When freedom came

Last month CC marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Holland with articles by Lloyd Rang and Dick Kronemeyer. As a subscriber to Canada Remembers on Facebook (facebook.com/CanadaRemembers), informative reminders of this event have crossed my newsfeed regularly. I knew about the annual gift of tulips to Canada from the Netherlands, but I didn’t know that many Dutch citizens had painted “Thank you, Canadians” on their roofs for the food air-drops. I also learned about the Liberation Forest in Groningen – 30,000 maple trees planted in honour of Canadian soldiers. Did you know that in Apeldoorn there is a street called Canada Lane and each house comes complete with a Canadian flag?

As I’ve shared before, the Liberation and its legacy comprise my historical DNA (“War Children,” CC Nov. 2012). Both my mom and dad lived through the Occupation. My mom recalls the end of the war with a vivid emotion that slices through the fog of long ago and far away:

The last year of the war was the worst for not having electricity or enough heat. The winter was bitterly cold. My classroom was heated with bean straw. We took turns keeping the fire going, sitting in front of the stove.

Sometimes oranges came in crates from the government. We would be so happy. They were so good! We never went hungry like in some parts of Holland. When we came home from school, we had a slice of turnip. My parents would eat an egg after we went to bed. Dad had to work and Mom was diabetic, so they needed to keep up their strength. My aunt and uncle took in two girls from Rotterdam, Audrey and Annie Dikken, because of the starvation there.

One of my friends was an only child. Sometimes after school her mother would butter some crackers and sprinkle them with sugar as a snack. That was better than a slice of turnip! Jealous, I longed to be an only child! A lot of families, including ours, had to deal with scurvy and lice. There was no soap. Near the end of the war, our school was closed for a time.
I remember all these things because I saw the fear in my parents’ eyes. More and more I realize how hard life was for them back then. No electricity and an 8:00 o’clock curfew at night. Just a little oil lamp. When it got dark, we would sing or play word games or just go to bed.

During the war I learned to spin. That was a smelly job because the wool came dirty off the sheep. My mother would wind the wool around jars and wash it that way and then we had to knit socks and underwear. Yes, knitted underwear! Itchy!

On April 15th, 1945 we saw weary Germans walking by on their way to Delfzyl, the most northern part of Holland. The next day they blew up the bridge over Damsterdiep canal. The explosion destroyed my uncle’s boat which was moored behind my grandmother’s house. Her windows were blown out by the blast. We fled into the fields. That night we slept on straw bales in a barn outside our village.

In the morning, we saw lines of Canadian soldiers walking towards Ten Post. A man on a bike rode toward them with a white flag to let them know it was safe. As we watched them approach, an amazing thing happened. Spontaneously, we all started singing the Dutch national anthem.

Later that day we returned home. The next day was a celebration. The flags came out and we wore orange. Canadian tanks rumbled by. We saw captured Germans and Dutch collaborators with their hands behind their necks. It was an unbelievable feeling of freedom. Finally that part of life was over. I was 13.

Many CC readers share similar memories and hold them dear. Personal and honest stories of the war and its aftermath. The past reverberating and rolling into the present. Influencing the next generation.

Mom’s wartime experiences molded her, manifesting their impact even 70 years later. An abhorrence for wasting food. A robust thriftiness. Vigorous faith. Appreciation of freedom and recognition of its responsibilities. National pride. Respect for the sacrifices of the Canadian military. But also a deep-seated anxiety and need for control. Security as a base value.

The same respect

Here’s what troubles me. I share my mom’s WWII story with unmistakable empathy for the truth of her experiences. Her story is uniquely precious to me. But am I prepared to accord the same respect to the stories of others? Can I set myself and my own heritage aside long enough to listen with deference to the equally unique and precious stories of other ethnicities, other races, other orientations?

This week I read a moving piece in Salon called “Dear white Facebook friends: I need you to respect what black America is feeling right now” (salon.com). Julia Blount, a bi-racial middle school teacher, begs for white America to listen to her story. She relates how racial prejudice is still a comprehensive reality in her life though she is educated, affluent and privileged in many ways. How much worse, she concludes, are the systemic disadvantages of those who are black, poor and ill-educated? As I read, I knew I was guilty of some of the knee-jerk conclusions that Blount decries about the riots in Baltimore. Remarkably, at the conclusion of her article, she expresses gratitude to the reader who, like me, stuck with her to the end of her story. She believes the listening will make a difference. She was right.

Listening respectfully to another’s story is simply this: love. As I was drafting this column, a friend sent me this excerpt about the power of language (from Stone upon Stone, Wieslaw Mysliwski):

Words lead the way of their own accord. Words bring everything out on to the surface. Words take everything that hurts and whines and they drag it all out from the deepest depths. Words let blood, and you feel better right away. And not just with outsiders, with your brothers also words can help you find each other, like brothers again. However far they’ve gone, words will bring them back to the one life they came from, like from a spring. Because words are a great grace. When it comes down to it, what are you given other than words?

Words are a great grace, a reaching for the other, a stretching beyond self. The Word-Become-Flesh authenticates an even greater grace, beyond human definition, a divine freedom to be embraced. New life from ashes. . . . It happened in Holland. It can happen in Baltimore. It can happen in my soul. And yours.