ICB Project: Interview series with surviving relatives

Relatives of Canadian soldiers buried in Holten are the main characters in an interview project set up by the Canadian Cemetery Information Center in Holten (ICB) in collaboration with the regional broadcasting organization RTV Oost.

The aim of the project is to find out more about the soldiers buried in Holten. At the same time, the interviews will underscore the impact of the loss of loved ones in Canada throughout the generations to this day.

In September 2019, ICB volunteer Jan Braakman, together with RTV Oost cameraman and journalist Sander Jongsma, will interview about ten siblings or children of men buried in Holten. The film that emerges from the project will become available to the public in the renewed ICB center in 2020. In the context of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands, RTV Oost will make extensive use of the information from the conversations with relatives.

The project stems from an idea by Margriet Dekkers and Nico Arfman. Margriet, working as a Canada coordinator at the University of Twente, suggested the idea of ​​interviewing the sister of Alcide Charlebois, who lives in the Canadian province of Quebec. Margriet met Rita, Alcide's sister, when she worked for the Canadian embassy. Alcide has been buried at the Holten War Cemetery.

Nico has propagated the idea in collaboration with the research committee of the ICB. The idea has grown into a larger project with the aim of finding as many immediate relatives as possible in a short period of time and interviewing them in Canada. Margriet Dekkers will be responsible for the interview with Alcide Charlebois's sister.

Thanks to the enthusiastic cooperation of a number of volunteers from genealogical organizations in Canada and because of the publicity for the project in Canadian national media (CBC Radio and theGlobe and Mail), dozens of interview candidates from all over Canada applied.

The material collected with the interviews will result in a video production. The film will be shown in the ICB, and will be broadcast in edited form via RTV Oost. The raw material from all interviews is available for the ICB, and can and will be used in the future for multiple forms of information for visitors to the center.

The project has become possible thanks to a subsidy from the culture budget of the municipality of Rijssen-Holten. The Culture Advisory Council of the municipality awarded an amount of € 4000 for the implementation of the project. This will cover part of the travel and accommodation costs.