Suppose your deceased father has a twin brother that he knew nothing about or never told you about. It seems like a strong story, but it is a question that has occupied sisters Ingrid and Hilde van Biesen from Mazenzele in Flanders for almost seven years. Then they saw a man in Willemstad who looked so much like their father that he almost had to be a brother. Or was it a strange doppelganger? The story goes back 82 years in time.
On May 30, 1940, the German ship Rhenus 127, packed with Belgian prisoners of war, ran into a naval mine near Willemstad. Among the 167 victims was Ingrid and Hilde’s grandfather: Cornelius Frans Van Biesen.
His death made his wife a widow, who was pregnant and gave birth months later in the Flemish Moorsel. Frans van Biesen was born, the father of Ingrid and Hilde. According to Ingrid, her father struggled with the fact that he had never known his. But was that the real reason? The answer took her father to his grave.
“That man had all the resemblance to my father and walked there with his wife. We were perplexed.”
In June 2015, Ingrid and her daughter arrived in Willemstad, the place where her grandfather died. In the fortified town she saw a man who caught her breath, because he resembled her deceased father like two drops of water. “That man had all the resemblance to my father and walked there with his wife. We were perplexed.”
Ingrid was transfixed. “My daughter asked if she could talk to him, but we didn’t dare,” says Ingrid.
The woman who could have answered the question whether there was ever a twin brother is Ingrid and Hilde’s grandmother, Suzanne van den Broeck. But she never spoke to her son or grandchildren about the birth of twins. “Of course it was wartime on January 31, 1941. There was chaos. We did search my father’s birth certificate, but it says nothing about whether he had a brother.”
“We also searched the cemetery, but we do not know whether that man also bore the name Van Biesen.”
Seven years later, she and her sister and husband are still trying to answer the question whether that man could have been her father’s twin brother. They have already done the necessary research themselves.
Ingrid: “During these Easter days we went again to Willemstad. We showed the photo of Dad at the tourist office and a lady recognized him as a man who lives there. Or has lived there, because she feared that he is no longer alive. referred us to a 99-year-old woman, but she didn’t recognize the photo.”
“We also searched the cemetery, but we do not know whether the man we saw also bore the name Van Biesen,” says Ingrid. “So we hope that people in Willemstad can tell us, based on the photo of our dad, who in Willemstad looks or looked like him so much. We don’t really want contact with those people, unless it is family. Because then we are cousins. and cousins of each other.”
Do you know more about the man from Willemstad who looks so strikingly like Frans van Biesen? Let us know.