Posts with the Soviet Union tag

Barris Beat

Canada’s nuclear legacy

Written by Ted Barris on . 2 Comments
Outside Nelson’s former post office…
… and down an alley way.

The archivist at the museum had no idea it was there. In fact, when Jean-Phillippe Stienne applied for and landed the job as new archivist and collections manager of the museum, archives and art gallery in Nelson, B.C., back in 2017, he knew nothing about the explosive history buried beneath his new office.

“I came here because it’s a beautiful part of the world,” Steinne, 43, told me during a speaking stop I made in British Columbia last week. “I’d actually been working here a few years before I knew about the mystery under the museum.”

When I asked what he was talking about, Stienne, or “J.P.” as everybody calls him, walked me out the front door of his museum (formerly the Nelson post office) and down a back alley to an adjacent building. He unlocked an exterior door, which revealed an inner door with a thick circular porthole window and a black-lettered sign that read, “Nelson’s Cold War Bunker.” (more…)

Barris Beat

NORAD Trophy ceremony

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Author with L/Col. Dean Black and the 2018 NORAD Trophy at Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum. Photo Matthew Wocks.

Just as I finished a presentation, last week, my cellphone rang. The readout said, “Air Force.” It’s silly, but almost instinctively I straightened by back and my tie, as if duty were calling. It turned out to be a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, Dean Black, who’s also the executive director of the Royal Canadian Air Force Association on the line. Not quite the Air Force, but, as it turned out, just as important.

“The RCAF Association has decided to recognize you and your new book with the NORAD Trophy,” Black said.

“I’m flattered,” I said, “but what’s the NORAD Trophy?” I knew that NORAD stood for North American Aerospace Defence Command and that the U.S. and Canada had formed it originally in 1957 when Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the West were at their highest, to ensure the protection of North America. (more…)

Barris Beat

History that speaks volumes

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Veronika Shavikova

Several years into the Second World War, a young teacher in a small Czechoslovak town made a decision. It nearly cost him his life. Oldrich Patrovsky, who taught primary grades so he could support his family, in 1942, watched Jewish neighbours uprooted and transported away. He chose to help some of them escape the Nazi dragnet. He was arrested and incarcerated inside the 18th century military fortress at Terezin. It’s a place in the former Czechoslovakia that the Nazis had transformed into a prison for political prisoners and a transit camp to redirect Jewish prisoners to death camps in Eastern Europe.

“His crime was being ‘a friend of Jews,’” Patrovsky’s great-granddaughter told me this week.

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Barris Beat

Resist to live

Written by Ted Barris on . 1 Comment
Jan Palach memorial at Wenceslas Square in Prague.
Jan Palach memorial at Wenceslas Square in Prague.

On Jan. 19, 1969, a university student, named Jan Palach, died in a hospital in Prague. Three days earlier he had gone to Wenceslas Square, near a statue of the 10th century duke of Bohemia (and the “Good King Wenceslas” of Christmas carol fame). There, in front of his history classmates and the authorities, he set himself on fire in protest against the Soviet Union’s occupation of his homeland. His suicide was a final act of defiance against the latest in a long line of occupiers of his country – the Czech Republic.

“It was [his] last appeal for resistance,” author Petr Cornej wrote.

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