Monday was Day 10 of our physical distancing. As I’ve done most days of my wife’s and my voluntary isolation, I emerged from my house early enough to retrieve both the newspaper at the foot of my driveway and at my neighbour’s. Coincidentally, he came out his front door at the same time. Keeping our distance, I tossed him the paper.
“How’re you doing?” I asked.
“Bored!” was all he said.
He didn’t have to say another thing. We nodded, smiled. He went back inside. I went on my way. (more…)
I don’t think I’d ever encountered a more driven medical professional in my life. When I met Bill Wilson back in 2004, to me he epitomized the ultimate first-responder. He was young, fit, even-tempered and well-informed; in fact, when I interviewed him, he’d already served as a front-line medic in Canada’s military operations to Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Afghanistan.
Yet, there he was, a veteran from all those military hotspots, back studying at Canadian Forces Base Borden.
“I enjoy the role of responsibility,” he told me. “I love the challenge.” (more…)
Not since the Second World War has this country required that young people complete service in the military. The Canadian Forces have relied solely on volunteers since 1945. Consequently, this week, while attending a student awards night at Centennial College, I was surprised to meet a young scholarship recipient who’d previously completed military service. His name was Yonghwan Seok.
“Before I came to Canada in 2018,” he told me, “I dropped out of (school) and went straight into two-year, mandatory military service.” (more…)
Early in May, almost 75 years ago, a Second World War glider pilot named Martin Maxwell tasted freedom for the first time in nearly eight months. On Sept. 17, 1944, during his second airborne operation, he had delivered British soldiers and equipment in a controlled crash landing near Arnhem, Holland, during Operation Market Garden, only to be wounded and captured days later. But on May 1, 1945, with the Germans surrendering all over Europe, Maxwell regained his freedom.
“A British tank came into our POW camp,” he said, “and we were liberated.”
This May of 2020, Martin Maxwell, a 96-year-old WWII veteran, will relive that moment, three-quarters of a century ago, as he re-joins me and our Merit Travel group for a 12-day tour marking the 75th anniversary of the Allies’ liberation of the Netherlands in 1944-45.
You can join us. Our tour plans include visiting the place where Maxwell was captured at the “Bridge Too Far” site in Arnhem. We’ll participate in the emotional “Silent March.” And we’ll tour the Scheldt estuary where 5,000 Canadians died clearing the way to the port of Antwerp and the final push against German Armies to liberate Europe.
To this day, Martin Maxwell recalls every moment of liberation. Even with the war officially over after May 8, 1945, and now freed by advancing Allied armies, pilot Maxwell found ways to assist the oppressed people he encountered in former Nazi-occupied Europe. To speed their way home, he and a friend traded a navigation watch to a Russian officer for a jeep and six containers of fuel. They packed the jeep with biscuits and cheese and soon came upon Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
“In a small corner of the camp, called Kinder Heim (children’s home,) we found dozens of children dead and dying. A little girl ran up to my friend, threw her arms around his leg and called out, ‘Papa! Papa!’”
A woman in the home informed Maxwell that Hannah, this little girl, thought anyone in uniform was her father. Maxwell promised to return the next day with food and provisions for the children. He even traded four cigarettes for a doll he planned to give to little Hannah.
“The next day, we handed out the food and water,” Maxwell said. “And I searched for the little girl to receive this precious doll. A woman emerged shaking her head. Hannah had died in the night.”
The Second World War left deep scars on civilians and soldiers. That’s why veteran Martin Maxwell, at 96, insists that neither the freedom he and his comrades restored, nor the sacrifice Canadians made for peace, can be forgotten. If you’d like to join Martin and me – May 1-12, 2020 – seats on our Dutch Liberation Tour are still available.
Follow this link: https://merittravel.com/product/holland-liberation-tour/
It’s just over a year now – Feb. 9, 2019 – that a young woman produced a video that showed her pitching a patio chair from a balcony 45 floors above the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto. Her stunt on Snapchat got thousands of social media hits. Instagram later picked it up and carried her response to the resulting charges of mischief endangering life.
“Chair girl wants charge dropped,” social media outlets said. (more…)
I met a couple of teachers, a few years ago. At least, I came to know a little of their lives. There’s not much I can relate. They were both Polish. One was named Jan Ciechanowski, born in March 1882. And Jerzy Brem was born in September 1914, as the Great War began. They both came to the area of Poland, around Krakow, in 1941. Or, more correctly, they were brought there, to the small town of Oswiecim, which elite German armies then occupied. The Nazis renamed the place, Auschwitz. And here’s the way the Nazis’ records summed up those two teachers:
“Jan, number 11193, executed Oct. 29, 1941” and “Jerzy, number 10190, executed August 19, 1942.” (more…)
A friend and I got talking about our grandchildren the other day. Writer Peter Jennings and I were kind of comparing notes about our granddaughters. It turned out both granddaughters celebrate birthdays this fall, and Peter shared a magical discovery.
“You know what I got her for her birthday?” he said. “An Instax Mini 9 camera.”
I admitted to PJ that I had no idea what he was talking about.
“It’s an instant print camera,” he explained. “It takes a picture and spits it out – developed – within a minute.”
“You mean like those old Polaroid Land cameras.”
“Yup! And she loves it.” (more…)
He was born the same year as the original Felix the Cat cartoon and the inventor of the Kalashnikov rifle. He survived the Spanish flu epidemic the year of his birth and, though he wouldn’t remember it, was a contemporary of the Treaty of Versailles that officially ended the Great War. His lifetime spanned the administrations of 22 Canadian prime ministers and four British monarchs. And tomorrow, Nov. 1, my friend and occasional visitor to our town, Russ Bannock, turns 100.
“The family’s gathering for birthday party – just the immediate family,” Russ told me this week. “They’ll fill a room at the Granite Club.” (more…)
He saved my father, and he saved me. In fact, he saved both of us multiple times. The first instance occurred 77 years ago this December. Just before Christmas of 1942, both Tony Mellaci and my father, Alex Barris, arrived at Camp Phillips – a U.S. Army training facility in Kansas. The army had posted them there to train as medics in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Then, something happened on Christmas Eve.
“The lieutenant told me to go to the headquarters barracks and pick up a soldier who was sick, and deliver him to the hospital. So, I and another ambulance driver picked up your father (although I didn’t know him) and took him to the hospital,” Mellaci told me. “But we never saw the sick soldier. We stayed in the cab while other medics loaded him into the ambulance.” (more…)
The images penetrated right to my core. I felt angry and hopeless both at the same time. Last week, a dear friend forwarded digital photographs she’d received from overseas. The pictures showed tombstones of fallen First and Second World War soldiers pushed over and spray-painted with swastikas.
A poignant quotation accompanied the images from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) cemetery in Israel.
“Why would someone want to cause pain in a place like this?” the caretaker of the cemetery said to the Times of Israel reporter. (more…)