VE-Day: Remembering Canada's Role

The son of a Second World War vet is touched by Europeans' gratitude towards Canada.

After finishing the first year of a doctoral program I would fail to complete, I visited friends in Groningen, Holland, in the first week of May in 1975. I had only the vaguest idea that I had happened upon an important 30th anniversary.

My father had served in Italy in the Second World War. He had shipped out of Livorno to Marseille in early 1945 to join the reunification of the Canadian forces in Holland in the early spring of that year. Like so many fathers and sons in the mid 1970s, we had not talked all that much about the war. Remembrance Day ceremonies were in decline. It did not seem that important.

I trudged out of the train station in Groningen carrying a massive blue backpack with a small Canadian flag sewn on the back flap. The morning of the second day following my arrival, I sat with friends in a small restaurant, talking loudly in English after parking the backpack conspicuously against a wall.

The date was May 6, 1975, just two days before VE-Day (Victory in Europe Day).

When I was ready to pay, I sauntered up to the cash register to greet a middle-aged woman who had this very odd smile on her face. She had been staring at us. She asked if I was Canadian. I answered in a matter-of-fact fashion that I was.

To my surprise, she then shook my hand vigorously and placed her hand over the cash register. There would be no charge for breakfast. I protested but I lost the argument, crumpled guilders still in my hand.

Over the years, I forgot about the incident.

Fast-forward almost 30 years to Ortona, Italy – late October, 2004. It is Canada Day in Ortona – Canadian flags in every window. My father and I were there to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Italian campaign. Canada’s then-Governor General Adrienne Clarkson later spoke at the ceremony, but the dignitaries were a little late in arriving. I ventured off the square to buy some bottled water and peanuts – something small to tide us over.

The old gentleman at the cash register in a tiny store on a side street in Ortona looked up through his impossibly thick glasses and saw the Canadian flag in my lapel and the poppy. He placed his hand over the cash register and would not accept payment for the water and peanuts. He had the same odd smile that I had only seen once before. He continued smiling as I left his shop. At the time, I just shrugged.

But over the next few hours, I finally remembered the incident from Holland that I hadn’t thought of – not even once in almost three decades. A classic retrieved memory; I began to understand the connection.

Sometimes only one repetition of an event brings everything home.

Two days later at Cesena, Smokey Smith was on stage to have his stories retold, one of the last Canadians to win the coveted Victoria Cross – “for valour.”

As we walked from the walled city of Cesena – there was just the one way out to the cars and buses – a personal ceremony that almost everyone missed was underway. A very elderly couple was standing beside their car. They had rigged a small gas generator that was somehow plugged into the car. It was running in neutral, with an ancient turntable plugged into the generator as it sat on the hood of the car, and a 78-rpm record was spinning crazily. How they rigged this up is anybody's guess.

Out of the sound-box in the front of the record player, a very old orchestral version of O Canada was playing – scratchy and tinny sounding – not all that loud. As we walked closer, the old couple stood at attention, and in very broken English they said, "God bless you." They remained at attention as the record player creaked and groaned until the last of the Canadians passed by. I know because I could not take my eyes off of them.

Few sons or daughters of Second World War veterans have had the fortune to experience the overt and unconstrained gratitude that so many feel towards Canada. Each May, as we celebrate the end of the Second World War, it is important that these incidents be shared. But as present generations benefit from these touching acts of gratitude, we must always recall the selfless acts of the veterans who were responsible for them.