When I talked to Erik Hazelhoff (1917) today, he was staying in De Hoefslag, one of the more remarkable dutch hotels. A man who has sucked the marrow out of life; a student writer warrior and bon-vivant who has retired to Maui, Hawaii. He remains today one of a handful of surviving bearers of the Dutch equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor and Victoria Cross, the so-called Military Willemsorde (MWO). With seventy two pathfinder sorties over Europe, multiple warship droppings on the machine gun patrolled dutch beaches, he is a lucky man to have survived the Second World War. The movie is fresh, candid like the man himself. It shows the When I talked to Erik Hazelhoff (1917) today, he was staying in De Hoefslag, one of the more remarkable dutch hotels. A man who has sucked the marrow out of life; a student writer warrior and bon vivant who has retired to Maui, Hawaii. He remains today one of a handful of surviving bearers of the Dutch equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor and Victoria Cross, the so-called Military Willemsorde (MWO). With seventy two pathfinder sorties over Europe, multiple warship droppings on the machine gun patrolled dutch beaches, he is a lucky man to have survived the Second World War. The movie is fresh, candid like the man himself. It shows the naiveté with which the Dutch resistance operated as well as its heroism. It shows Germans sometimes as soldiers, sometimes as murderers. It shows "wrong" Dutch as patriotically volunteering SS-soldiers. The best and the worst and everything in between. Is shows the Second World War as it was for everybody of his generation: the biggest event of their lives. Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema rose to the event and this movie with its captivating theme has enshrined it during his lifetime.
Review of Soldier of Orange
