Memories of the value of freedom - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

It was something of a surprise to me when I realized we would mark the 80th anniversary of the Second World War next week on May 8.

 

I wasn’t alive at the time, but the war still played a big part in my life. My father was in the artillery in the Canadian army, serving first in Italy and then in Holland. After the war ended, he came home to my mother and my older sister, born before the war, and they bought a farm north of Lucknow where I was raised.

 

My father perhaps talked to my mother about his experiences in the war, but he seldom spoke of it to us kids, though my brother and I often asked questions, since little boys are usually fascinated by war. My mother used to tell of reunions of my father’s battery where the wives would sit in one corner, passing the time while their husbands sat elsewhere, recalling events they experienced together. Only other old soldiers could really understand what life in war meant, I suspect.

 

After my father died, my mother and sister flew over to Holland for one of the celebrations of the end of the war - I suspect it was the 50th. I recall her telling the story that the Dutch people were so grateful to the Canadians who drove the Germans out, that if you indicated you were Canadian, everyone would stop to thank you and offer gifts.

 

For us, locally, the reward was also that generations of Dutch farmers sought opportunity to grow by immigrating to Canada to buy farms. I remember early experiences of this, first when a prosperous neighbour hired a Dutch family to help out on the farm and live on one of his farms. Later, a Dutch family bought the poorest farm in the neighbourhood and worked, day and night and with all their kids, to build it up to a prosperous operation. 

 

Recently, The Globe and Mail printed a story by Paul Waldie, its European correspondent who visited the town of Zwelle that celebrated the life of Léo Major: a one-eyed French-Canadian infantryman who single-handedly liberated Zwelle from German occupation on April 14, 1945.

 

Major is hardly a household name in Canada, but his heroics during the Second World War have been celebrated for decades in this city of 140,000 people, which also named a street after him. 

 

Major, then a private, had been sent on a mission with Corporal Wilfred Arsenault, another French-Canadian soldier from the Régiment de la Chaudière. Their orders were to assess German positions and provide targets for gunners as part of a plan to launch a heavy bombardment of Zwelle before Canadian, American, British and Polish troops went in.

 

On their way into town, the pair came across a German patrol, which opened fire and killed Corporal Arsenault. Major fought off the Germans and carried on. According to several accounts, as he made his way through Zwelle’s narrow streets, he shot his gun into the air and set off several explosions. The ruckus caused so much havoc among German troops that they fled the city, fearing an allied assault had begun.

 

Major got word back to his superiors that the town was clear and the bombing and shelling was called off. He then retrieved his friend’s body. The next morning, a contingent of Canadian and other allied soldiers moved in and were given a hero’s welcome.
Recently, I also re-read Jan Kamienski’s book Hidden in the Enemy’s Sight. He was just 19 and born in Poland, the son of a professor of musicology and Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Poznan and a mother who was a concert singer and a voice teacher.     

 

In 1939, Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Russia’s Communionist Soviet Union reached an agreement to divide up Poland and, in September, Hitler invaded, beginning World War II.

 

Kamienski and his parents boarded a train with other faculty of the university to move to a “safe” area, 600 kilometres away, but the train was attacked by German aircraft and he was shot in the thigh and had to spend time in hospital. Later, he recovered and joined the Polish resistance and was sent to the city of Dresden in Germany as a contact for Polish  spies. He studied art at a local art studio. Dresden was not attacked by allied bombers early in the war and residents felt it was because  it was a historic city, but early in 1945 allied bombers struck, devastating the city and killing thousands.

 

Later, after the Soviets took control, Kamienski and his wife escaped to Canada.

 

How things change. Germany is now a valued ally, Poland is free of Soviet repression, but Canada fears its former friend in the United States under President Donald Trump’s threats. Still, it’s good to remember what we experienced in World War II as a lesson as to why we value, and are willing to fight for: freedom.