Remembrance

     I have a difficult relationship with Remembrance Day. The only member of my family actually involved in WWII was my maternal grandfather, who was from a small village in northern Germany. He wasn't involved in the Nazi Party. There was no Jewish community in the village. Given his age at the time, I have a suspicion that he didn't really have much of a choice about whether to enlist or not, regardless of his feelings about Hitler and the Fatherland. But still.

    They sent him to the Eastern Front. Not Stalingrad, but just as horrific, from what my mother has told me secondhand. He never talked about his time in the military to anyone except her and my aunt, towards the end. No food, inadequate supplies, scorched earth - an endless slog of frozen mud and blood and murder. When their commanding officer died (whether by a Soviet bullet or mutiny - he never said and Mum never asked), he and the surviving members of his unit fled the advancing Red Army and went looking for the Americans so they could surrender and maybe eventually go home.

    He spent the better part of a year in a POW camp, went back to his village, sold the farm, and emigrated to Canada, sending for his family once he'd found a job and a place to live with the help of the Salvation Army (my feelings about them are for another post and another complicated set of feelings).  He never talked about the war again, and once he retired from his job, was never sober again until the day he died. Whatever wound he carried - the shame and grief and guilt - took 45 years to kill him.

    So that's it. The ceremonies here are all about how our side fought for freedom, paid a terrible price, and prevailed. What ceremony is there for when you come back and realize what you fought and paid in blood for was something unworthy - a vicious, contemptible lie, propagated by men unfit to lead?