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‘This flag has power’: Wartime Canadian flag recovered from Europe after 80 years

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JL;DR SUMMARY Michael Levenston, the son of Canadian Jewish WWII hero Gerald Levenston, recounts the touching story of retrieving a long-lost Canadian flag gifted by his father to his wartime Dutch girlfriend, Ada Hugenholtz, from her family. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski.

  • At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself.
  • This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude.
  • Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from.
  • But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
  • And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.
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Tags

WwiiDutch ResistancePatriotismAllied ForcesCanadian Jewish HeroGerald LevenstonAda HugenholtzCanadian FlagWartime RomanceTransatlantic Friendship

Places mentioned

Toronto, Ontario, Canada
"He was speaking not long before he died in 2010 about how, after his men liberated the Netherlands from the Nazis in 1945, he gave them a different kind of mission."
Netherlands
"Levenston carried out another important wartime task. One that he was equally proud of but would get no such write-up except in one of his letters home to his mother back in Toronto."
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
"The younger Levenston tracked down Ada's family, connected by email with her son, Ren Putman Kramer, who lives an hour outside of Amsterdam."
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
"Michael Levenston joins me from Vancouver with the flag, which is a bit moth-eaten and dirty, but still in great condition, considering it was last in Canadian hands 80 years ago."
This podcast episode was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 55878
Cairo Source ID 72
Retrieved 2025-07-01 05:30:52 UTC
Curated 2025-07-01 06:02:44 UTC