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Remembering . . .
The Wartime Legacies of Canadians in Holland
By Valerie M.E. Giles, Ph.D.
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The people of Holland have never forgotten that Canadian troops were deployed
in the Liberation of the Netherlands in 1944 and 1945.
In a highly visible and symbolic gesture, as gratitude for the protection
provided by Canadian troops in the closing years of the Second World War,
more than a million tulips bloom every spring in our nation’s capital.
They are gifts from the people of the Netherlands, some from their Royal Family,
and some donated. All are meant to represent the spirit of friendship between
Canada and the Netherlands since that time.
There is something particularly poignant about stories from the war years.
Behind the numbers killed and injured and the soulless recitations of how
battles proceeded, the weapons used, or the territory gained or lost were
real flesh and blood people. Sometimes they were frightened and cold and hungry.
Some of them were children. Out of the privation and hardship, impressions
were made on children. For one of them, the experience inspired his life.
It was in the town of Sappemeer in the province of Groningen in north eastern
Holland that a Canadian medic unit set up tents in a small school yard in
April 1942. They provided medical support to the Canadian liberating forces.
Children from nearby houses played from dawn to dusk and spent time with the
soldiers who gave them bread spread with butter, chunks of cheese and sometimes
even chocolate bars.
The soldiers made a particularly powerful impact on one little boy. His own
father was serving with the Dutch army, which had been defeated early in the
war. The last the family knew was that their father had been seen in Rotterdam
during the bombing in 1941. They had little hope that he would have survived.
With no word from him, the little boy worried that his father may have been
killed. Canadian soldiers came to represent kindness and his mother made him
understand that they were liberators. In his five-year old mind, he promised
himself that one day he would go to Canada – the land of his heros –
and make a life there.
Despair was all around. The winter of 1944-45 was one of the worst on record.
Some people resorted to eating tulip bulbs and others gathered bits and pieces
of food in the rail yards. More than 18,000 people died of starvation in Holland
before that winter’s end. At home, from the roof deck of his house adjacent
to the school yard, night after night he could hear hundreds of Allied bombers
flying in formation to the target cities of Hamburg, Williamshaven and Emden
towards the north east and see the sky made red with the light of reflected
fire.
Decades later, as a young man of 25, he left Holland with $150.00 and made
his way to Canada. He arrived in Vancouver on July 31, 1965. Immigration officials
told him that there were jobs in Prince George with the building of the new
pulp mills. Since his plan was eventually to own a lumber mill, the prospect
of going to Prince George appealed to him. By the time he reached Prince George,
his carefully-spent travel allowance had become depleted to $25.74.
There were still some hungry times ahead; days when he would stand outside
the Salvation Army but was too proud to go in. Other days he slept under a
tree near the emergency ward of the hospital. He believed he would be found
and there would be help for him in case he collapsed from hunger. There was
yet another struggle in his newly-adopted homeland; learning English.
Eventually, his luck changed. One day, after making his daily walk from downtown
to the BCR industrial site, he was offered the job of cleanup man at the Netherlands
Overseas mill. In recognition of his diligent work, he won promotions to foreman
and superintendent within a year and a half.
It was the summer of 1967 when he got invited to dinner at the home of Gerry
Wilmot, then Sales Manager for Netherlands Overseas Sawmills. As the two men
talked about the past, they came to a startling discovery: they had met before.
Gerry Wilmot revealed that he had served in Holland during the war. He had,
in fact, been the captain of the Canadian Army Medic Unit stationed in the
school yard. The dinner guest that night, who had once been the hungry and
grateful little boy in that school yard, was John Brink.
Memories came flooding back as they looked at Wilmot’s photographs.
There was the school house and the Brink family’s home along with other
familiar landmarks. How could it be that two unrelated people managed to eclipse
each other’s orbit again twenty-two years later and ten thousand miles
away?
A further stunning coincidence happened later.
In 1975, proceeding with his life’s other ambition of owning a lumber
mill, John Brink wrote a business plan and incorporated his company as Brink
Forest Products Ltd. He began negotiating with Carrier Lumber to lease a mill
site on River Road. He leased the property and dormant old planer mill and
commenced operating. With that accomplishment, he realized his second dream.
Later, as if to signify that he had followed the right path, he found out
that the old planer mill once belonged to a company called Norman M. Smith.
The footprint of that operation is exactly the same as the current Brink Forest
Products operation. Until 1964, the owner of the Norman M. Smith mill had
been Captain Gerry Wilmot!
But were these events more than just coincidence? If he were to put a great
deal of faith in signs, John Brink has more than a few indications that his
life unfolded with certainty according to plan.
Dr. Giles is a Prince George-based writer and researcher.
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