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Woman meets up with family that helped her family

Joop Hemmerle sat with fellow captives in a German prison cell in Amsterdam, awaiting transport to the concentration camp at Dachau.
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Sisters Tina Opdendries and Dorothy Meindersma check the bouquet Olga Hemmerle-Warnau created for their parents’ gravesite at Alto-Reste Cemetary

Joop Hemmerle sat with fellow captives in a German prison cell in Amsterdam, awaiting transport to the concentration camp at Dachau.

It was December of 1943. Hemmerle, who lived in the coastal village of Andijk, about 100 km north of Amsterdam, had been arrested for harbouring Jews and for taking part in the Dutch resistance.

Weighing on the young man’s heart was concern for his young wife Tine and her unborn child.

Serving a much lighter sentence in the same prison was Frank Zee, a fellow Andijker who had been caught hiding one of the many young men who were being rounded up to work in German factories.

Zee was about to get a temporary release from prison so he could go home and harvest his crops.

He promised Hemmerle that he and his wife, Eberline, would look after Tine and her new baby.

Sixty-six years later, the little girl born one month premature in Frank and Ebeline Zee’s bedroom is visiting Canada for the first time, reuniting with the five surviving daughters of the family who took her mother in during the war.

The Zee family left The Netherlands for Canada in 1949, leaving the Hemmerles with little more than memories.

While her father had survived Dachau in body, his spirit was permanently broken. He died in 1970, says Olga Hemmerle-Warnau.

Although she was too young to remember the Zees, her mother told her who they had helped the family and she made it her mission to visit and thank them personally.

“I didn’t know them at all. I only knew they went to Canada after the war.”

Hemmerle-Warnau had no memories of the family, but her mother always kept an album of photos to go with the stories.

Helena Kits was only eight years old when the Hemmerle baby was born. But she and her sisters have never forgotten the baby or her mother. Their names come up every time someone in the family celebrates a birthday, Kits said while visiting in the Red Deer home of her sister, Tina Opdendries.

The Zee sisters had been searching for Olga, too.

The mystery unfolded when a weekly newspaper, de Andijker, published a story about Hemmerle-Warnau’s search for the Zees. One of their nieces, Ebeline Hawtin, saw the article and phoned her aunt, Aaf (Agnes) Kooiman. By the end of that day, Hemmerle-Warnau had talked to three of the sisters and was starting to make plans to visit them in Canada.

Ebeline Zee died in 1985 and Frank died four years later.

Fortunately for Hemmerle-Warnau, their five surviving daughters all live in Red Deer or close by. Kooiman and Opdendries are in the city while Kits and Dorothy Meindersma live in Lacombe and Jenny Brink lives in Bentley.

Hemmerle-Warnau said she was impressed to see so much Dutch influence in Central Alberta, pointing out the wooden shoes mounted outside Opdendries’ door.

Hemmerle-Warnau said the most important stop in her tour was on Monday morning, when she went with the five sisters to lay flowers on their parents’ grave.

“It was important to give honour, because the parents of them did so much for my mother.”

One of the biggest surprises came in church on Sunday. Simon Swier, whose late wife, Ann was one of the Zee sisters, handed Hemmerle-Warnau a small, faded picture with her father’s handwriting on the back — in English.

Hemmerle’s elegant cursive outlines the story of his first daughter’s birth. On the front, the tiny infant is nestled in her mother’s arms, with Frank and Ebeline Zee standing behind them. Swier found the photo in a collection of Ann’s belongings after she died.

bkossowan@www.reddeeradvocate.com