Leslie and Colin.

PHOTO: SHARON ADAMS

Later, I witness the Freedom Torch relay and lighting of the flame in Zutphen. It is impossible not to be swept up by the joy. I meet Bergemeester Gerritsen in a coffee house where he takes a breather between official duties. For him personally, Liberation Day has become more important. “I’m of the 1960s generation,” which, in the Netherlands as well as elsewhere, looked “more to the future than to the past,” he says. In time, he became “more open for the stories from the war, personal stories. They touch me more than when I was younger.” He has noticed a gradual increase in interest in ceremonies over the last decade, perhaps, he says, due to threats to democracy in the wider world as well as intolerance at home. There are echoes of Germany in the 1930s in the voices of those blaming the nation’s woes today on foreigners and immigrants, he says, and remembrance is an important preventive.

“Freedom,” says my host, Joke, “is fragile.” The Dutch experienced that for themselves under Nazi occupation, with gradual erosion of civil rights and eventual loss of rule of law itself. Over the years, the expression of gratitude for their liberation has evolved into promotion of freedom for everyone, everywhere. “You have to defend the freedom of people who are suppressed,” she says, especially those suppressed by their own governments. “It’s very important to speak out. You must let them know this is not how governments are supposed to behave.” The Dutch know how evil can flourish when the courage of good people fails, she adds.

In dozens of conversations I learn how remembrance has changed, and notice subtle differences of opinion about its nature from generation to generation. I sense urgency among the elderly to share war experiences and a growing interest in the postwar generation to capture and honour that history. I meet parents who see remembrance as a way to pass on national values. And in young adults I see the blossoming of a commitment to the universal ideals of peace, tolerance and freedom.

University student Martin Scholten von Aschat chats with Michael Harbinson.

PHOTO: SHARON ADAMS

Wim Fontein, 86, Menno Scholten von Aschat and Chrisje Hanebrink, both teens at the end of the war, and Ellen Praag, 77, share bitter experiences. Fontein was often forced into hiding for making trouble for the occupiers.  Hanebrink remembers terrified nights listening to Allied bombers passing overhead, dreading off-target explosions, some that destroyed neighbouring farmhouses. Praag remembers the fear of betrayl of those, like her parents, who sheltered Jewish families. Family friends were betrayed for food in the Hunger Winter and were executed. “We also remember for what reason they died.” They also share their memories of liberation. Fontein missed the celebrations, a 21-year-old so weak from famine he could not stand. And Scholten von Aschat recalls the surrealistic feeling of instantly restored freedom as he played bridge with Canadian soldiers in a tank while war raged on a few kilometres away.

They all fear the young may lose their commitment to remembrance as well as the connection the country has to Canada. “I remember my father telling me things about the First World War, but it was a tale of history. It doesn’t give feelings,” says Fontein. For Hanebrink’s five children, “it was just part of our lives.” But it’s not the same for her grandchildren. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think the feeling will survive. I have the feeling eventually it will just evaporate.”

Jan van Ardenne’s tennis champion father played a game with a local commandant on condition he release a prisoner, secretly a resistance leader. Now 60, it took him decades to get over a hatred of Germans passed on from his parents. “It takes generations” to heal, he says. Now he thinks Germany ought to be represented in Dutch remembrance ceremonies. “I think commemoration will continue (but) it may not be in the way we do it nowadays.”

Scholten von Aschat’s grandson Martin, a university student, says time has marched on. “If you haven’t experienced it, I don’t think you can possibly understand the meaning of liberation because you haven’t been occupied,” he says. Although his parents and grandfather feel a connection to Canada, he does not. “Obviously you learn from history lessons,” about Canada’s involvement in liberating the Netherlands, but “it’s difficult to thank someone you never had any contact with.” Martin’s generation meets more grandchildren of the occupiers than grandchildren of the liberators. “I have many friends in Germany.”

But later in the week I see the Canadian-Dutch connection kindled in a pair of teenagers who attend the Lawes Bridge dedication ceremony. Before this, Janneke Overduin, 19, knew very little about the Canadian liberators. But hearing the story of the Lawes family has changed that. “We don’t have the possibility to talk to people who really were there,” she says. Her friend Nynke Krans, 18, wonders how the tradition can continue. “I question myself whether my children or grandchildren will remember.”

Dutch children learn about the Second World War in school and are involved in remembrance. In Holten, schoolchildren take part in the annual ceremony May 4, are assigned graves to tend, and put a lighted candle on every grave in the cemetery on Christmas Eve. Young people need to learn such lessons, says Krans, so “we know how to improve all that to preserve peace.”

Changes are being made to continue the tradition. This year, 3,000 Canadian students attended remembrance events to hear “stories of war, but also stories of peace,” says Netherlands Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende. “That is how we make them aware that freedom is not something to be taken for granted.”

Local hosts vow to continue welcoming Canadian veterans and their families, even if there is no national program.

“Let’s be realistic, this will not be the last time,” a tearful Ruth Krooshof says at our farewell banquet. Her parents Freka and Henk, local WAV organizers, have hosted veteran Bill Ward of Toronto eight times since 1998. “It’s a virus, it gets into your body and never leaves,” says Freka. “You want to hold them and talk with them and say ‘thank you, thank you, thank you.’”

“There are children and grandchildren,” new generations to be educated, says van’t Holt. WAV is now working on an information centre near the Holten Canadian War Cemetery. He hopes it will give younger generations a solid connection to an important past. “To never forget,” says van’t Holt.

I come away from my visit comforted by Zutphen’s history of adapting to change. The evidence has surrounded me all week: St. Walburgiskerk, its walls scarred where brighter brick was used to repair war damage, still a place of worship and wonder; a glass viewing plate in a public building protecting a portion of centuries-old wall frescoes; walls of historic buildings integrated into the modern lobby of a new city hall; vaulted cellars where townspeople once sheltered, now cozy spaces for coffee klatches; and the people of Zutphen who honour and preserve their past while getting on with the future.

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