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A Nazi soldier stole a watch in 1942. It showed up 80 years later.


When Mr. Janssens found the watch, he must have recognized the Dutchman’s name on the back and guessed that the soldier had stolen it, Mr. Snijders explained. Instead of returning it, the farmer hid it inside an indoor clock.

That’s where it stayed for the next 80 years.

Recently, the farm in Belgium was sold and members of the Janssens family moved out, said Pieter Janssens, the farmer’s grandson. By chance, he said, the family found a pristine pocket watch made in 1910, with the inscription on the back.

He then emailed Mr Snijders, in an attempt to track down whether the watch was its original owner.

Mr Snijders said such requests can be difficult. “It’s so complicated, most of the time it just doesn’t work,” he said. “It could take years.”

Finding remnants of Jewish history in Rotterdam is difficult. In May 1940, Germany bombed the city, obliterating its center, killing 1,150 people and destroying 24,000 houses. In the Netherlands as a whole, about 75 percent of the Jewish population was killed during the Holocaust.

However, Mr Snijders has been posting details about the watch’s history on social media and hoping for the best.

Within 24 hours, Mr. Snijders received information that the watchmaker, Alfred Overstrijd, had a daughter who had survived the war and had three children living in the Netherlands. (Louis Overstrijd, the watch’s owner, has no children.)

Mr Snijders later found Mr van Ameijden, one of the watchmaker’s three grandchildren, on LinkedIn. He arranged a meeting between the farmer’s descendants and the watchmaker, in which the watch was officially handed over. Mr Snijders, who attended this month’s two-hour gathering in Rotterdam, said: “I saw the tears. previously reported by Radio Rijnmonda Dutch radio station.



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