door Sometimes you come across a postcard that immediately makes you think: “There must be a story behind this!” This postcard is one of those. By Huber van Werkhoven
Originally intended to be franked with a charity stamp (‘for the child’), the card was sent from Rotterdam to Finland. It was quite decently franked for the international postcard rate of 12 cents, with a 10-cent stamp issued to commemorate 75 years of the Universal Postal Union, along with two 1-cent Van Krimpen stamps.
The 10-cent stamp was cancelled using a machine postmark commemorating 30 years of KLM. For the pair of 1-cent stamps affixed to the left of the card, a manual handstamp was required at the post office. Both postmarks are dated 3 October 1949.
The card was marked RETOUR (return – in blue stamp), with the handwritten note “Palautetaan” (Return to sender), because the recipient had been “Kuollut” (deceased) since 28/7/49.
Let us first examine who G.J. Krediet was—the sender—who lived on the Maaskade on Noordereiland, overlooking the shipping traffic on the Nieuwe Maas. That turned out to be no easy task.
Initially, I came across Gerrit Jacobus Krediet, a GP who, during the war, provided shelter in his Wassenaar home to Peter Tazelaar and Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema. He paid for this with a sentence to Dachau, where he died in 1945. But this card was written after the war, in 1949.
After extensive searching, I finally found the ‘real’ Gerrit Jan Krediet in the Rotterdam City Archives, on the housing record for the property at Maaskade 63b. He lived at that address from March 1949 to December 1966.
The website www.oorlogsbronnen.nl reveals that the Rotterdam-based Gerrit Krediet also did not emerge from the war unscathed. During the large-scale raid of 10 November 1944—just one day after his 36th birthday—he was arrested. He ended up in Hameln, where he was forced to work for the railways. That area was frequently bombed by the Allies. He later described his landlord as ‘a filthy scoundrel’ and the man’s wife as ‘a devil-woman’.
After the German capitulation, Krediet was eager to return to his family and decided to walk back to the Netherlands. Upon his return, he was able to resume his former job as an electrician at the Municipal Energy Company. He eventually had eight children. One of his sons described him as ‘a modest man from Rotterdam’ who played the harmonium at home and had a broadcast radio through which he tried to instil a love of organ music in his children. He died in Rotterdam in 1984 after a long illness.
But G.J. Krediet was also a philatelist. He collected stamps, as shown by a small classified ad he placed in Philatelie, the Philatelie monthly magazine in November 1952. René Hillesum, who assisted me as a Finland expert for the Finnish part of this story, managed to retrieve that advertisement. 
In somewhat broken German—undoubtedly a remnant of his enforced stay in that country—Gerrit Krediet wrote his postcard to L. Suolakivi. He had heard nothing in response to his letter of 25 January ’49 and hoped for a reply soon.
At the bottom, the text was later added: “L. Suolakivi ist den 28/7’49 gestorben.” (L. Suolakivi died on 28/7/49.). In pencil there has been written “dead”. And the card was returned to Rotterdam.
René Hillesum attempted to find information about L. Suolakivi. At the address on the postcard—Caloniuksenkatu 4 in Helsinki—a music production company was (and still is) based.
René also discovered that the name L. Suolakivi was used as a pseudonym by three lyricists of Finnish music. The best known of these was Helena Eeva. Intriguing!
Later, René came across an image of a gravestone. Beneath it was buried Lauri Suolakivi, together with his later-deceased wife and two children. And the date of death on the gravestone—28 July 1949—matches the date mentioned on the postcard.
Establishing all the connections between Lauri Suolakivi, the three pseudonyms, and the address of the music production company may prove to be quite a challenge.
I assume that the ‘organist’ Gerrit Krediet was attempting to contact producer Lauri Suolakivi for musical reasons, rather than out of interest in a possible collection of Finnish stamps.
Although—the music published by the lyricists under the same name leaned less towards church music and more towards dance music and the tango…
Image source:
https://kane.fi/fi/nuotit/226012-naisten-tango-toivo-karki-sanat-l-suolakivi-nuottivihko.html
