I’ll Be Home For Christmas 1945
December 16, 2015
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For hundreds of thousands of families around the world, Christmas 1945 marked the first holiday celebrated together after the long and lonely years of war.
For hundreds of thousands of families around the world, Christmas 1945 marked the first holiday celebrated together after the long and lonely years of war.
Thousands of wartime animals performed valuable work during the global conflict, while others provided love and comfort to servicemen who were far from home.
Fred Sutherland of Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, is now Canada’s last surviving Dambuster — one of only two left in the world. He’s also a member of my extended family, because he was married to my mother’s cousin Margaret.
My admiration is boundless when it comes to the Canadian wartime nurses who bravely carried out their grim duties — so it was an honour to interview Jessie Middleton of Abbotsford, British Columbia. I was especially keen to meet Jessie because my column has not paid enough attention to wartime nurses — our Canadian women […]
Jack Dye, a brave young bomb aimer from Regina, Saskatchewan, saved everyone on his Halifax bomber but lost his own life.
Hank Herzberg of Chicago learned what had happened to his boyhood friend from Hanover, Germany, by reading my post called The German Jew Who Bombed Berlin. And his own story as a Ritchie Boy is also extraordinary!
This week marks the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, and the Holocaust survivors who made it out alive. Please read my previous post about the Scheffer family, who hid a Jewish couple for two years in their home in their small town in Holland: Heroic Family Hid Jews From Holocaust. […]
Wartime mail was critically important. Imagine saying goodbye to your husband or son, knowing that you will not see his face or hear his voice for years — maybe forever. Mail was the lifeline, both for the boys over there and the folks back home.
My mother-in-law Gerda Drews was a teenager living in Berlin during World War Two. She witnessed the ferocious battle of Berlin, and her family’s tragic experiences after her city fell to the Soviet Army.
Gerda Drews was a child living in Berlin with her family when the Second World War began, and over the next five years she survived the bombing of her city 363 times, witnessing some horrific sights. By Elinor Florence My family members, on both my mother’s and my father’s sides, served in the Canadian forces […]
