WARTIME LOVE STORY
Local couple in heritage spot
On May 8, 1945, the Canadian Army entered Amsterdam.
Marguerite Blaisse’s father was too ill to join the delirious crowds greeting the liberators, so he asked his daughter to see if she could talk any Canadians into coming to their house to celebrate.
She walked up to a tall, handsome lieutenant and told him of her father’s request.
“He held my hand while he called to his friends and so, surrounded by 20 liberators, I arrived back home,” she later wrote. “It was hard to tell who was more pleased: we, who could not thank these men enough, or they, who seemed so happy to be in a home again, alive, and survivors of long, hard years of war. It seemed like one big, warm family reunion.”
Alas, some food her father had stashed away for the celebration had gone bad. The soldiers left, but later that night the lieutenant, Wilf Gildersleeve, came back with another officer, “their arms loaded with fresh bread, ham, butter and candles.”
Wilf Gildersleeve and Marguerite Blaisse fell in love, married, and went on to raise eight kids in West Vancouver. Their story has inspired Historica Canada to film a Heritage Minute that will begin airing on TV on Tuesday, the 75th anniversary of the Liberation of the Netherlands.
Marguerite was one of 1,886 Dutch war brides who emigrated to Canada after the war. But her father was initially leery of Wilf.
“My dad was posted to Amsterdam for a few weeks,” relates their daughter Juliana Leahy. “Every day they spent together, she was chaperoned the whole time. I guess she was 21, my dad was 29. They knew the spark had been lit, but my dad was not allowed to have any sort of private time with her.
“My mom’s parents said he had to get a job in Canada, he had to build a house, and become a Catholic. He had to pass all of these tests for his one and only daughter to marry a Canadian.”
So Wilf went back to Canada, promising to return. They stayed in touch by sending letters through military airmail.
“Lo and behold, he got a job, he bought a property, and started building a house,” said Leahy. “They sent drawings back and forth through the mail of the house that he built.”
They were engaged that Christmas, and on June 25, 1946, Wilf married Marguerite in a beautiful old church overlooking their first meeting place in Amsterdam’s famous Vondelpark.
Sadly, her father was too ill with tuberculosis to attend, and died shortly after the marriage. A lawyer, he had spent much of the war in hiding from the German occupiers. He sometimes hid out in a secret room constructed in the basement, which was accessed by lifting up a false toilet.
Amsterdam had been occupied for five years before liberation, and conditions were often brutal.
“My mom would ride her bike out in the country and bring food back in, hidden on her body,” said Leahy. “She remembered being stopped and (the Germans) finding the milk and meat ... they would steal the meat and shoot a hole in the container, pour the milk all over her and send her on her way.
“The last winter, of course, they literally survived on tulip bulbs.”
The German forces in Holland surrendered May 5, and on May 7 thousands of people crowded into Amsterdam’s Dam Square. But German soldiers opened fire on the crowd, killing an estimated 32 people. Marguerite and a friend were there, diving through a window to get out of harm’s way.
Wilf, meanwhile, had been with the Seaforth Highlanders at the bloody Battle of Ortona over the Christmas season in 1943. He played organ at a Christmas dinner the Canadians held in a church in the midst of the fighting; in 1999 he returned to Ortona for a “reconciliation event” with German soldiers that was filmed for a CBC documentary, Return To Ortona.
Marguerite passed away on June 27, 2001. Wilf died just over two months later, on Sept. 1, 2001.
“It was very close, but it was as it should be,” said Leahy. “He promised my mom’s parents he would take care of her ’til the end, and he did.”