Lives Independent By Mike Thompson

It was 1953. My Dad was 15 years old and it was one of those steamy days of summer where the whole neighborhood could be found on the front stoops of their apartments in north Hamilton. Air conditioners were still a luxury for most people on this street, and televisions were even scarcer. Everybody knew everybody else, many worked together and their kids played together, and World War II wasn’t quite a distant memory.

On this particular day there was an apartment for rent in my Dad’s nine-unit apartment building. The word was out that some prospective new tenants were expected by that evening. The tenants had congregated outside like they had a hundred evenings before, not so much to get a breath of fresh air, but to get a look at their new neighbors. Shortly after seven, a Volkswagen Beetle pulled up to the curb and parked. A large, well-built man emerged from the driver’s side, looking quizzically at the apartments along the street. It struck many as an odd sight to see such a tall man driving such a tiny car.

My Dad saw that his father, my grandfather, had a strange look come over his face. He rose from his place on the steps and walked briskly down to confront the man who was now walking around the car towards the apartments. They met just as the man was stepping to the sidewalk and there was a pause. A pause that was just long enough to see that this man was much larger than my grandfather, and just long enough to know that something was about to happen. Without warning, my grandfather drew back and laid a powerful left hook to the stranger’s chin, sending him over the hood of his car and onto the street.

The neighborhood fell silent. My grandfather took several steps, now towering over the man, and extended his hand to help him to his feet. The observers started to buzz, trying to understand why my grandfather, normally mild mannered and never violent, would suddenly lay a perfect stranger out on the street, on an otherwise ordinary day.

Like many men in the neighborhood, my grandfather had served in Europe during the Second World War. He saw the action, the heroism and the death that war had to offer. Shortly after the Allied invasion of France, he was taken prisoner by the Germans. He had been marched for miles across the French countryside by a platoon of six German soldiers, heading for a destination any soldier would dread. My grandfather rarely shared his stories of war, and what happened during this march are among the details he simply didn’t discuss; they were lost forever. What he did share was that at some point during his capture, he and his comrades overpowered their captors and escaped into the fields of France. They were later picked up by the French Resistance, and eventually returned to England to fight another day.

The man who arrived that day was among the thousands of German citizens who immigrated to Canada in the 1950s, soon after the immigration laws were relaxed. Germans, including former soldiers, were no longer considered the enemy, and they were welcomed to Canada.

As it turned out, the man on the street and his wife did move into my Dad’s apartment that summer. Years later, my grandfather told my Dad that he and the man would often meet at the local pub for a pint and some private conversation. What they talked about to each other was never mentioned around friends and family. My grandfather and the man became friends because of so much they had in common, rather than because they were once enemies.

The man who emerged from the car that day, was the sergeant of that six-man platoon who marched the captured Allied soldiers in the French countryside.

I last spent time with my grandfather when I was barely 21. At the time I was preoccupied with those things that young men think about, and really didn’t understand that this man, my own grandfather, was a piece of living history. What I wouldn’t give to spend an hour with him now.

ISSN 1710-6788
Published by: be smith designs
Copyright © 2004 remains with contributors