Sandra Greenberg believes that despite acts of remembrance, today, some things are forgotten on Remembrance Day. “We need to work for peace,” she said. “War is harmful not just for the people who fight, (but also) to their families, to people that get caught up in the destruction and environment destruction.”
Ted Conover’s last day of combat in the Second World War brought trauma and recognition. “It was the 1st of May, 1944, and we’d been very successful in getting prisoners up to that point,” Conover said. “What we were unaware of was that the area where we were to take up our position was mined by the Germans with shoe mines.”
If William Salo had miscalculated that day in the winter of 1945, it might have meant death for him and his student navigator. “It was like in a fog. I lost sight of the ground. The plane kept on dropping, but he didn’t say anything,” Salo said. As the qualified pilot of a twin-engine Anson training aircraft, Salo was responding to the directions of his student navigator. They found themselves in a fog bank and Salo kept waiting for the observer-in-training to give him directions through the fog.
Renate Krakauer’s parents, William and Charlotte, lost many of their relatives and friends that day. “They came knocking on doors and dragged all the Jews out and they took them to the Jewish cemetery, where they had dug these deep pits,” Krakauer said. “And they had people lined up, [naked]. They would line up at the edge of the pit in rows. First row, bang, bang, bang, bang, into the pit. Second row, bang, bang, bang.”
Lance Corporal Jordan Bachle recalled the quiet of a September morning in Afghanistan suddenly broken. “I remember seeing the mushroom cloud of thick, black smoke,” he said. “It was a big pressure plate; I’d say it must have gone 500 to1,000 metres in the air.”
Next Monday, at Glen Ames Senior Public School, students will reflect on the act of remembrance. Their reflections, part of the school’s Nov. 11 Remembrance Day observance, come from a story about the First World War, titled The Enemy: A Book about Peace.
Clarence Buchner still finds it strange spending most of his time on land. “I grew up on Pelee Island,” Buchner said. “The thought of still being on the water while at war sounded just like a dream come true.” While serving in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War seemed a hasty choice, Buchner feels it was the perfect fit.
Jia Zhen Liao remembers the day she lost her family. “I was a young girl then and didn’t know what was happening,” she said. In the early 1940s, young village children in the Canton province of China spent their days playing, tending the crops or performing various chores.
Serving in the military is a family tradition for Ben Boyden. “I’m proud to be in the army. I joined for a reason,” he said. Boyden, 22, joined the 48th Highlanders of Canada in November 2008, when he was 17 years old. Now a corporal in the reserves, he enjoys the experiences that the military has provided him.
Fidelis Oketch was on just his seventh mission in Iraq when his war ended. “The scariest (part) was knowing friends who died,” he said, “getting blown up by IEDs each day and taking fire fights.” Though he had always wanted to be a military pilot, Oketch got his first chance to serve in the military after 9/11 when President George W. Bush declared war on Iraq and U.S. troops were sent out almost immediately.