A VALENTINE’S DAY STORY

Today is the Traditional Day for lovers. St. Valentine’s Day.  This morning I woke to see eight hot air balloons gliding silently across the dawn sky – the rising sun making their silhouettes look heart-shaped.

It is a day where love and greed form a 24-hours marriage. Long stemmed red roses can cost up to $150 a bunch and special St. Valentine’s Day dinners to two are up to $300 in Sydney.

But the most poignant Valentine’s Day story of love and devotion was played out in this city yesterday. A love story that I had a peripheral involvement in and in which you unwittingly shared.

It was the story of Frank and Elisabeth Bruitzman. They met in Amsterdam just after the Second World War. Frank  had been in a  concentration camp for three years for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets.

They met in a Dutch café. To put it in the vernacular Frank ‘hit on her’. Asked her to marry him. And finally she agreed. That marriage lasted nearly sixty years. They came to Australia forty years ago and raised five kids.

And in their twilight years fate dealt them simultaneous blows. Frank at 90 and Elisabeth, 88 were both dying of cancer.  As their conditions deteriorated they refused hospitalisation. They wanted to stay at home together and depart this world together. Until a few days ago they could still hold hands.

They refused medication. Frank and Elisabeth believed in voluntary euthanasia. They thought people who did it were brave but they wanted their own lives to take their natural course.

Like many of you, my attention was drawn to their story by a beautiful but haunting photo of life and death in the Herald Sun yesterday.  Frank and Elizabeth, gaunt and near death, lying side by side, surrounded by their adult children: Hans, Christine, Elisabeth, Johanna and Richard.

What we didn’t know was that Elisabeth died before that newspaper hit your breakfast table.

It seemed that was all Frank was hanging on for. I was talking on air to Elisabeth’s namesake daughter yesterday afternoon when it happened.

In the middle of a story Elisabeth faltered, went silent, for what seemed an eternity, and then said in a thick voice ‘I’ve got to go. Dad just died’.

Within hours of his wife’s death Frank had joined the lifelong partner he had seen as a ray of love and hope in an Amsterdam café after the years of despair and death in war-torn Europe.

It was a bitter-sweet real-life drama, coincidentally played out on 3AW.  Frank and Elisabeth Bruitzman finally got their dying wish. And finally, all the pain and the suffering, was over.

Forget the roses and the chocolates….. that is a true Valentine love story.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007