Personal sacrifice for their country is a message that resonates at every Remembrance Day ceremony, but it is one that resonates every day in the heart of Wilhelmus Meere.
Meere’s father was executed by the invading German army on March 8, 1945, when Meere was five years old.
After being arrested and detained for three months, Willem Meere was killed for his communications duties in support of the Dutch resistance.
While Meere grew up aware of his father’s efforts to free Holland of the Nazi regime reign from 1940 to 1945, he began in 2002 looking more deeply into his father’s role in the resistance, which led him to seek recognition to for his contribution to his country at great personal risk during a time of war.
Those efforts culminated on Thursday (April 4) at a Ramada Hotel meeting salon, where Wilhelmus was presented with two medal presentations in recognition of his dad’s service to his country.
The primary award given posthumously to Willem Meere was the Mobilisation War Cross, which was established on Aug. 11, 1948, by the royal decree of Queen Wilhelmina, given to recipients who were non-military personnel or people who performed military tasks for the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Meere said he is proud of what his dad did, and how the recognition of his sacrifice has been a long time coming, with the ceremony attended by many of Meere’s neighbours from Meadowbrook Estates in Kelowna.
“I think after the war a lot of people just wanted to forget…those were tough years during the war and we all just wanted to move on and look to the future,” he said.
“We didn’t think about people who lost their lives perhaps as much as we should have.”
The life story of Meere’s father began with his birth on Oct. 16, 1910, in the Holland community of Scheveningen.
He grew up in Scheveningen and then The Hague, and married Meere’s mom Lean Jacoba Barnhoorn.
Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Willem Meere worked as a radio telegraphist technician for the Dutch government-owned airline KLM.
He lived with his family, three brothers and one daughter, at the Airport “Schiphol” in Holland until the invading German army bombed Schiphol, destroying the Meere family home and everything in it.
The family relocated with his wife’s in-laws to Rijswijk, where hardship was a daily way of life during the Nazi occupation years.
Because of his knowledge of radio operations, Meere was soon after contacted by the Dutch resistance.
Working under the pseudonym “Jack Guillaume,” he became heavily involved in the resistance communications efforts with the Allied Forces.
His wife Lena also helped, mainly as a courier for the group, on her bicycle delivering notices and new codes for telegraph communications.
Their friend owned a butcher shop where a secret cold room compartment was hidden, housing radio equipment under the code name “Packard” which operated for many years during the war.
The Meeres also hid radio equipment in their house between double walls, which also doubled as a hiding place for a Jewish family of four, who secretly lived in their house for more than two years during the early years of the war to avoid being sent to German extermination camps and almost certain death.
The secret radio unit in the shop was eventually discovered by the Germans on Feb. 7, 1945, with six people, four men including two sisters and Meere’s father, arrested that day and sent to the “Oranje Hotel” prison in The Hague.
They were welcomed by a Dutch collaborator who said to them: “Welcome to hell. You will never leave here alive.”
After being held in solitary confinement for three months, the four men were executed. The two sisters were liberated by the Canadian army on May 7, 1945.
Lena had to identify her husband’s remains, and he was subsequently buried with full military honours in Rijswijk and then was later reburied in the honour fields in Loenen.
For Wilhelmus Meere, he was able to visit his father’s gravesite in 2016.
While the memories of his dad are somewhat fleeting given his age when the elder Meere was arrested, he remains proud of his father’s sacrifice for his country.
He went on eventually to have his own family – two children, three grandkids and three great-grandkids.
The story of his father did not really resonate with his kids as they grew up, and for him what he did became more clear as he began his journey of recognition.
“We were familiar with his story but it was not something we talked about a lot,” Meere said.
Netherlands Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Mark de Wit, his country’s military attache based in Ottawa, was on hand to present Meere with the medals, saying such ceremonies are important for younger generations to not lose sight of the sacrifice of their descendants during a time of epic global war upheaval.
He cited the importance of the message of history – to not forget the lessons of the past or be condemned to repeat it.
But he acknowledges having spent a career in the Netherlands military, those lessons – the hardship and casualties of war – often blur as time marches on.
“Unfortunately the lessons of the past are too often forgotten,” he said.
Impressive is how de Wit describes the actions of those in the Dutch resistance, saying “They did what had to be done.”
The Second World War touched his own family, as de Wit’s grandmother and her brother ended up in German labour camps.
“My grandmother was saved by the Russian army advancing on Germany and she was then left to walk home,” he said.
He says Canada played a pivotal role in freeing Holland from German oppression, and his country’s resistance fighters played a significant role in assisting those efforts.
As for Meere, his native country has done right by him.
“He deserves this recognition…he did what needed to be done,” Meere said.
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