Tineke’s parents preserved a little family secret and kept it back from her

Between two packets of love letters, Tineke van Brakel (66) from Deventer found two envelopes. One was addressed to her dad’s parental home, the other to her mother’s.

The seal on the stamp shows that the envelopes were posted in 1947. Tineke van Brakel was curious to open one of them. In it she found a piece of paper: the confirmation of an adoption of a Canadian soldier. For one guilder and 25 cents , Dutch people could adopt a grave of a soldier who was killed during the Second World War and who was buried in Holten.

”I had no idea’, Tineke van Brakel says. “This was never mentioned. Apparently, both my father’s and my mother’s family took care of a soldier killed in action. At home we talked about the war a lot. My mother often told us about her eldest brother, who was in the airforce and who was engaged to the girl that later was to be the mother of of the well-known Dutch TVpersonality Paul de Leeuw. She often told about the many Canadians they housed on a regular basis. She even witnessed the execution of 17 young men, opposite from her parental home at the Van Deldemstraat in Deventer. She told us about this too, but never about the grave adoption”.

New bike for mum

Why not? Tineke will probably never find out, since both her parents have died. “They had a large collection of documents and photos” she says.

Ëspecially my dad kept everything. I even found the check for a new bike for my mum”. She still has a packet of love letters from her parents as well, wrapped with a red ribbon. However, she has always been reluctant to open them. “I think that’s too private”, she says. ”These letters were written during the war. At the time, my mother was 15, and my dad was 18”.

Looking for more information

But she gladly handed over the official documents that she found among the pile of love letters to the Canadian cemetery in Holten.Tineke van Brakel hoped that the center could tell her more. As it happened, a few years ago board member Henk Vincent of the information center was working on the list of adoptions.

He tells us: “After the war every Dutchman could adopt a grave of a soldier. This was done by people from this area, but also from Apeldoorn and the rest of Holland. In Holten every grave had a “family”. People are still coming here for “their boy”and they have kept up the correspondence between them and the next of kin in Canada”.

Filed

Henk Vincent: “The Commonwealth War Graves Commission ( CWGC) stopped the grave-adoption program in the fifties. Some graves were given a personal touch and were turned into a small garden with leftover flowers from their own yard. That was a thorn in the flesh of the Commission’s cemetery keepers. From then on, all the graves on this field of honour are maintained uniformly again”.

The adoption documents of private (soldier) G. Vaillantcourt and of private J.F.Napier will be inserted in the files of these servicemen, both killed in 1945.

 


Bron: https://www.destentor.nl/reggestreek/ouders-van-tineke-hielden-voor-haar-een-klein-familiegeheim-in-holten-verborgen~a78ad5f3/