Gerda M. was born in the western Netherlands in 1960. From the time she was a little girl, she had vivid dreams of being inside an airplane in flight, with a bunch of soldiers. She would walk toward the open door of the plane, then the dream would end. The dreams were disturbingly vivid and she could see and smell the equipment worn by the soldiers and could hear the engines of the airplane. Her mother told her to ignore the dreams and that they didn’t mean anything. This photo of Gerda was taken when she was 11 years old, a time when her dreams became the most vivid.

Gerda grew-up, married and had a son. In 1999, her family moved to the area north of Eindhoven, which had been liberated by Allied paratroopers in 1944. In 1999, she attended a commemorative parachute drop, wherein jumpers descended from a C-47, to honor the paratroopers of Operation Market Garden, and she became very emotional when she heard the engines of the C-47 approaching. As the jumpers came out of the plane, she started to cry and she felt she had a connection to this.

She and her son went to the US Military Cemetery at Margraten and they stood in front of each of the over 8,000 graves in that place and read each name. When she saw the name of a certain lieutenant, who had died on 17 September, 1944, (a member of the 506th Parachute Infantry), she began sobbing uncontrollably and sank to her knees. After composing herself, she checked all the other names in the cemetery, but none had any significance to her. She wrote a letter to George Koskimaki, asking him about this lieutenant (whose grave she has since adopted). George informed her that this lieutenant was killed by a bullet fired from the ground, as he stood in the door of his C-47, awaiting the green jump light. The plane subsequently crash-landed and some of the occupants survived, to be taken prisoner by the German Army.

Gerda believes she is a cross-gender reincarnation of this 506th lieutenant. I’ve tried to locate her in past visits to Holland, but she had moved. I recently found out her new address and I got an email from her, this morning. I will meet her later this month, to video record her story, for Volume 2 of my ‘Avenging Eagles’ books.

~ Written by Mark Bando, Historian for the 101st Airborne Division & author of Breakout At Normandy & The 101st Airborne From Holland to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest
Mark’s Website: triggertimeforum.yuku.com/

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