“It was just another day of war. I didn’t expect to see him again for the rest of my life.” George Emmerson

OSHAWA—George Emmerson arrived at Hillsdale Terraces on Monday with two chocolate bars in his coat pocket. He does so every time he turns up for a visit. And he gives them to Henk Metselaar.

“Hi, Henk! Good to see you again,” Emmerson said brightly, bending down and patting the hands of the bespectacled 94-year-old who was hunched over in his wheelchair, vacant-eyed.

“Do you remember when I made that meal for you in Enschede, Holland?”

Metselaar raised his moist, red-rimmed eyes, and gave a wavering smile. “Yeah,” he panted. “Yeah.”

Metselaar has Alzheimer’s disease. Nobody can know what he recalls from May 1945, in the days after his native Netherlands was liberated and Nazi Germany finally fell.

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What is known is that, all his life, Emmerson has wondered about the emaciated labour camp prisoner for whom he made a hearty meal while stationed in the Netherlands, also leaving him with the last two chocolate bars that his parents had sent from back home in Port Perry, Ont.

Metselaar, who later moved to Canada and raised six children a short drive from Emmerson’s hometown, used to tell the same story, of how a gentle-hearted Canadian soldier fed him in a desperate time and gave him a pair of glorious chocolate bars.

Then, thanks to a chance encounter while shopping for a new recliner in Whitby last year, Emmerson met Metselaar’s daughter, Hillie Carnegie. She runs a furniture store there with her husband, who also happens to be Emmerson’s cousin. That coincidence prompted them to trade stories, and when Carnegie said she was Dutch, Emmerson told her about that hungry prisoner all those years ago. She was shocked by how well it matched her father’s oft-told tale.

She and Emmerson are now convinced the men have found each other, reunited after the brief binding moment they shared as the dust of war settled over Europe nearly seven decades ago.

“It was just another day of war,” said Emmerson, now 92. “I didn’t expect to see him again for the rest of my life.”

Emmerson joined the war effort as a volunteer in 1942. After a brief stint in the Dental Corps, he arrived in Europe as a military transport driver whose first mission was to supply the Allied forces after they’d punched their way up the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in 1944.

At that time, according to Carnegie, Metselaar was a prisoner, one of millions of Europeans who were captured and forced to work in Nazi labour camps during the war. The conditions were horrendous: Metselaar was sometimes so hungry that he would boil grass for food, Carnegie said. “He didn’t talk about that much.”

Just as victory was declared in Europe, Emmerson arrived in Enschede, a Dutch town near the border with Germany. He was stationed in a house with 10 other Canadian servicemen, he said. One day he was home alone, writing letters, when a sergeant-major came in with a man about Emmerson’s age who looked desperately hungry.

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“He was just a skeleton,” Emmerson recalled, describing how large groups of freed prisoners were roaming the Netherlands at that time, trudging home along country roads, starving and weak.

The officer told Emmerson to feed this man, and Emmerson happily obeyed. He fried some potatoes and warmed some bully beef, which the man frantically devoured.

“He told me I was the best cook in the whole world,” Emmerson laughed, “and here I am, a truck driver.”

As the man rose to leave, Emmerson remembered the chocolate his parents had sent from Canada. He ran to fetch it so the freed prisoner could eat the bars for extra energy on his trek home. “He said, ‘Now I will go to home,’” Emmerson recalled.

They shook hands and the man left.

Flash forward to spring 2013, when Emmerson went furniture shopping, met Carnegie and told of how he’d given that Dutch man those chocolate bars.

“I just about fainted,” Carnegie said Monday, recalling the moment she realized Emmerson was describing her father, Henk Metselaar.

“That’s the reason he came to Canada … He always hoped to find that soldier,” she said.

Carnegie invited Emmerson to meet her father at last year’s Remembrance Day ceremony in the Hillsdale Terraces care facility, where he lives. Just as he did for the service this year, Emmerson brought two chocolate bars for Metselaar — a Snickers and a Mars.

“I got down on my haunches and I looked in his eyes and said, ‘Do you remember the Canadian soldier?’”

With his dementia so advanced that he barely speaks now, Metselaar didn’t react much. But after Emmerson left, Carnegie said her father uttered some of his only words since he lost the ability to converse. He asked: “Where did that man go?”

“God works in mysterious ways,” she said. “My dad always said he wanted to meet that soldier.”

Now, in the twilight of his life, she believes he finally has. Maybe he does, too.

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