JAKE AND ANNA BIERSTEKER foot note 54
This couple were in their teens during the war, living in Zaandan, a city of 45,000 in northern Holland. Their grandfather Beudeker was caught by the Nazis with a radio, and for the last six months of the war he spent in a German concentration camp. They remember the tremendous amount of hunger. Living in the north, they were not liberated until V-E Day in May 1945,so they suffered until the very end of the war when Allied soldiers began to arrive. The biggest impact of the war was the starvation. The only meat that Anna had was a neighbour's cat that her two older brother caught and skinned , claiming that it was rabbit. During the last year of the war, they only ate sugar beets and tulips. Since they were always hungry during the war, Anna vowed never to be hungry again.
Her husband-to-be came to Canada in 1949 to see if he could find a job and establish himself, with his only reason to immigrate was to find a better job amid a housing shortage. When he wrote that he was able to find work, Anna decided to come and marry him in Canada. In the early winter of 1951, she boarded the ship at Le Harve, France heading to Halifax. The trip was very rough and they went…show more content… After some time searching, they stopped at the police station and enquired about the where-a-bouts of the street. The police officer they found said there was no such street in Meaford. The Bierstekers were flabbergasted. They were angry that they had driven all this way in the blizzard only to arrive in the ' wrong Meaford'. As it turned out , they got out a map and Richmond Street did exist, running north and south behind the high school, to the surprise of the embarrassed police officer. They eventually did arrive at their relatives by eleven that night. It was an inauspicious introduction to Meaford and area, and despite this beginning, they did grow to love the