Forty Days and Nights

It may as well have been for forty days and nights that we were on the long Atlantic. Two by two, with children most of us, we packed our bags, walked the gangway, waved, and leaning on a deckrail watched the sea rise up behind us, top the dikes and take the lives of loved ones, still waving, their raised arms at last drowned by the flood of the horizon. Choosing to go, you'd almost think we should be happy,

    but added to that ocean our own salt

and then, in quarters closer than the country we'd just left, waited, walked the deck, for ten days ate mostly variations on a theme of onions,

    layer by layer

our former lives were peeled away, until there was only left the small sweet core with which to land upon our Ararat, Quebec,

from where the train, a cattlecar of Frisians, Gronigers, and luyden uit Zeeland

took us all to destinations pinned onto our shirts,

    male and female we had no names, just places we were sent, like mail from overseas.

an excerpt by John Terpstra found in To All Our Children The Story of the Postwar Dutch Immigration to Canada, Albert VanderMay, Paideia Press, 2004

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They Came in Ships

Maria and Gerrit Aggenbach came to the Americas on a ship, like so many other immigrant ancestors. After the end of World War II, they were faced with a housing shortage in The Netherlands but there were opportunities for work and the promise of a good life in Canada. This photograph is from their 1951 courthouse nuptials, in Den Helder, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands. Shortly after they became man and wife, they boarded the SS Volendam where they were wed a second time by a chaplain on the ship. Maria always said that the courthouse wedding was her legal marriage but her wedding on the ship was her real marriage, before god. Gerrit's sister, Bep, and her husband had already settled in Roblin, Manitoba, Canada so the newlyweds stayed in a chicken coop, at Bep's home, until they could save enough money for their own home.

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