Courtesy photo Jan Hieminga, who is set to celebrate his 100th birthday on Wednesday, shown in a family photo when he was a toddler in Amsterdam.

One of Jan Hieminga’s two daughters calls Hieminga’s upcoming 100th birthday “an amazing milestone,” and nobody would disagree.

But anyone taking a look back at this Dutch immigrant’s long, productive and successful life, split between two nations and two continents over those 100 years, will find something “amazing” in pretty much every paragraph.

A Nashua resident since 1988, Heiminga’s numerous accomplishments include his involvement in a faction of the Dutch underground, one of many bands of brave “resistance fighters” that popped up across much of Europe during World War II.

Such tiny armies risked their lives in almost always futile efforts to resist Nazi advances, but those who focused more on helping their neighbors had a better, if still pretty low, success rate.

Those neighbors, in this case, would be Dutch Jewish citizens, men, women and children who local humanitarians like Heiminga hid from the Nazis.

Courtesy photo Jan and Jacqueline Hieminga were in their early 20s when they married in 1943. Jan Hieminga will celebrate his 100th birthday Wednesday at his daughter's Nashua home.

That was a long time ago, but Heiminga was born a long time ago – July 1, 1920 to be exact. Now, as he closes in on that “amazing milestone,” his family and friends are planning a pandemic-compliant celebration for Wednesday at the Nashua home of his younger daughter, Ellen Antoinette.

Technically, the celebration isn’t “at” her residence – celebrants will instead cruise slowly past it, waving and hollering birthday wishes to the sounds of car horns, all directed at the newly-minted centenarian seated on the deck off the second level of Antoinette’s home.

Celebrating birthdays and other events in parade-like, drive-by fashion caught on real quick upon the sudden issuance of stay-at-home, no-contact orders back in late March and early April, and given the logistics, the format works out quite well for celebrating Heiminga’s big day.

“We started planning many months ago for a big party,” Antoinette said. “Then, COVID-19.”

She said anyone who knows her father and would like to join the parade of well-wishers is welcome to do so. The event starts at 4 p.m., and Antoinette estimates he father will be out waving to visitors for about an hour. Her address is 2 Iris Court, in Ledgewood Hills condo community. The deck on which her father will be sitting faces Rosemary Court, and signs and balloons will guide visitors in.

Ellen Antoinette's cleverly designed invitation announces her father's 100th birthday celebration, which will take place Wednesday.

For visitors, banners, balloons and other such celebratory accessories are optional, but hearty “happy birthday” wishes and robust waving are required.

Jan Heiminga is a man who has seen and experienced a lot in his 100 years, and who still today can pull up a chair and engage a visitor on almost any subject, as long as said visitor uses his outdoor voice.

In contrast to many of his contemporaries, he rarely responds “I can’t remember,” especially when the topic is his family or the immigration process, which he, his now late wife Jacqueline (van Westreenen) Heiminga and their two daughters experienced together in 1957.

Antoinette was 4 at the time, and her sister, Louise Fernbacher, was 10. Fernbacher lives in Westwood, New Jersey, the second New Jersey town in which the family lived after coming to America.

Jacqueline Heiminga, who was born in Rotterdam, passed in March 2018 after a battle with dementia. She was 95. The couple had been married for 75 years.

Courtesy photo Jan Hieminga and his late wife, Jacqueline, around the time they moved to Nashua in 1988. Jan Hieminga celebrates his 100th birthday Wednesday.

It was at the annual, raucous birthday celebration for the queen of The Netherlands that the two met as teenagers in 1938.

“There were drunk people everywhere,” Heiminga says with a laugh.

He said that growing up his family was considered middle-class, or, as he put it with a smile, “on the lower side of well-to-do.”

When his father, a real estate broker, got a good job in the city of Schiedam, he moved his family there. Schiedam, Heiminga said, was known as “the gin capital of The Netherlands” for its numerous “gin factories.”

Bicycling was the chief mode of transportation in much of The Netherlands, given the country’s lack of hills and relatively flat terrain, Antoinette said she learned from her father.

Jan Hieminga, Nashua man who turns 100 years old Wednesday

“Bicycles were everywhere,” she said. “Bike lanes in the roads, bike trails everywhere.”

The gradual appearance of the dark clouds of war went largely unnoticed, or at least not discussed much, as the 1930s gave way to the 40s.

“Nope, it wasn’t talked about much at all,” Heiminga said of the series of German aggressions that would soon trigger World War II.

A craftsman, builder and construction supervisor by trade, Heiminga and his crew were going about their jobs as usual when the series of events that would change millions of lives forever suddenly appeared in Schiedam.

“I was standing in front of a church when the sirens went off. Everybody stopped … (then) started looking for places to hide.”

Telegraph photo by DEAN SHALHOUP Jan Hieminga, whose 100th birthday celebration takes place on Wednesday, relaxes in his Nashua home.

Heiminga paused. “I looked up, I could see the bombers coming in,” he said, shaking his head. It was May 1940, and Germany’s occupation of The Netherlands was underway.

Heiminga first laid eyes on the German soldiers the next day.

In an August 2016 oral history interview conducted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,

Heiminga was asked what the next few days were like.

“It was just terrible … terrible. We were not prepared for that,” he said. “When I saw them I thought, ‘get out of here’ … we didn’t want them here at all.”

There was, however, a certain group of Dutch folks who welcomed the Germans: The Dutch Nazi Party, which, Heiminga said, “appeared when the Germans came.”

The painful memories bring a grimace to Heiminga’s face as he recalls the sight of Nazi soldiers rounding up certain Amsterdam residents.

Heiminga was asked if he saw people being arrested.

“Yes,” he replied softly. “Jews. They had armbands … they were just taken away.”

Heiminga and other construction workers kept their jobs after the German occupation, but instead of working for the government or property owners, they now worked for the Germans.

His crew was assigned to remodel schools into living quarters for the invaders, he said. He was also assigned work on the coast, which involved building bunkers – for the German soldiers.

Heiminga said he knew some people who joined the resistance, but not being fond of weapons, he worked with the Dutch underground helping to hide Jewish people.

Many were led to an area under the stage at a local movie house, which was near the apartment where he and his family lived.

Avoiding the Nazi troops became a way of life for the Dutch. “You made sure you stay away from them,” he said.

But one day in 1944, a couple of soldiers spotted him as he was going around collecting rent from people who lived in apartments his father was managing.

Unable to produce the type of ID the Germans demanded, the two arrested Heiminga and put him in jail, he said. He soon learned the Germans wanted to send him to a concentration camp right then and there.

But Heiminga’s wife of just one year came through, contacting “someone she knew” who was able to get the correct ID card to him in time.

“I was freed,” he said. “I took the last trolley home. Just beat the curfew.”

Antoinette, Heiminga’s daughter, said when her parents immigrated to America they were able to avoid the Ellis Island registration process and go straight to New Jersey because they were lucky enough to have a family to sponsor them.

It’s a family that also happens to have had a remarkably compelling experience amid the horrors of World War II.

A young couple and their baby, being shepherded with hundreds of other Jewish prisoners into the gas chambers at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was able to make arrangements with the family for a last-ditch attempt to save their baby.

The plan was for the doomed couple to toss their infant over a wall just before they were forced into the chambers by the Nazi guards.

The plan was for the sponsor family to be on the other side of that wall at the moment the couple tossed the baby over.

It was a long shot at best. But the sponsor family had put themselves in the right place at the right time, and the bundled infant sailed into their collective waiting arms.

In an instant, the sponsor family had a new child to raise.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears weekly in The Sunday Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

Dean Shalhoup

Longtime reporter, columnist and photographer, is back doing what he does best ñ chronicling the people and history of Nashua. Reaching 40 years with The Telegraph in September, Deanís insights have a large, appreciative following.