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TAYLORSVILLE - More than 60 years ago, a teenage Adrian Versteeg played dangerous cat-and-mouse games with the Nazis, smiling in their faces as he quietly sabotaged their efforts to round up Dutch labor conscripts and transport them to German camps.
As a member of a Dutch underground resistance cell in The Hague during World War II, Versteeg saved several hundred souls from the concentration camps, only to be arrested and plunged into an odyssey of starvation, disease and mass death - horrors that defined humankind's depravity in the 20th century.
He survived several camps, was liberated by British soldiers in the last days of the war and emigrated to Taylorsville in 1953. The gentle, friendly man known to family members as "Opa" (Dutch for grandpa) died in his sleep at home Sunday, one day short of his 85th birthday.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Gwendoline, said Wednesday.
She said a pall of failing health, memory loss and intermittent sadness had hung over their low-profile suburban life since the violent blur of Versteeg's 80th birthday - Sept. 11, 2001.
There is harsh irony in history forcing a man who miraculously survived Nazi genocide and rebuilt fragile happiness in America to live out the twilight of his life with each birthday bringing a scalding reprise of images of the World Trade Center ablaze and a world sliding again toward war.
"We realized this is the way Adrian wanted it," his wife said of his peaceful death as he slept. "He wanted to be 85, but he didn't want to celebrate his birthday because he always felt the events of that September the 11th had ruined it for him."
According to Peter Black, senior historian for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., honoring lives like Versteeg's is vitally relevant today, both for his actions as a saboteur and his experiences as a victim.
"It's important to be aware of how easily - even in a highly industrialized, civilized and prosperous middle-class society - that hatred and fear, properly whipped up, can lead to persecution and indeed mass murder," Black said.
Such stories, he said, also "serve as an example for us of how to respond toward an assault on individual human beings as well as on human dignity in general, even when it would be more comfortable and even when virtually all political, social and psychological pressures would advise us as individuals to become bystanders."
Versteeg resolved to fight the very day Adolf Hitler's forces invaded his beloved Holland in 1940. Months later, when the unemployed 19-year-old was ordered to report for a job at a medical clinic, the perfect opportunity landed in his lap. His clerical tasks for German doctors included certifying fitness exams of labor conscripts being forced into scores of Nazi work camps, factories and collective farms across newly conquered Europe.
With tiny alterations to the documents, Versteeg found he could divert patients from German control. "I was in a beautiful situation," Versteeg told The Salt Lake Tribune in 1995. ''I could help people to stay away from the camps.''
Versteeg connected with a loose-knit network of like-minded resisters, most equally young and emboldened by a sense of bravado, even fun at thwarting Nazi brutality. His forgery grew over the next three years into widespread falsification of and trafficking in a variety of medical documents, identification papers and food and fuel rationing coupons.
He was arrested June 19, 1944, at an upstairs apartment in The Hague while attempting to contact another resistance cell. Plain-clothed Nazi agents met him at the top of darkened stairs, pressing a cold pistol barrel under his nose. Though interrogated for days, he admitted nothing of his sabotage, insisting that he was only a black marketeer seeking stolen food coupons. The false alibi apparently spared him from execution by firing squad.
Instead, Versteeg was jailed as a political prisoner and hauled through six camps across Holland and Germany. Starved and racked by disease, Versteeg was little more than a living skeleton on April 20, 1945, when he was dumped at a camp named Sandbostel in northern Germany.
When British troops finally freed Sandbostel, nine days later, the horrific scene marked them indelibly.
''There were dead and dying all about the place,'' said Dennis Turnbull, a member of the 4th Durham Survey Regiment, British Royal Artillery, in a 1999 interview with The Tribune. ''The smell was something horrible. Absolutely terrible. They were pushing bodies with bulldozers into ditches.''
Versteeg never forgot the first dab of sugar water on his tongue as British nurses brought him back from near death. He returned to The Hague on June 29, 1945, to a hero's welcome from his friends and, later, traveled to Denmark for several glorious weeks of ceremony and celebration as a guest of the Danish king.
Versteeg fell in love at first sight of his future wife during a chance meeting in 1952 at San Remo on the Italian Riviera. Gwendoline West had survived the German blitzkrieg on London by being evacuated with her young siblings to rural England and Wales. Fifty years later, Gwen would dreamily recall the sunny afternoon she met Versteeg on Via Matteotti: ''I looked at him and thought, 'What a lovely face!' . . . I was instantly attracted to him.''
They kept in touch after Versteeg emigrated to Utah through a lengthy and stormy long-distance romance. She joined him and they married in Salt Lake City on Oct. 27, 1956, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church. They raised three sons, Roger, Noel and Bruce.
Versteeg worked primarily in accounting, but his life's passions were family, tulip gardening and soccer, a sport he played, coached and followed with near-religious zeal.
As league players aged through the years, their leisure gradually turned from sport to Hollandia, a European style dance club on Salt Lake City's west side that united participants of almost every nationality for fancy-dress evenings of dancing and revelry. Each night ended with a rendition of "God Bless America.''
The now-defunct Hollandia, as Gwen put it, ''was peace on earth.''
Versteeg never spoke of his war experiences until 1981, when a fluke encounter with someone swaggering in a Nazi SS uniform at a costume ball led him to break down.
''It all came pouring out,'' said his wife.
A year later, Versteeg was awarded the Dutch Resistance Commemoration Cross by Prince Bernhard in Washington, D.C. At the ceremonies, Versteeg wore a suit jacket of solid bright orange, the Dutch royal color.
In the last decades of his life, Adrian displayed a deep devotion to his four grandchildren, Adrienne, Christian, Matthew and Andrew.
Versteeg and his wife returned to Europe in 1995 to mark the 50th anniversary of D-Day and he tracked down members of the 4th Durham Survey Regiment, joining them for their final reunion in Durham. ''Because of you,'' he told them, barely able to get words out to the hushed gray-haired crowd, ''I am here.'' The veterans erupted in thunderous applause.
He developed a lasting friendship with Turnbull, who died a few months ago.
Funeral services for Versteeg are scheduled for Friday at noon at McDougal Funeral Home, 4330 S. Redwood Road. His wife said Versteeg will be buried with his medal and wearing his orange jacket, with a Dutch flag given to him by Prince Bernhard draped over his coffin.
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TONY SEMERAD is researching a biography on Versteeg.