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Klaas Brink

As told to his granddaughter, Shawna Butler by her mother Audrey, Klaas' daughter

My grandfather, my mother’s father, Klaas Brink, who lived in Union Road, PEI, was a young citizen of Holland who was forced to fight for the Nazi Germans in World War II, as many young Dutch men were. It wasn’t easy, and it hardly ever happened where young men could refuse to fight for the Nazis because they supplied the little amount of food that Holland was getting; they threatened to cut off all food supply to their families, and when their families died, they would kill them. With my grandfather, they directed these threats to his mother, my great grandmother.

One of the stories my mother remembered her father telling her was when he and his friend were on a U-boat and were supposed to be shooting at the Allied forces, and they all tried as hard as they could to miss their targets.

As all the men were, my grandfather was shaved bald upon going into the war. My mother said that when she was growing up after the war, she remembered him often drinking two raw eggs in the morning because he was used to doing that; often in the war that was all they could eat.

After the war my grandfather was extremely prejudiced against the Germans, as many were. His brother who was too young to go to war, later had adopted a German child; it took several years for my grandfather to even talk to his brother.

Grandfather Klaas was 63 years old when he died in 1992 of Alzheimer's Disease, before I ever did meet him.