Lives intertwined by World War II courage
By JODY RECORD

Micha van Veldhuizen and UNH President Ann Weaver Hart talk about her father's rescue by Micha's grandfather in Holland during World War II. The Dutch high school sophomore is an intern at the university's Center for International Education and is staying with Weaver Hart's famaily. (BOB LAPREE/UNION LEADER)
DURHAM — History is always different in person.

The written account of 1st Lt. Ted Weaver’s plane being shot down over Nazi occupied Holland in 1944 reads like a novel. Hiding in a wheat field, with a German soldier searching for him just a few feet away. A dog that didn’t bark. Families of the Dutch underground taking him in, moving him from house to house, until the town was liberated nine months later.

But the climax of the story came a few weeks ago when Weaver’s daughter, University of New Hampshire president Ann Weaver Hart, went to Logan Airport to pick up a 15-year-old boy who was coming to America on an exchange program.

Micha Van Veldhuizen isn’t just any Dutch high school student. His great-grandparents hid Hart’s father from November 1944 until April 8, 1945, when Canadian troops entered Nijverdal.

Van Veldhuizen never knew of his connection to Hart until he decided to fulfill his English language requirement in the United States.

Dutch students who want to get an English diploma have to spend three or four weeks a year in an English-speaking country. Last year Van Veldhuizen went to Indonesia. This year, when he asked his mother if she knew anyone in America, she mentioned Hart.

“I had never heard the story,” he says. “We did a Google search and found her. Then later I asked my mother, how do you know Ann Hart?”

Van Veldhuizen’s grandmother, Annie Van Harten, was a young woman in 1944. She talked little of the war until her grandson heard about Hart and started asking questions. He just recently learned his grandfather was a high-ranking officer with the Dutch police who pretended to be investigating people he was secretly helping.
Talking in the car

Ann Hart’s experience was similar.

“The only stories I heard in the late ’60s were about how hard it was and how everyone that had hid him made sacrifices,” Hart says. “I think it was a little too painful, a little too difficult.

“Mom tells a story about the first night Dad was back home. They were sitting in the living room and the doorbell rang and Dad jumped up and hid behind the couch. Then he realized he didn’t have to hide anymore.”

Hart’s mother, Sylvia Weaver, began encouraging her husband to record the events of those nine months. One day while driving in the car, Hart’s uncle pulled out a tape recorder and told Weaver to start talking.

“Most of the tapes were made in the car, telling stories to my uncle,” Hart says.
B-24 under fire

Ted Lionel Weaver was 23 years old when he piloted the B-24 bomber Full House on its 23rd mission over Holland. It was July 7, 1944. There were nine men on board. Their mission was to strike aircraft factories in Bernberg, Germany.

The flight path was to take them across the northern tip of France and then into Germany. They were flying at an altitude of 20,000 feet when the plane came under fire.

The enemy aircraft came out of nowhere, ME-110 fighters at 1 o’clock high. The strike lasted minutes, there was a rush of air into the plane and it was crippled.

Smoke filled the cockpit. All the radios were destroyed. Leaking hydraulic fluid covered the rudder. The outboard left engine was the first to go. The crew stayed calm, adjusting their parachutes, waiting Weaver’s orders to abandon the plane.

The first man out was one of two wounded in the attack. His crewmates placed the ripcord in his hand, pushed him out the opening and yelled, “pull.” Weaver speculated he was unconscious. He was killed when he hit the ground.

The young pilot sent the others out before him while he tried to guide the limping plane. Six of the crewmen were captured and became prisoners of war. One was killed. For nine months, Weaver was listed as missing in action.
Leaving no tracks

When he hit the ground, he did what he had been trained not to do: he shed his parachute and left it where it was. He could hear gunfire nearby. There was no time to roll up the silk and hide it.

He had landed in a wheat field and began crawling on his hands and knees so he wouldn’t leave a trail. Along the way, he shed anything that could connect him to his family back home.

He buried pictures; a silver bracelet decorated with a set of wings that had his future wife’s full name engraved on the back; all but one of the silver officer insignia bars he wore.

Fifteen years later, the son-in-law of the farmer who owned the land would find the silver bracelet and have it returned to Weaver.

The soldiers carried escape packets containing German, French and Belgian money, enough concentrate food to last a few days, silk maps of Europe and cards written in German and French with vital phrases.

Weaver memorized a few of the messages and then tore up the cards and buried them.

He spent the day lying in the wheat field, watching a house nearby and the family who lived there. That afternoon when he got up and walked toward them, he uttered one phrase:

“Ich bin Amerikanische pilot; guten tag.” (“I am an American pilot; good day.”)

Weaver was given a pair of coveralls and was sent back to the field where he covered himself with grain stalks. Farmer Schoemaker later brought him to meet Jan Roorda with the Dutch underground.
Hidden houseguests

From July to November, Weaver moved whenever it got unsafe. He had met another American and they were staying in the woods when the Van Harten family offered to hide them.

Mr. Van Harten had been released from digging tank traps for the Germans but was not yet home when the two pilots arrived in Nijverdal. Hank, the oldest son, had just been freed from a concentration camp. The stakes were high.

And yet, for the next six months, the Van Harten family sheltered the men, hiding them in the colonnade between the front room and the dining room whenever the Germans came to search the house.

Then, when it was learned the Nazi soldiers had discovered people hiding in the colonnades and were shooting them through the walls, the Van Hartens built a new hiding place in their sitting room.

They cut a 2½-foot-square hole under a daybed and dug out an area below it, 4 feet deep and 7 feet square. Under cover of night, the soil was carried out of the house in buckets and dumped in the garden so the neighbors wouldn’t get suspicious.

That dirt space became the Americans’ bedroom.

The men passed the time playing cards — pinochle and bridge — with Van Veldhuizen’s grandmother and the other family members. Annie’s sister, Gerritdina, taught Weaver to knit.

As the Germans moved across Holland, they took over the Dutch people’s homes and then abandoned them. When the Van Hartens learned their house was going to be the next command post, they hurriedly moved Weaver and the other pilot. A baker in town hid the men for two weeks until the Nazi soldiers moved on.
Staying in touch

Weaver stayed with the Van Hartens until the war ended. He kept in touch with the family after returning to America. Hart met Van Veldhuizen’s parents when they called her father during a trip to the states in the 1980s.

They exchanged Christmas cards thereafter but lost contact in the 1990s when the Van Veldhuizens moved to Indonesia. Then, early this winter, they found Hart on the Internet.

“That was a surprise, to find out she was a university president,” Van Veldhuizen says. “I know Ann’s really busy, she has a lot of things to do. But she still has time for me.”

And they both have had time to share the stories that have been passed on to them. Stories that intersect their lives.

Hart tells of Jan Roorda, the first man to help her father. Shortly after, he had been arrested and sentenced to death.

“Jan was scheduled for execution the same day the town was liberated,” Hart says. “He said the firing squad was marching one way down the street and the Canadian army was coming in the other direction.”

“All those people that helped him took a chance,” she continues.

Van Veldhuizen nods his head.

“Even though there were threats. And they weren’t hollow threats. People were killed for helping the Americans,” Van Veldhuizen says. “My grandmother told me of the searches, of the Germans coming to the house and shoving them aside, shouting.”
Reflections on courage

Hart is contemplative.

“My dad’s stories always made me wonder if I had the moral courage to do what they did,” she says. “It’s quite a moral standard when you’re a little kid trying to figure out whether you’re brave or not.

“I wouldn’t be here if a whole lot of people in Europe had not had that moral courage. My father, he was a kid.”

Van Veldhuizen is nodding again.

“Imagine a UNH student trying to do the same thing,” he says.

The most touching moment of the interview comes when Hart tells her mother’s story. Like so many women left behind, she had no idea if her soldier was dead or alive.

“Month after month went by without a word. My mother was a college student,” Hart said. “My father was given a form telegram; he couldn’t send anything personal. All it said was he was alive and would contact her.”

Her voice catches and then she finishes, “My grandfather got the telegram and went to find my mother. She was in class.”

Tears come when she mentions what her mother said was the hardest part: her friends and the men who didn’t come home to them.

“It could have been so different for us,” Hart says. “Anyone of those people could have turned my father in, the farmer, anyone.”

“So many what-ifs,” Van Veldhuizen says. “So many.”

From:http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=35918

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