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Neeltje Brouwers & Klaas Koers
Original text: website of the Air Forces Escape and Evasion Society, https://airforceescape.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/8.pdf
Chapter 4: The Organisations
4.3.7. The Koers family
After September 1943, Klaas Koers who was a sergeant-major with the State Police and his wife Nel who was a woman search officer with the border patrol were actively involved in helping airmen in Geulle. On the Dutch side of the border they worked with Mies Bruynen and Evert ("Nico’) Bakker who both circulated the underground newspaper Trouw, and on the Belgian side of the border in Uikhoven they maintained contact with representatives of the White Brigade and Comet Lines. The airmen who had been passed on to Mr. and Mrs. Koers had some way managed to contact the people who worked for this underground newspaper.
When Klaas Koers wanted to make an appointment to rendezvous with his passeurs at night, he would use a special method to inform his Belgian friends on the other side of the river Maas that he and his fliers had arrived. He used a trick that he had learned from smugglers. Very softly he whistled the first lines of ‘Wilhelmus’, the Dutch national anthem, which was only audible to someone holding an ear very close to the surface of the water. From the other side of the river a reply was softly whistled, i.e. the first lines of the ‘Flemmish Lion’ after which the Belgians lowered their boat into the water to collect the anxiously awaiting Allied airmen.
The last person to be taken into Belgium by the Koers family was Bram (‘Bob’) van der Stok.
He was a medical student who after reaching Great Britain as an ‘Engelandvaarder’ in the summer of 194t had joined the Royal Air Force. In 1942, he had been shot down over France and imprisoned in Stalag Luft IITin Sagan neat Breslau. There he became involved in a massive escape of seventy-six officers at the end of March 1944. Fifty of these men were murdered while twenty-three men were re-captured and imprisoned. Van der Stok had been one of the three men who resisted capture, traveling to The Netherlands by train. Via his acquaintances in Utrecht, he was brought to the Ottens family in Amersfoort where he remained for one month. When the local resistance refused to help him further because his identity could not be verified with any certainty, he set off alone, traveling by train to Maastricht, and finally reached Belgium with the help of the Koers family.
Via Brussels, Paris, Dijon and Toulouse he arrived in Gibraltar on 8 July 1944. After returning to England, he became Commander of the 322nd (Dutch) Squadron of the RAF.