He was born in Schiphol near Amsterdam in 1924, one of ten siblings in a farming family.

“I had six brothers and three sisters, and I was in the middle,” he said.

“Six are still here, me included, although all the others are still in Holland.”

Life on the farm, which raised dairy cattle and sheep, wasn’t easy, and he started working on it when he was 12 and still going to school.

“Everything was done by hand,” he recalled.

“It was normal; we didn’t know any better.”

Realising he and the family needed an alternative income, Gerrit began training as an electrician when he was 15, something that would set him up in later life.

Things were tough on the farm but they were about to get a lot tougher, because when Gerrit was 16 when Nazi Germany invaded Holland.

Fortunately, the farm gave him and his brothers a way out of fighting for the Dutch resistance and the Germans themselves.

“They came around to try to recruit me, but we were able to bribe them with butter, which was hard to get at the time,” he recalled.

However, the German need for manpower because too hard to resist.

“They needed men to do the work that the soldiers had been doing,” he said.

“They we going to take my father, my brother (who was 21) or me, so I told them to take me.”

Gerrit was taken to work in a basalt factory at Koblenz on the Rhine River in Germany, where he and his fellow workers had to melt basalt rocks into items such as pipes and tiles.

“The furnace reached 1700 degrees,” he recalled.

“It was hot and you had to wear special gloves. You had to watch yourself.”

Even so far away from home, Gerrit’s family still helped take care of him.

“We weren’t getting enough nourishment, so my family sent a food packet every week,” he said.

He and 30 other labourers, mainly Dutch and French, had to share a barracks, and live with the fear of daily and nightly Allied bombing attacks.

“The Germans continuously moved us to keep us away from the Allies,” he said.

“A man who had two sons fighting at the front and who owned a small hotel bar hid us in the cellar of the hotel and looked after us,” he said.

It was here that they were when liberating American troops arrived.

“The Americans looked after us and wanted to do everything for us,” he said.

“They asked us if there had been any bad Germans, and we told them about a Feldwebel who had treated us badly,” he said.

“When the Americans had arrived he had thrown his uniform away, but we picked him out for them, and they captured him.”

Gerrit resumed his electrician career when he returned to his family in Holland.

He married wife Dingena in 1949, and they remained married until she passed away in 1996.

“We lived in a little bedroom in my family’s house because we couldn’t afford to get a house,” he said.  

It wasn’t long before life took a major turn.

“A friend said there was a meeting on about going to Australia, so I went along and put my name down,” he said.

Three months later he was on board a cargo ship bound for Australia.

He had no job waiting for him in Australia and just 25 pounds to his name, meaning it was three months before he was sufficiently set up to bring his wife and baby daughter Alidah over from Holland.

His first job in Australia was working on the railway line between Melbourne and Geelong.

Jobs in Warragul and Moe followed, but it wasn’t easy going.

“I didn’t speak English and everything was different than in Holland,” he said.

He got his full Australian qualifications when he passed an exam in 1963 and had his own business for 17 years.

He went over to Holland for his first visit in two decades in 1970, before returning to Australia.

He and his family ran the Shady Willows Caravan Park in Batemans Bay for seven years before moving to Racecourse Beach at Bawley Point in the 1980s.

They built a house in Bawley Point where Gerrit lived before moving to The Manor two months ago.

“I like it here,” he said.

“It is friendly and a nice place.”

Gerrit has three children, five grandchildren and 16 great grand children, and a good philosophy on life.

“If you want to do something, do it; don’t wait until tomorrow, it might be too late,” he said.