Posts Tagged ‘Princess Margriet’

Legion House in Kanata played host to a very special visitor May 11 as Princess Margriet of the Netherlands came to Dominion Command headquarters to plant a symbolic tree and pay her respects to the Canadian servicemen and women who helped to liberate her homeland 65 years ago. Princess Margriet and her husband, Professor Pieter van Vollenhoven, joined Dominion President Wilf Edmond in the ceremonial planting of the young London Planetree in Legion House’s front garden. “It is a real pleasure for me to have such a distinguished member of the Dutch royal family and her husband here today,” said Edmond, standing [...]

There were not as many as in the past, but the Canadian veterans who returned to the Netherlands this year seemed to be as wildly welcomed as they were 65 years ago. Back then, in 1945, the Dutch people were starving. They had been living under increasingly harsh German occupation for five years and had seen their neighbours rounded up and taken off to uncertain fates. That all ended when Canadian forces liberated the country at a cost of more than 7,600 fallen soldiers and countless others wounded. Still, it is amazing to see how the gratitude continues, not just from those [...]