August 13, 2014

A WWII war vet receives his medals in the mail

Filed under: General,History by Orangemaster @ 12:36 pm

Ereteken_voor_Orde_en_Vrede_1947

A 97-year-old man from Groesbeek, a village well known for its WWII cemetary, received two medals 70 years after WWII in the mail.

Arnold Nijenhuis wasn’t one to talk about the war, but recently started talking about it, telling stories. In one of his stories, his son Vincent understood that his father was put forth for a medal, but never received it. Vincent found a document in a pile of old papers to claim the medal and sent it in asking the Ministry of Defense to finally honour his father.

Almost like subscribing to a magazine, Arnold Nijenhuis was sent not one, but two medals, roughly translated as the War Memorial Cross as well as the Decoration for Order and Peace, again, in the mail.

(Link: www.gelderlander.nl, Photo of Ereteken voor Orde en Vrede 1947 by Robert Prummel, some rights reserved)

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August 14, 2012

Don’t throw out WWII stuff, museums will take it

Filed under: History by Orangemaster @ 1:25 pm

Today, sixteen of the country’s resistance and war museums are calling on people to give them objects from WWII such as books, documents, photos and more that they no longer want to keep. Most importantly, the museums don’t want people to throw anything out, as there is still a lot out there to collect.

Some Dutch videos show people handing in clothing, embroidery, letters, jewellery and more.

And a bit like The Antique Roadshow programme where people have gran’s old pendant appraised, museums probably know a lot more about many of the objects than their current owners do.

Although I have yet to visit many war-related sites in the Netherlands, I very much enjoyed the Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery, which I visited when I used to live in nearby Nijmegen. It has more than two thousand Canadian soldiers buried there, along with Poles, Moroccans, Pakistanis and others that fought in WWII. Wikipedia states that bodies were moved across international frontiers, so that the Canadians would not be buried in German soil, something rarely done internationally.

(Link: www.gelderlander.nl)

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