In Nieuwe Niedorp, the monument to six Czech airmen from the Second World War has been unveiled. The crew of the bomber was shot down over Niedorp by the Germans in the night of 22 to 23 June 1941. Their names are immortalized in the monument: “To remember those who fought for our freedom.”
Hundreds of interested people from the Netherlands and abroad are standing on the Kanaaldijk in New Niedorp opposite the spot where the plane, a Vickers Wellington T2990, came down more than eighty years ago. The men were on their way back from a bombing raid on Bremen. Five occupants did not survive the crash, only the pilot managed to escape death by parachute.
The aircraft was not recovered until May 2021. The remains of the crew members were buried last year in a military cemetery of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Bergen op Zoom. The unveiling of the monument, designed by artist Rutger Jan Bredewold from Haringhuizen, is the culmination of years of quest.
Flames
Radan Bukva is one of the surviving relatives of the pilot of the crashed aircraft. He is happy with the recognition for his great-uncle and the monument. “Vilém Konstancky was my grandmother’s brother. The whole family is proud of him.” Bukva thinks the monument is beautiful: “I like the idea that the flames of the device are depicted as birds of freedom. I like it very much. The memory of my uncle must be kept alive.”
You can see images of the commemoration and the unveiling of the monument in the video.
The storage facility at Nieuwe Niedorp was part of it ‘national program for salvaging aircraft wrecks‘ of the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry supports municipalities in ‘promising’ excavations at locations where human remains are likely to be buried in the ground. Some 5,500 aircraft crashed in the Netherlands during the war.