 In a celebrated image published in newspapers across Canada in 1945, a Canadian soldier -- Capt. Leonard Johnson -- celebrates his marriage to a Dutch war bride with an arresting kiss. The photograph came to represent the tight, wartime bond between the two nations.
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LONDON, Ont. - They met at a dance during Europe's giddy post-war days.
She was 21, a Dutch girl from the city who was happy to be out on the town with her pals.
He was an Ontario farm boy -- a tank driver, she later learned -- and handsome and so very nice.
"The sun was shining in my eyes and he closed the curtain for me. It was all very romantic," Dolly Hodgins says now.
She lived in the city of Haarlem and was 16 when the Netherlands fell to German forces in 1940.
Those were tough times: Her family ate tulip bulbs when food was scarce and saved their potato peels to trade with a farmer for one-third of a cup of milk. Her aunt once exchanged a piano for a bag of potatoes. When winter came and the coal for heating was gone, they sometimes sneaked out into the darkness to cut trees for firewood.
So when the Canadian liberators rolled through the city in tanks and troop trucks in May 1945, it was a celebration to beat all celebrations.
At a rest-and-relaxation centre in the city, the Canadians held dances to which all the local girls were invited.
Hodgins recalls the Canadian boys as polite. They had chocolate.
And there was Austin Hodgins, the Lucan tank driver and doctor's assistant who was unflagging in his affection for Dolly van den Berg.
They wrote letters for six years -- he entreating her to come to Canada for a visit; she declining each time, before her mother suggested she accept.
So in May 1951, she boarded a ship for North America and landed in New York to find him waiting for her on the pier.
By that September, they were married.
It was a marriage that was to last 51 years, until his death in 2002.
She joined the Anglican church, brought her mother here, settled into small-town Southwestern Ontario and a world that included raising two daughters as Canadians. "It was a whole new life for me because I was a city girl and this was a farm in Lucan."
Austin, one of a long line of Hodgins leaders in the community, went on to become a Biddulph reeve and a keeper of local history.
Dolly regrets not a minute of the move or the marriage. "He was the sweetest man on Earth. He was so good."
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This month and next, Canada and the Netherlands are celebrating a relationship forged during war and liberation 65 years ago.
The van den Berg/Hodgins marriage in some ways exemplifies its first bonds and some of its enduring legacy.
While Polish, American and British forces all helped in the battle, it's the Canadians who captured the hearts of the Dutch.
It's a legacy that's echoed back to its country of origin: The immediate post-war years marked the biggest Dutch immigration Canada has seen -- so many new arrivals, that Canada now counts one million residents with Dutch heritage.
For some, the shattered European economy after the war forced them from the Netherlands, which actively encouraged emigration.
For others, the new spectre of mandatory military service at home, after six years of war and deprivation, was too painful a prospect to remain.
Others sought adventure or, like van den Berg, love.
America, Australia, New Zealand all beckoned.
For many, Canada was the first choice.
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"My friends and I were too realistic to believe what they told us -- that we'll take you back to North America and make film stars of you," says Hodgins' childhood friend, Synthia Schilder, who still has a menu from the farewell dinner the Canadians threw for the young women of Haarlem late in 1945.
The meal featured soup, goose, baked Alaska, chocolate. "To us, that was an enormous feast. I remember stuffing myself to the gills."
The Canadian soldiers were polite and her parents trusted them, she said. "My parents loved the Canadians. Hey, they were our liberators.
"Our knowledge about Canada, it really was scant in those days. It was a big country and it was cold: that's what we were told."
Schilder arrived in London in 1951, at the urging of van den Berg, then married and helped raise two daughters, one of whom met a Dutchman and is now living in the Netherlands.
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It wasn't all happily-ever-after.
There are tales of cliques and clannishness among the Dutch; and stories of their neighbours and sponsors, Canadian and Dutch-Canadian both, taking advantage of cheap immigrant labour.
For many, the reality of Canada was a shock.
"My mother kept saying, 'You're going to be eaten by the bears,' '' recalls Elisabeth Dieleman, who left the Netherlands with her husband Marinus in 1956.
There were no bears in Halifax, where they landed, but the city struck her as dirty and sooty.
Still, there were jobs and food.
She had been 12 in 1940, when German bombs dropped around her family's Rotterdam home, a bombardment that shattered what the Dutch had hoped would be neutrality during the war.
"I saw too much," she says, recounting how she was compelled to look as two trucks loaded with bodies were driven past their home.
They were hungry much of the time and, without coal to heat the homes, winters were cold.
"It was awful. It's hard to tell this, " she says, looking down at her hands. "So many people died of hunger."
Then, liberation by Allied forces swept like a wave across the country.
American soldiers, she recalls, wolf-whistled when she passed their camp. The Canadians, though, gave them chocolate.
"Everybody in every street, they were dancing. I can still see it."
Homesick after arriving in 1956, they returned to the Netherlands for a time. But their son Marinus had asthma and would soon have been eligible for Dutch army service. So they returned to London.
For years, when Dieleman still drove a car, she visited Canadian veterans in hospital and brought them tulips every May.
"(I had to) thank Canadians, Canadians who fought so hard and so many died . . . Because of what they did for us, I would do anything for them."
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Londoner Rinette Teunissen used to visit Canadian veterans at Parkwood Hospital, where so few vets now remain the place is downsizing its veterans' wing.
A contingent of Dutch-Canadians always brought flowers and danced traditional dances.
A few shared stories, she says. Most shared tears.
One veteran patient, a former army doctor, would tell them about the people he couldn't save.
"That's why he cried so much. The tears and the stories rolled out of his mouth," she says.
Rinette and husband Piet Teunissen were among the later arrivals, in 1966, when Piet was offered a job at the emerging University of Western Ontario's wind tunnel.
Today, Piet visits schools to share stories of the war and its aftermath on behalf of those who can't.
"Because I was involved. I know about it. A lot of people who were there don't want to talk about it. They have suffered too much," he says.
Piet's own memories are as vivid as when he was a boy. As liberation approached, they heard a humming noise that grew ever louder. "The whole neighbourhood climbed on the roofs to see the sea of (Allied) airplanes flying over" and dropping paratroopers who soon made their way to his street.
The boy marvelled at the Americans in their high leather boots, grenades strapped to their belts and Lucky Strikes cigarettes between their lips.
When Americans moved on, the Canadians and English arrived to hold and advance the Allied lines. "They were the liberators," Piet Teunissen says. "They were our gods. We were happy like crazy."
It's one reason Teunissen became one of the driving forces behind the design of a carillon installed in London's Victoria Park five years ago as a tribute to Canadians who first liberated the Dutch and then befriended her emigrees.
Rinette Teunissen says her husband's design and technical skills were in enough demand that they could have emigrated almost anywhere.
But the war-time bond became a decisive link.
"Hearing those stories, you realize, I am so lucky as to be here. If they had not done what they did, we wouldn't be here. I still say that's thanks to the Canadians."
deb.vanbrenk@sunmedia.ca
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