Ann Weaver Hart met a member of the family that hid her father from the Nazis in 1944.
DURHAM, N.H. (AP) – University of New Hampshire President Ann Weaver Hart met a living part of her family’s history when she picked up a Dutch exchange student at Logan International Airport in Boston last week.

Micha Van Veldhuizen, 15, came to the United States to study English. He tracked down Hart and made plans to meet her after learning that his grandmother’s family hid Hart’s father from the Nazis after his plane was shot down over Holland in 1944.

Dutch high school students who want a diploma in English must spend three or four weeks each year in an English speaking country. Micha asked his mother if she knew anyone in the United States, and she mentioned Hart.

Until then, Micha hadn’t known much about the war experiences of his grandmother, Annie Van Harten, he told the New Hampshire Sunday News.

Hart told him her father, missing in action for nine months after his plane went down, didn’t talk much about his war experiences either, until her uncle got him to tape-record some of them. She shared those stories with Micha last week.

1st Lt. Ted Weaver was 23 years old and planning to marry Hart’s mother when he piloted a B-24 over Nazi-occupied Holland on July 7, 1944, on his way to bomb aircraft factories in Bernberg, Germany.

When the plane was struck by fire from ME-110 fighters, Weaver tried to keep it steady while the rest of the crew put on their parachutes and jumped.

Weaver was the last to jump. He landed in a wheat field in Nijverdal, where he could hear gunfire.

He quickly shed his parachute and left it. He crawled on his hands and knees toward the farmhouse so he wouldn’t leave a trail.

Along the way, he buried nearly everything that could connect him to his family back home: pictures, a silver bracelet with his future wife’s name engraved on the back, and all but one of the officer’s insignia bars he wore. A farmer found the bracelet and returned it to him 15 years later.

The crew all carried survival packets with German, French and Belgian money, concentrated food, silk maps of Europe, and cards with vital phrases in German and French. Weaver memorized a few of the phrases and buried the cards.

He spent the rest of the day lying in the field, watching the family who lived in the farmhouse. Finally, he walked up to the house and uttered one of the German phrases, “I am an American pilot. Good day.”

He was given a pair of coveralls and sent back to the field. Farmer Schoemaker later took him to meet a member of the Dutch underground. Several families hid him over the next few months.

Then the Van Hartens offered to shelter him and another American pilot. First, they hid them in the colonnade between the front room and the dining room whenever German soldiers came to search the house.

When they heard that the Germans were shooting people right through the walls of the colonnades, they cut a hole in the floor beneath a daybed and dug a 4-feet deep, 7-by-7 pit in the ground, carrying the dirt outside at night, bucket by bucket. They slept in the hole.

When the Van Hartens learned German soldiers were going to take over their home, they moved Weaver and the other pilot to a baker’s house for two weeks. After the soldiers moved on, the pilots returned to the Van Hartens’ home, where they stayed until Nijverdal was liberated by Canadian troops on April 8, 1945.

Weaver stayed in touch with the Van Hartens after the war, and his daughter met them when they visited the United States during the 1980s. But then they lost contact.

The Van Hartens tracked down Hart recently with a Google search, and were surprised to learn she was a university president.

“I know Ann’s really busy – she has a lot of things to do – but she still has time for me,” Micha said.

Hart’s eyes filled with tears when she told Micha about her mother, a college student, who finally heard via telegram that Weaver was alive. The hardest part, her mother told her, was that so many of her friends had boyfriends who didn’t come home.

“It could have been so different for us,” Hart said. “Any one of those people could have turned my father in – the farmer, anyone.”

“So many What ifs,”‘ Micha said. “So many.”

AP-ES-04-11-04 1453EDT