Unique Opportunity€ 329,000.- All-in (also many antique furniture)
Email:
jpbastiaans@gmail.com
01.07.2010
Jeanne Belot was a pretty, elegant and lovely woman: she always knew what she wanted and was a marvelous Mom for her 4 kids.
Her life wasn`t too easy at the start. Born one year after World War I ended. At age 21, World War II would mark her life. She married John, a dutch WW-hero, who fled to England and joined the international troops to fight for liberation from the Nazis.
John was dropped behind the German lines in a nocturne CG4-A glider and fought until capitulation ended the terrible Second World War. Then he helped burying American and English military victims in provisional cemeteries.
In the sixties, he and Jeanne moved to the most beautiful residencial village in Holland: Margraten (N50 49.260 E5 48.223) , the place were 8,301 american soldiers, killed in World War II, are buried in a peaceful place. Every year, thousands of familiars fly over from the States, to pay tribute to their beloved ones. On every 4th of May (Memorial Day), important authorities like e.g. Queen Beatrix, George Bush and many other state personalities, come to Margraten.
One of the reasons John and Jeanne chose this nice place was their immense love for America, country they visited many times and where various friendships were established. They wanted to be close to their American friends and near to a piece of the country they loved. Both have passed away now and (we) their children have decided to sell their home (we prefer not calling it “house”), preferently to an American relative family of the resting soldiers.
The home is a postwar (1957) 2,000 sq.ft. white brick, two levels construction on a 6,000 sq. ft. garden plot. It has the most beautiful uninterrupted 20 miles view of all the neighbouring houses, and borders the American Cemetery surrounding fields (Google Earth: "De Koningswinkel Street, 12" lat=50.8199218743, lon=5.81732182447). Incredible peace wheezes from the stone walls and all seasons have their charm.
In respectful memory of our beloved parents, we haven`t touched or changed one inch of the original state. Bathrooms and kitchen should be refurbished and modernized, not too much, the construction is of strong brick. We target their last will and would have been our parents dream: their home to an American family, close to their beloved relatives, buried at the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial.
The ask price for our Home is € 329,000.-.-
For more information and to visit the house write to:
jpbastiaans@gmail.com
"Fast wartime friendship survives 59-year hiatus": Acquaintances, now 85 and 83, reunite.
Frank Dantas, 85, left, of Rockland, lost contact with Jane Belot in 1946. (LISA BUL/The Patriot Ledger)By SUE SCHEIBLEThe Patriot LedgerROCKLAND - They were 26 and 24 and, from the looks of the vintage photographs, two stunners.
He was a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army; his battalion, the 703rd, was passing through Belgium on the way to Germany. She was a schoolteacher in Mesvin; her family's house was next
door to his unit's post.
door to his unit's post.
Six days in September 1944, a fast friendship - ''no romance, young and innocent,'' he says - and they went their separate ways. He had a war to fight, tanks to destroy; she had her teaching.
For a few years, they wrote and she invited him to her wedding, but he was far away by then. After 1947, they lost touch.
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Fifty-nine years later, the phone rang one afternoon last October in the home of Frank Dantas in Rockland. A man's voice with a slight accent asked if this was the home of a Frank Dantas ''who would be about 85 years old.''
The woman who answered replied yes, it was, and the man said, with some excitement, ''He's still alive?'' and asked to speak to her father. ''I'm his wife,'' replied Rita Dantas, who is 69.
In 1952 in Lisbon, Portugal, former Staff Sgt. Frank Dantas had married a young woman 16 years younger than he whom he'd met in the Cape Verde islands while working as a seaman.
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That phone call was the beginning of a reunion this past week for Dantas, now 85, and Jane Belot, 83, the young Belgian schoolteacher he met nearly 60 years ago.
On Aug. 22, Belot capped off 14 years of searching for her wartime friend when she and her daughter, Monique Bastiaans, 49, flew to Boston.
For 10 days, they have been staying with Dantas and his wife and taking in the sights, shopping, dining out. Saturday, Dantas' nephew, George Machadinho and his fiancee, Gorett Parsloe, both of Stoughton, took them all to the Cape where they wound up in Provincetown. Yesterday, Dantas' two sisters came up from Rhode Island for dinner. Tomorrow, Belot will fly home to Holland where she lives and Bastiaans, a sculptor, will fly on to her home in Valencia, Spain.
''It means a lot to me, her effort in trying to find me after all these years,'' Dantas said yesterday afternoon as the reunion party relaxed in his living room.
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He recalled that when his battalion was posted in Mervin in 1944, Belot and her brother came out to greet the soldiers and were very friendly. ''I tried to teach her a little English, and she spoke French and gave us a little dictionary with some common expressions,'' Dantas recalled.
Belot sat listening with a smile as her daughter translated. She had brought along a photo album showing her life over the years since 1944 and said that after her husband, John Bastiaans, died 14 and a half years ago, she began thinking back over her life and wanted to find out what had become of Dantas, that friendly young American soldier.
They had only known each other for six days, but it was an impressionable time in her life. After she married in 1947, they had stopped writing; she moved to Holland, stopped teaching and raised four children.
Dantas was discharged from the Army in November 1945, after serving four and a half years, and had decided to travel the world as a seaman.
Of Portuguese heritage, he met 18-year-old Rita Barbosa in the Cape Verde islands and married her July 23, 1952. They moved to Boston in the fall of 1952 and then to Rockland in 1966.
He worked as a machinist for 21 years at the Bemis Co. in Watertown; they had no children but many nieces and nephews.
When Belot decided to try and find Dantas, she contacted the U.S. Army and even included a photograph of him, but it was returned with no leads.
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Last fall, her son, Jean Paul Bastiaans, 52, turned to the Internet. He lives in Zaragoza, Spain, and is a businessman and the Spanish consul to Slovakia; he used his skills and contacts to launch a search.''We were surprised when Frank's name popped up on the computer,'' said Belot, who speaks some English.
It was her son who made the phone call last October to the Dantas' home.
When Dantas and Belot first spoke again on the phone after 59 years, they inquired about one another's families and then Dantas asked, ''Are you well?'' Belot replied she was - well enough, in fact, to travel to the United States to see him.
First, however, she urged Dantas and his wife to come to Holland to visit. One way or another, she was determined they would get together. ''It was like an ultimatum,'' Dantas said yesterday.
In the meantime, they exchanged family photos by mail, talked some more by phone, and a week ago last Friday, one of the hottest days of the summer, Belot and her daughter flew into Logan Airport from Amsterdam.
Dantas was there to meet them with his nephew, Michael Machadinho. Belot had offered to stay with her daughter Monique Bastiaans at a hotel but Rita Dantas insisted they stay with them. ''My mother says be sure to say that they are really being very nice to us and we are having a wonderful time,'' Bastiaans said yesterday as she translated for her mother. ''They are so - what is the word - hospitable.''
Asked what she thought of it all, Rita Dantas said with a smile, ''I thought it was nice, after so many years. You never know what is going to happen.''And in that spirit, there may be more reunions ahead. ''My mother wants to see him every year,'' said Bastiaans and since Rita Dantas has a brother in Belgium, she has already planned an itinerary - first Belgium, then Holland.
So, a year from now: same time, different place?''God only knows,'' said Frank Dantas.
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Friendship through time - 1944 to 2003Frank Dantas, 85, of Rockland-1941: drafted at age 23 into Army while living in Jamaica Plain.-September 1944: age 26, staff sergeant, 703rd Battalion, posted in Mesvin, Belgium, for six days, meets Jane Belot, 24.-Language: Portuguese, English.-1945: discharged from Army, works as a seaman to South America.-July 1952: marries Rita Barbosa of Cape Verde islands in Lisbon, Portugal, and returns with her to Boston.-1966: couple moves to Rockland.-Occupation: machinist at Bemis Co.
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Jane Belot, 83, of Holland-September 1944: age 24, schoolteacher in Mesvin, Belgium.-Language: French.-September 1947: marries John Bastiaans, a Belgian businessman, moves to Holland, raises four children.-1989: husband dies after more than 40 years of marriage. Begins searching for Frank Dantas.-October 2002: Internet search for Frank Dantas is successful.-August 2003: reunion with Dantas in Rockland.
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The quote from Lord Byron:
"Friendship is Love without his wings!"
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