He never spoke of the war.
I never asked.
No one did.
We all knew better.
He never tripped down memory lane, spouting glory day stories of hero moments. It was a silent cloud that hung over our dinner table. It was always with him. With us. The unspoken war. World War ll.
No one said anything when he returned, and sat silently drinking alone for two decades. No one said anything when he yelled that kids were starving in France, scaring his children into finishing all the food on their plates. No one said anything when he tossed every toy gun that showed up in the house into the fireplace, toxic fumes filling the living room.
When he shipped off, my Grandmother, pregnant with my mother, waddled to the train station along with all his other childhood friends’ wives. She was jealous. How lucky the boys were to be adventuring to see the world. They were farmers in a small rural kind of community. The kind that shared food when crops failed, the kind that raised barns together, the kind that held socials and church dances, the kind that weathered floods and funerals together, the kind that everyone’s business was just everyone’s business. A community that was a little emptier after the war.
He was in the 1st Railway Corp. As a part of transportation division, he was stationed all over the hot zones of Europe… on London bridge during bombings, in the rubble of Paris, the scarred fields of Holland… he saw action freeing most occupied territories. He was even shot. In a crossfire, one of his big floppy ears that stick out far from his head was nicked. That same day he saw all his friends blown to pieces. When the smoke settled, he had survived and the good guys had won the war. But after the victory cheers faded, they kept him overseas. They sent him into the concentration camps. He was tasked with transporting the survivors. By the time he returned to Canada, the fanfare had ended. Only my Grandmother stood on the train station platform, his daughter he didn’t know by her side.
By the time I was born, he had stopped drinking. I was the first baby he held. And he never wanted to let me go. We were thick as thieves. “Oh those two” – the family would shake their heads and we would continue hammering our renovation projects or sitting in the kitchen corner playing poker intensely for only peanut shells.
Years later, sometime after his second stroke, he and I went for a nightly stroll down Winnipeg’s St. Vital back lanes “to check what the neighbours were up too.” His walker would stray in whatever direction he looked and during our zigzag course, we stumbled upon a gang of kids playing commando in their backyard. Fake guns rattling. Camo pants. The kids shot at each other. Faked dying. He stopped and watched.
“I can’t forget them. They were living skeletons”
I didn’t know what to say. Then he just walked on. That was it.
My Grandfather passed away. Recently we placed my Grandmother in a retirement home and, while moving, I discovered a ziplock of mysterious war photos that no one in our family had ever seen before. How he got these, why he had them and why he kept them, we will never know. They speak volumes of his silent truth.
Today is the day I remember him the most. I miss him greatly.
