History and Nostalgia

With all that has been going on in our family within the last few months, my mind has increasingly turned to thoughts of family history. On my mother's side, a cousin has spent many years compiling an exhaustive genealogy, complete with old photos and stories. It has been a labour of love for him and we have all benefited from it.
On my father's side, a family tree has been created dating all the way back to the time of no surnames. Like so many others, people were named after their fathers, or where they lived, or what their occupations were. Being of Dutch ancestry, my ancestors go by names like deBoer (the farmer) and  Bosch (from the bush).
Reading the family genealogies is a litany of recurring names that sound strange to North American ears--Auke, Sippe, Gretje, Trientje.
With all of that information available, you'd think I would know all that there was to know about my grandparents and great-grandparents. Not at all. While leafing through family papers in search of dog registration papers, I discovered a folder with newspaper clippings and letters from the World War II years and beyond.
One of my aunts had written a very moving letter on the occasion of my grandfather's funeral, which I had never seen or read. Feeling a bit like a voyeur, I could not help but peek.
I had always been told that my maternal grandfather had sheltered people from the cities in Holland that had been bombed during the war, such as Amsterdam. There were even two paintings of the ancestral home made by a grateful artist who had stayed with him and his family.
But what I discovered made me see my grandfather in a whole new light. The people he sheltered were not just city dwellers, they were Jewish... While everyone knows how dangerous that was during the war years, and while there were many such brave people in Europe who did exactly the same, I had never known this about my Pake. He was a gentle, unassuming, modest man who never trumpeted what he had done.
With tears streaming down my face, I mentally thanked him for the extremely brave and courageous feat of helping to save those who were hunted down and killed during the Holocaust. How many other families may not know how brave their parents and grandparents were?