Finding family in faraway places

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This article was published 05/04/2022 (1436 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a love affair which briefly flared after the guns of war fell silent, but left a long-unknown connection.

Now, decades after Canadian forces led the liberation of the Netherlands during the Second World War, two women — one from Winnipeg, the other Dutch — will meet for the first time because they have one thing in common: their dad.

Today, at the Winnipeg airport, Dolores Seller will greet her formerly unknown half-sister, Greetje Kaldewaaij.

“I’m so happy,” the 67-year-old Seller said Monday as she counted down the hours. “I’m really happy. I’m just so happy. And I know if my father was still alive, he would be right there and he would be so happy, too.”

Harold de Paiva was a Canadian soldier who was born in 1923, and enlisted when he turned 18. He fought in the Italian campaign, but by April 1945, he was serving in the Netherlands.

Trudy Koerts, 19, had recently returned from a year of forced labour in a German camp, sewing army uniforms.

As far as the family on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean can figure out, it was likely at one of the numerous liberation celebrations in Groningen, the largest city in the northern part of the country, where de Paiva met Koerts.

After de Paiva shipped out back to Canada, Koerts realized she was pregnant. All she knew was his first name.

Seller said her dad returned to Winnipeg, and stayed in the army. A few years later, while with fellow soldiers in a Winnipeg coffee shop, he bumped into 18-year-old Helen Kehler who, having recently moved to the city, was celebrating her first paycheque by taking herself out for a meal.

“She said she saw my dad walk in and it was — boom — love at first sight,” Seller said. “They got married six weeks after that meeting and they were married for 42 years.”

De Paiva had several jobs during his career, including public relations, associate director of the Red River Exhibition, and a writer and columnist at the Winnipeg Tribune. He was also part of the publicity committee for the 1967 Pan Am Games.

The couple had Seller and then a few years later, a set of triplets, of which only one, a son, survived. However, he died at 25 of a brain aneurysm.

Seller said her dad died in 1994, without ever knowing about the daughter he had fathered overseas.

Kaldewaaij, 74, had a tougher life in her early years.

“When I was born, my mother was 20 years old,” Kaldewaaij recently told a Dutch newspaper. “It was a shame at that time to have a child as an unmarried girl.”

Kaldewaaij said her mother married when she was two and she believed he was her biological dad.

“Unfortunately, they didn’t have a good marriage,” she told the newspaper. “I was about 10 years old when I sided with him in an argument. Then my mother shouted that he was not my father at all.”

While her mother never said anything more about her real father, Kaldewaaij said an aunt once told her that her mother had dated a Canadian and “I looked like him.”

Kaldewaaij later moved to Amsterdam, got married and had two children. Through the years, her mother died, then her step-father, as well as two half-sisters, and it was then she decided to hopefully find out about her potential Canadian connection by taking a DNA test.

On this side of the Atlantic, contact was made by Seller’s cousin, Steinbach resident Phyllis Unger.

Her daughter took a DNA test and soon received an online message about a fairly close match with a woman in the Netherlands.

“She came over to my place and said, ‘Mom, I think you should sit down. I’ve got something to tell you,’” Unger said.

Unger said she was soon in contact with Kaldewaaij. However, because her DNA was close but not a perfect match, she asked Seller to also submit a sample.

“Her test came back 100 per cent: she is the sister and I am the cousin.”

(How did the cousins have DNA so similar? Unger’s dad, George de Paiva, was Harold’s brother — and the two brothers married a pair of sisters.)

Seller and Unger have plans to take their new relative on a tour of her Canadian dad’s boyhood home, the VIA Rail station where he and his brother left for war, and other places where he lived his life.

The women are already talking about a trip to the Netherlands.

Seller said a half-sister entering her life couldn’t have come at a better time.

“My mom died April 28, 2020,” she said. “It was a time we could only have 10 people at her funeral (due to the COVID-19 pandemic). I had no siblings alive… and Greetje is a wonderful lady. She is so warm,” she said.

“I couldn’t have asked for a nicer sister.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca