A mother and her daughter stood on the beautifully manicured grounds of the Canadian Cemetery in Holten, the Netherlands, on May 4, 2025. Dutch children laid white and red roses on the more than one thousand graves of the Canadian fallen soldiers. Thousands of poppies fell through the sky from a helicopter above, while the…
The blue van turned off Royal York Road onto South Drive. The man on the back ramp gripped a bar with one hand, and with the other, pitched my bundle of papers onto the side of the road, just a few feet from where I stood. A biting wind carried an early snow flurry. A…
At this time of year, many of us turn our thoughts to Europe, and to the tyranny of the German Nazi regime during World War II. Many of us have stories we remember, or that have been told to us, about what our families experienced in the early 1940s. One such story I remember well….
November takes us on a strange journey from All Soul’s Day to Advent, with Remembrance Day in between. I’ve been thinking about the poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae. Like everyone else my age, I remember memorizing it in school and reeling it off with my class, all standing chock-a-block in assembly together with…
Remembrance Day often seems to pull the church in two directions. We wear red poppies and remember and honour the dead, our mouths filled with words of sacrifice. Or we wear white poppies, and we speak of peace and holy resistance, protesting the speed in which nations resort to war. Some of us wear both,…
This hymn was composed for Remembrance Sunday and sung for the first time in Coventry Cathedral in England. During his years in ministry, Rev. Kaan helped form the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. His focus was always on inter-church relations, human rights, and peace. Born in Haarlem, his experience as a young teen under Nazi…
In a recently published book on Dutch war monuments (Ruurd Kok, Denken Over Herdenken. Oorlogsmonumenten in Nederland), one chapter is devoted to some monuments that have been erected in the Netherlands not to honour but to mark the death of German soldiers on Dutch soil in the Second World War. Since the 1990s Germans have…
Every November 11, memories come storming through my mind about World War II. No, I was not on the battlegrounds; we lived in the Netherlands, where Canadian soldiers came to help to set our country free. For this great sacrifice, I humbly and sincerely thank them. I was only two years old when the war…
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