There is a saying in Dutch: Een goede buurman is beter dan een verre vriend= A good neighbor is better than a distant friend. When I met Lies Bueninck in September 2009 ( see: https://cometosea.us/?p=720 ) she showed me what my mother had given to her. Lies and another 200 Dutch women in the Dachau AGFA Commando https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGFA_Commando had exchanged addresses with their fella-prisoners when their liberation was imminent.
They wrote their address and a short message/poem on the back of a 1 1/2 ” diameter carton that had been used in the AGFA factory to separate the timing devices, the women were forced to assemble. On that day, April 26, 1945, 200 x 200= 40,000 of these address cards were written….. Many of these survived. Some are exhibited in the Washington, D.C. Holocaust Museum. Lies Bueninck was 100 years old when I met her, she still remembered my mom. This collection of Lies Bueninck’s memorabilia will be a temporary exhibit in the Dutch Resistance Museum opening on April 24. I will be attending.
This is a long winded introduction to my very good friend Evert Slijper, who came to visit yesterday. He is the exception, unless Oregon can pass for the Neighbor.
I met Evert in 1972, in Springfield, Oregon. He is 9 years my junior. He came from Holland to Tacoma in the seventies to study at the University of the Puget Sound in an exchange program with the only private Dutch University “Nijenrode”. He has lots of friends here in Gig Harbor and Tacoma through the Thistle sailor community. One of the Gig Harbor notables, the owner of the Tides Tavern, Pete Stanley, studied at Nijenrode on this same exchange programs. Evert still calls it “Three Fingered Jack” to show his age. When I sent out my “Fleetwood is Flotsam” blog on November 16, 2013, Evert came to the rescue with his cousin Victor van Liempt on Ibiza, who made me the best dressed shipwreck survivor. Then when I arrived back in Holland on January 8, 2014 he put me up in his parental home in Haarlem with a car and weekly maid service until I repatriated to Gig Harbor on April 3rd 2014. And in between he looked me up at the yacht club “De Schinkel” in Amsterdam where “Fleetwood” was berthed and where he and his brother are still “Kind in Huis” because of their association with the “Freedom” sailing fleet.