Hilversum region wartime resistance story merits postal stamp by Canada Post

A late salute to the late Mona Parsons

Tags:The latest 2023 postal stamp sold by Canada Post, the one that features the face a young woman, will get your letter delivered anywhere across Canada, from Newfoundland to the Pacific Ocean. No value is stated on the stamp but it does say in capital letters ‘MONA PARSONS 1901-1975’ and, of course, ‘Canada’. Sold in booklets of ten, one may be surprised to spot on the inside of it an illustrative windmill. What in the world is a Dutch windmill doing on a stamp booklet issued by Canada Post?
Who is this woman and why the windmill? These are good questions and for answers to them the book ‘Mona Parsons, From privilege to prison, from Nova Scotia to Nazi Europe’ will be most helpful.
The book is a compelling read. The book’s key segment about Mona Parsons (Leonardt, her married surname) among others details the German invasion of the Netherlands, the subsequent occupation of the country, and what follows thereafter. Surprisingly perhaps, even well before much of Dutch underground resistance was organized nationally, Mona Parsons, along with her well-to-do upper-class husband Willem Leonhardt, already had been arrested and convicted for keeping downed Allied airman out the hands of the occupiers (it is then 1941). Worse, as the book details, Mona Parsons was condemned to be executed for saving Allied airmen, a sentence which, upon a daring appeal, was ‘softened’ to a life of forced labour in the notorious German concentration camps.
While the deck may seem stacked against those of a life of privilege when exposed to the dehumanization and deprivation in such camps, the Canadian Dutch prisoner survived what was for many if not most prisoners nothing but a slow death. Mona invented ways to wart off the worst of deprivation. The chance to make the dash for freedom came for her during the chaos in the aftermath of an Allied bombing raid on her camp in Germany in April 1945. She escaped captivity with a friend she had met in the camp.
Although physically thin and weakened, the two woman walked for days, avoiding contact with both police and civilians on the street, to reach the Dutch border area. They walked right into the arms of the Canadian liberators of The Netherlands. End of trouble? Not at all. To her chagrin, her Canadian compatriots highly doubted her story and held her for being a spy which in times of war, as at that time, easily merits execution. Because her story sounded so far-fetched to her interrogators, they took her to the Canadian Army Rear Headquarters for further investigation by officers of, believe it or not, were from the Nova Scotia Highlanders and still more astounding included acquaintances of her youth!
If one had thought that this former Hilversum-region resident of nearly Laren would finally be able to step off the rollercoaster she appeared to be on, one guessed wrong. As is known from numerous other survivor recollections, life after incarceration in concentration camps rarely returns to normal. That of Mona Parsons was no exception. Although her husband Willem made it out of the concentration camps alive, his health remained fragile and continued to need much care. At last, he died in April 1956, leaving Mona as a non-Dutch citizen in the Netherlands to battle for legal rights she did not have under Dutch law of that era. Conflicting interests shut her out of the Leonhardt family too. Although a recipient of citations for her efforts on behalf of the downed aircrews from Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower and from the British Air Field Marshall Lord Tedder of the Royal Air Force, Mona Parsons bid Europe farewell and returned to Canada in December 1957.
It soon will be 80 years since Canada’s only female Nazi German concentration survivor regained her freedom. The USA and UK, and now Canada, all paid tribute for her wartime resistance sacrifice. Is it appropriate to ask, ‘When will the Netherlands make good’.