“You know, your Grampa would kick your ass if he saw that.” My Dad was referring to the swastika I had drawn on the back of my hand. I was in grade two or three, and I’m not sure where I saw it, but my mates and I had been drawing tattoos on ourselves in class with ball point pens. The symbol held no meaning for me, no more than the cross or anchor on the other hand, it was just easy to draw and it looked cool. But my Dad’s statement had the impact he had intended; I loved my Grampa as much as anything in the world, so I asked him why, what did he mean.
“That’s the symbol of the Nazis. It’s who your Grandfather fought in the war. It’s what the whole war was about. The Nazi’s were the bad guys, they were responsible for horrible things and your grandfather would be very upset to see that on your hand.”
I was entranced with World War Two and the fact that my grandfather was in it. I began to read books about D-Day, Air borne rangers, and the big battles of that war. The books of that sort you could find in elementary libraries read like adventure stories, and just like the symbolism it was hard for a kid to attach grown-up meaning to those events. I asked my Grandpa for stories, but he would never tell me the ones I wanted, the stories of action and adventure I thought he had. He would tell funny stories, so I had a vague notion that much of the war consisted of drinking and partying with your friends in far away lands.
When we both were much older he talked with me more seriously about his experiences in the war fighting Nazis in Europe. When he reached an age when every visit was precious, because neither of us could be sure there would be a next time, I started to interview him in earnest on the subject.
He told me about men engulfed in flames running across the beach in France on his first night in Europe, where he would spend another four years seeing death on a scale I can’t comprehend, that no one who hasn’t experienced these things first hand ever could. He told me about the day he walked into Dachau, the first concentration camp the Nazis built, it operated for 12 years, tens of thousands were tortured and killed there. His unit was amongst the first Canadians into the camp and he said it wasn’t something he could have imagined. There were starving people in cages, and when he and his friends tried to give them the chocolate from their rations the officers in charge yelled at them. “Those people are on the edge of death, starving, you can’t just feed them hands fulls of chocolate, you’ll kill them!” He had photos, he said, and he wanted me to see them. One was of impossible skinny shirtless men, and the other was of bodies, piled up in a way that made it hard to understand that they were human beings at first site. He was insistent I see them, and when I did he said, “I was there, I took those pictures.” He said it with an urgency that I didn’t understand at the time, but I think I do now. Can you imagine experiencing something like that and then living in a world where people say it didn’t happen, where the symbols and ideologies of the ghastly Nazi machine live on, and knowing that you are amongst the last people living that can testify, that can say, “I was there. I saw it. It happened.”
The youngest veterans of world war 2 are in their 90s now and there are few of them left. I don’t think it is a coincidence that right wing Nationalists are on the rise in North America as our last WWII veterans die off; the last people who remember where staunch nationalism and hate fuelled patriotism leads. Millions dead, starving people in cages, and bodies piled high.
Remembrance Day is to honour our veterans, but ever fewer of us have combat veterans in our lives. It was hard for me when I was young to attach grown-up meaning to the symbolism and the events of a long ago war, but I had my Grandfather, a veteran of that war, to help connect me to the lessons of history. I think he had a clearer sense of all of this than I did, that’s why he spoke with such urgency and why he wanted me to see for myself what he had seen, because he understood that memories fade with each generation and that forgetfulness dooms us to repeat the same lessons.
The last half of the 20th century were some of the most productive and prosperous in human history. In the aftermath of the horror resulting from the largest mobilization of armed forces the world has ever seen, the world became more united, we created international laws and organizations like the United Nations, greatly expanded international aid, including billions spent by conquering nations to help their enemies build themselves back up, join the international community and become allies and partners. Social, political, and economic cooperation on a global scale has demonstrated its benefits and cooperation is needed more than ever as we increasingly face issues that affect all of mankind.
Nov 11