To the Editor:
Again on Remembrance Day, I am taking note of what this day means to me.
First of all, I thought of the Canadian soldiers who gave their lives to free Europe from the Hitler tyranny, and I am thankful to them that I was allowed to come to Canada to live in a free and wonderful country.
I think of the 1945 Europe that was a pile of rubble, where 60 per cent of all living quarters in Germany, the country of my birth, were uninhabitable. I talked with my wife about her life in Berlin. She recalled when, on the way home from nightshift, she walked through bombed and burning streets and wondered if the family apartment was still in place. At the end of the war, 180,000 of the 250,000 buildings in Berlin were destroyed.
I think of the bodies I helped to collect when I, along with other 15-year-old boys were sent to a bombed-out city for cleanup.
I think of the 16 people that gave their lives from the village of 330 souls of Wuelperode in Germany, where I grew up, including four friends 17 years old.
I think of my father, who was wounded in the First World War and spent three years in a French prison camp and was drafted again in the Second World War. From 1945-1948, he was a political prisoner in one of the most brutal Soviet concentration camps, Muhleberg.
Now it is 2012 and we still haven’t learned from the past. While millions of people are dying of malnutrition, the world is spending $1.7 trillion on the most terrible weapons in history. What would happen if there was a war and nobody came?
Creston
