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The Willems' Mission (2003)

The Willems Mission is a film about film maker Erik Willems' investigation into the real life of his father Wim Willems, who died in 1964. The film follows the trail back through the life of a man whose career took an unusual course. This archaeologist who worked in the jungles of the Dutch East Indies adopted a very different guise during the war and, after the war, found himself heading a mission that was to organise the postwar repatriation of Dutch subjects from Poland: the Willems Mission.
A self-willed man who had a colonel's uniform made so he could negotiate better with the Russians; a wayward man who made such a mess of his administration that it was later hard to counter allegations of fraud; and an impulsive man who could not get on at all in the world of diplomacy. During the war, he was sought by the Dutch and British secret services, possibly because he had made a clandestine journey from the Dutch East Indies to occupied Holland. In the Cold War he was attacked as a crypto communist, a man who was mistrusted by the postwar parliamentary inquiry and, as a result, he was thwarted in continuing his career when he applied for a job heading the Dutch internal security service, of all things. He ended up in a small village where he founded a family with wife and children at the age of 50.

From the end of 1945 to December 1948, the Willems Mission was active in Poland. He helped bring back many collaborators, SS men, stateless people and a few Jewish survivors of concentration camps, forced labourers as well as relatives of missing people who set off to look for them and then themselves got stuck behind the Iron Curtain.
The Willems Mission helped repatriate about 400 people, the last group only in December 1948, after they had been interned in the mines of Silesia for years.
Willems was inclined to ignore official instructions. He let small people return to Holland than the Ministry of Justice approved and always changed the money needed on the black market to make sure his budget was adequate.

Erik Willems lost his father when he was only seven years old. He grew up with stories about a father who seemed to have stepped out of an exciting boys' adventure story. Now he could complete his own mission. He follows the trail left by his father and visits a few people who knew Wim Willems personally. What traces remain of a human life? Why did Willems do it? Was he happy, towards the end of his life? He married late, had four children, and a house like a castle: the old vicarage in Kessel. And where did all the Polish silver that Wim Willems collected come from?

The Willems' Mission is a co-production of Selfmade Films with NPS. This film was made with support from the Dutch Cultural Broadcasts Fund.
 

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