Twenty years after it premièred on Shaw Cable, a documentary by retired Victoria-based writer and filmmaker Rene Wassink is being rebroadcast.
Ray Remembers, which documents a Canadian war veteran’s return to the Netherlands, where he fought during the Second World War, is airing intermittently on Shaw this month.
The film’s title character is Ray De Montigny, whom Wassink followed during his return to the Netherlands in the spring of 1995 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands.
The documentary, preceded by an updated interview with Wassink, airs on Shaw (Channel 4) on Thursdays at 8:30 p.m., Saturdays at 9 a.m. and Sundays at 11 a.m.
A year before his film originally aired, Wassink enlisted a large contingent of the local Dutch-Canadian community to announce a special “tulip tribute” to Canadian soldiers in Victoria. Several red-and-white tulip beds symbolizing Canada’s links to the Netherlands were planted around town, blooming in time to honour Canadian troops who helped free the Dutch from Nazi occupation near the end of the Second World War.
A young boy at the time of the liberation, Wassink and his family lived just a five-minute walk from the famous “bridge too far” in the middle of Arnhem that inspired the 1978 Hollywood movie of the same name.
When the Germans forcibly evicted the town’s population in the summer of 1944, his family walked 50 kilometres east to Voorst.
Wassink, 76, said he hoped the rebroadcast would serve as an enlightening reminder of how Canadians fighting in support of British forces liberated the city in April 1945.
