Every year, the children and grandchildren of the generation of Dutch civilians who endured Nazi occupation of their country from 1940 to 1945, celebrated their liberation day – May 4, 1945.

Indeed, every May 4 since then, during silent marches in every hamlet and city in the Netherlands, the Dutch continue to acknowledge the sacrifice that thousands made, in particular their “liberators,” Canadian soldiers, sailors and airmen.

More than 7,600 Canadians died in the nine-month campaign to liberate the Netherlands. The Dutch have never forgotten that sacrifice.

Ted Barris’s Days of Victory talk/presentation offers accounts of Canadians’ participation in the liberation of Holland – Operation Market Garden, the Scheldt estuary, taking the German surrender at Wageningen and the famous food drops of Operation Mana in the 1945 “Hunger Winter.” While the pandemic erased 75th anniversary observances of Dutch liberation overseas, the stories that remain from veterans and civilians of that time can never be erased. They live on in the remembrances of those who were there.

Not a soldier, but the soldier’s storyteller, not a veteran, but recognized by vets as keeper of the flame, Ted Barris has now published 19 non-fiction books, a dozen of them wartime histories. For 50 years, he has worked as a broadcaster in Canada and the US. He taught journalism at Toronto’s Centennial College for 18 years. His book The Great Escape: A Canadian Story won the 2014 Libris Award for Best Non-fiction Book of the Year. And Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid against Nazi Germany received the RCAF Association NORAD Trophy in 2018. In 2019,  Rush to Danger was long-listed for the 2020 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction.