Cis and Joe Beekman celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary last week.
By Paul Pickering
A ROMANCE salvaged from the terror of Hitler’s Europe – and lived-out in the peace of the Dandenong Ranges – entered its 61st year last week, as love-struck seniors Joe and Cis Beekman played host to a cavalcade of well-wishers at their Wantirna South home.
The vibrant couple celebrated their 60th anniversary last Tuesday (2 October) with friends and family from across the hills and as far away as Holland gathering to marvel at their enduring union.
As the fanfare subsided momentarily on Thursday, Mr and Mrs Beekman took a moment to reflect on their extraordinary lives together.
The story of the Dutch-born duo’s chance meeting is enough to impress even the most reluctant romantic.
It played out in Nazi-occupied Holland in 1943, when Joe – a member of the underground resistance movement – was forced to flee his home town under pursuit from the Gestapo.
He biked 130 kilometres before daring to seek refuge at a poultry farm in the Dutch countryside.
“I knocked, a young girl of 17 years old opened the door and I married her four years later,” Joe recalled.
After arranging accommodation and work at the adjacent hemp farm, Joe began dating Cis secretly during his two-year hideout from the Nazis.
“I saw a lot of the girl next door. We discovered that if we were together we were happy – and after 60 years it’s still the same,” he said.
Marrying shortly after the war ended, the couple decided to move to Australia to pursue a better life for themselves and their son, Ben.
In 1955, they followed Cis’s brother and sister to Melbourne, initially staying in a caravan in Dandenong.
Desperate for a more permanent residence and a source of income, the Beekmans moved to a dilapidated bungalow on a potato farm in Olinda.
Joe later began work as a painter and Cis worked at a restaurant at Mount Dandenong, allowing them to save enough money to build on a block in Sassafras, where they would stay for 46 years.
Both became intimately involved with the hills community, Joe as a long-term member of the Ferny Creek Horticultural Society and Cis as a special minister at St Thomas More’s Church in Belgrave.
The Beekmans noted last week that the close-knit community atmosphere of the hills made them feel at home in their adopted country almost immediately.
For now, though, home is the friendly environs of Knox Retirement Village, where they can be spotted holding hands on their daily strolls across Burwood Highway to Knox City Shopping Centre.
“We do everything together,” Joe said when asked for the secret to their blissful marriage.
“When I retired 19 years ago, I said, ‘From now on we will spend every moment together’.”
“We have our arguments, but we always talk it out and then it’s finished,” Cis added.
True to their word, the couple is now planning to embark upon a second honeymoon to Surfers Paradise together.
“We said we will do it every 60 years,” Joe laughed, with an affectionate nod to his bride.
