Valuable lessons from a war ended - Keith Roulston editorial
May 8 marks the official end of the Second World War in Europe, back in 1945, longer ago than anyone less than 78 years old was born, and therefore the reality of that war needs to be restated for the generations of Canadians today.
I grew up the son of a veteran who fought in Italy, Holland and elsewhere in Europe, but, like many veterans, he seldom spoke about it at all. My wife Jill’s father served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and used special government loans to veterans to buy a lot and build a house in Scarborough. My father used his government aid, and stretched his resources, to buy a farm near Lucknow, but he always struggled to make it pay and moved into town less than 20 years later.
On our farm, we greeted the first of a wave of immigrants from Holland in the early 1950s, first working on a neighbour’s dairy farm and later through some people who bought a farm near us, with five children who I went to school with. It was the first of a flood of Dutch farmers, perhaps attracted to Canada through warm feelings for the Canadian soldiers who liberated Holland.
Recently, Jill suggested I read The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch woman who died in 1983 but who, with her sister Betsie and father Casper, hid Dutch Jews from the German army occupying Holland, beginning in 1940. The Hiding Place could be a companion piece to The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager who lived hidden from the German occupiers, in an attic above her father’s Amsterdam business until they were captured in August of 1944 by the Germans and Anne and her sister Margot died while in the Bergen-Belsen extermination camp.
Corrie ten Boom, a devout Christian, was already middle-aged when she and her older sister and father began hiding refugees. Eventually the secret room off Corrie’s bedroom where refugees hid in emergency, proved its worth when the refugees were safe there as the father and his daughters were captured for helping Jews and taken off to prison in February 1944.
At first, Corrie was kept in solitary confinement in a brutish prison in Holland. She was helped by a few, but treated horribly by many. Her father, already an old man, died within days of his capture.
Corrie persuaded a helpful nurse to give her a Bible, which she hid down her back when surrounded by German guards.
After the Allies invaded Europe on June 6, 1944, the two sisters were sent on a long, brutal trip, crowded into a rail car, to Ravensbruck prison camp in eastern Germany. There, she worked in a Phillips electronics plant, persuaded by a sympathetic guard to sabotage the radios they built for German war planes.
Persuaded by Betsie, the sisters provided secret Bible-reading classes for interested prisoners, using Corrie’s hidden Bible.
Betsie, who wasn’t as strong as her sister, got sick and died in December. Corrie was released from prison, apparently by some bureaucratic error, and returned to Holland for the grim winter of 1944-1945 when the starving Dutch people ate anything, including tulip bulbs, to stay alive. When the Canadian troops liberated Holland after May 8, they brought truckloads of food.
In post-war Holland, Corrie was helped by a woman who owned Bloemendaal, a 56-room mansion, to provide accommodation for people returning from prison camps. After hundreds of these survivors had been given a chance to recuperate, she welcomed Dutch prisoners of war from the Pacific War who had been treated grimly by Japanese captors. Meanwhile, her own home welcomed Dutch citizens who had collaborated with the Germans and were abused, as traitors, following the war.
We must remember just how horribly the Germans and Japanese were in those days. We also need to remember that today these are two of the most generous peoples in the world, in part because of the wisdom of post-war leaders in the U.S., Britain and Canada.
But we can’t forget that gruesome past. There are people in all countries who can’t accept that six million people were murdered by the Nazis.
Meanwhile, the lessons of that time are lost on many. In the U.S., democracy is undervalued for millions who want their party in power. Meanwhile, Russia is trying to rebuild its post-war glory, when it ruled half of Europe. Other countries, too, forget the value of democracy.
The lesson of World War II is that peace is so valuable we can’t risk losing it.
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Many thanks to all those who offered their congratulations recently by telephone, in person, over the internet or on Facebook after I was named to the Ontario Community Newspaper Hall of Fame. Your best wishes are heartily appreciated.