Luck was a lifelong companion
Jim van Praag jeweller b August 23, 1922 d March 20, 2020
Luck was a constant companion in the long life of Jacques (Jim) van Praag. He was lucky to escape by the skin of his teeth from the Nazis. Lucky to survive two hazardous sea voyages during World War II. And lucky to avoid the Japanese bullets during his sojourns over West Java.
It was the ever-present factor that shaped his life, he wrote in his own memoirs.
But van Praag, who has died aged 97, made his own luck. Born in Antwerp, Belgium, into a Jewish family, he enjoyed a golden childhood.
As a young lad he would walk home from school through the city zoo and recalled the animals coming up to greet him as he passed.
He had been at Cambridge University studying English when war broke out in September 1939. He returned swiftly to his parents and sister in Belgium and, eight months later, when Germany invaded, they evacuated with columns of others dodging German Stuka dive-bombers en route to France.
His family found refuge there but, as the occupation of France became imminent, van Praag and the son of a family with whom he escaped Antwerp decided to quit Europe altogether.
The boys were thwarted at every turn, being thrown off trains and boats as they tried to get to England, Spain, and Morocco.
They eventually made it to Liverpool
They evacuated with columns of others, dodging German Stuka dive-bombers en route to France.
after stowing away on a Polish ship. They went on to London, where they were billeted as refugees.
Meanwhile, van Praag’s family had also made it to London, where his father set up a diamond-cutting business in Hatton Garden, the city’s jewellery centre.
Word got out to his parents that their son had perished in the Channel, and his family mourned him, only to be told a few days later that the young Jacques was in fact alive and well in Fulham.
His father turned up at Jacques’ billet. ‘‘It was the only time I ever saw my father cry,’’ Jim later recalled.
The family then managed to get passage to New York, with the young van Praag travelling separately. In a horrible twist of fate, he was again presumed dead when his ship went off the radar.
It eventually arrived some days later, and he was again reunited with his mourning family.
Many of their extended family were not so lucky, and died in the concentration camps.
America was a salvation for the family. His father set up a diamondcutting business, and van Praag became his apprentice.
But when the US joined the war in 1941, he enlisted as an aircraft mechanic in Texas.
Though he had a classification exempting him from military service, he nevertheless joined the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army Air Force.
He trained as a navigator and bombardier, flying all over the US and eventually all the way to Canberra, where he would be based.
He carried out missions over Java, including one in which he had to fly at only 30 metres above sea level to evade radar detection. Their mission was to drop propaganda pamphlets over internment camps in West Java.
It was a fraught mission, flown at night with inadequate flight information. Van Praag and his crew made it back to Australia – a 12-hour trip – with the proverbial teaspoon of fuel left in the tank.
‘‘In retrospect, it was a very dangerous mission,’’ van Praag later reflected. ‘‘We could have crashed into the coastal mountains if my navigation had been only a little bit out. A stray bullet could have blown us up. If we had been shot down, the treatment by the Japanese, disturbed in their own stronghold, would have been more cruel than usual.’’
The crew’s bravery in that mission was recognised when they were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Years later van Praag would meet a handful of Dutch men in Wellington who had been in the camps when the pamphlets were dropped. He received letters from several survivors of the Japanese camps thanking him for the material informing them of the progress of the war.
In 1944 he was dispatched to a camp in the jungle near Darwin. From here he carried out combat missions as a bombardier and machine-gun operator attacking ships, and bombing bridges,
Japanese headquarters and ammunition dumps.
During his down time he and his crew swam in the nearby pristine water holes, making sure to toss a hand grenade in first to scare off the crocs.
At the end of the war he was assigned to the transport squadron tasked with reestablishing the civilian airline KLM once it was liberated from the Japanese.
Billeted at apartments in downtown Brisbane, he soon met Betty, a Kiwi, and the pair fell instantly in love.
Betty was married though – to a US marine – but it was a marriage doomed from the start and she sought a divorce once she and van Praag returned to the US after the war.
They were married in New York, where van Praag’s family was still living, in 1946.
He went back to working for his father in the diamond trade, and Betty found employment as a shorthand typist.
Life in New York was a succession of shows, museum visits, eating out at restaurants and weekend breaks in Vermont.
But Betty’s parents in Wellington kept writing to the couple, trying to convince them to come and live in New Zealand.
They eventually agreed and arrived in Auckland in the autumn of 1947. Van Praag worked for a short time in his father-in-law’s rag trade business but it wasn’t his cup of tea.
By 1951 he went into business on his own and was later joined by his father when his family emigrated from the US. Together they ran L van Praag & Son, a wholesale jewellery business.
They imported diamonds from London and had them made into rings, selling them to various jewellers and, with his father’s diamond-cutting equipment, they set up shop in Cuba St, Wellington.
They became known as diamond experts, and Jacques found himself lecturing on the subject.
They later set up Engineering Developments Ltd, manufacturing jewellery presentation boxes. The lucrative business was started with two partners and just a couple of hundred dollars.
With his only child, Tony, on board they expanded into Australia.
Van Praag, who would go on to found the Dutch Club in Wellington, was president and a life member of Rotary and president of the Jewellers Association.
In later years he became a justice of the peace and a marriage celebrant.
He and Betty travelled widely, before her death at the age of 96 in 2018.
He once said that meeting and marrying Betty was the best bit of luck of his whole long life. – By Bess Manson