A Reunion Decades in the Making
When Dina Van Dommelen-Samson and Nico Peltenburg shook hands for the first time earlier this month in Nova Scotia, neither felt like they were meeting a stranger. In a sense, they weren't. Their fathers had shared something extraordinary — a bond forged under the shadow of German occupation, in a farmhouse in the Netherlands during the Second World War.
Peltenburg had travelled from Europe to Nova Scotia with one quiet hope tucked beside his travel plans: to finally meet the descendants of the family who had risked everything to hide his father.
Hidden on a Dutch Farm
During the German occupation of the Netherlands, Nico Peltenburg's father found shelter on a farm belonging to Dina's family, the Van Dommelens. Hiding a Jewish or otherwise hunted person during the Nazi occupation was an act of extraordinary courage — discovery meant deportation, imprisonment, or death for everyone involved.
The Van Dommelen family took that risk. They hid a man they barely knew, kept him fed and safe, and when the war ended, life moved on in the way life tends to do after catastrophe — quietly, separately, across different countries and decades.
For nearly 80 years, that story lived mostly in memory, passed down through family conversations. Dina knew what her family had done. Nico knew who had saved his father. But the two families had never met in person.
From Nova Scotia to the Netherlands — and Back
The Van Dommelen family eventually emigrated to Canada, settling in Nova Scotia, where Dina grew up carrying the weight and the pride of her family's wartime choices. Nico, meanwhile, grew up in the Netherlands knowing his father owed his life to a Canadian farming family.
When Nico finally made the trip to Nova Scotia, the meeting — by all accounts — felt less like an introduction and more like a reunion. The kind where you already know the important things about the other person, even if you've never been in the same room.
"It felt like family," is how moments like these are often described, and rarely does that phrase feel more earned than when two people sit across from each other carrying the same story from opposite sides of history.
Why These Stories Still Matter
Canada has long held a special place in the collective memory of the Netherlands. Dutch liberation by Canadian soldiers in 1945 is still marked every year with tulip festivals and veterans' ceremonies — most famously Ottawa's own Canadian Tulip Festival, born from a gift of bulbs sent by the Dutch royal family in gratitude.
But the wartime connection runs deeper than liberation. Thousands of Dutch families were sheltered, fed, and protected by ordinary people during those brutal occupation years. And thousands of Canadian families absorbed Dutch immigrants in the postwar decades, carrying those memories with them to new towns, new farms, new lives.
Dina and Nico's meeting is a reminder that history isn't only preserved in archives and monuments. Sometimes it lives in a handshake between the children of two people who never forgot each other, even when the world moved on.
A Story Worth Passing On
For both families, this first meeting is unlikely to be the last. After nearly 80 years of knowing about each other without knowing each other, there are stories to swap, photographs to share, and a friendship — rooted in something as old as courage itself — to build.
Source: CBC News Nova Scotia
