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Illustration by Christine Wei
I have been thinking about a story my Dad, a Second World War veteran told me a few years before he died.
My dad was a nice Jewish boy from Prince Albert, Sask. He enlisted in the army in 1940. When he enlisted, he spoke English, French, Cree, German, Yiddish, Russian and Ukrainian without an accent, and had an excellent ear for identifying others’ accents. Unsurprisingly, after basic training, he attended specialized training in England and spent much of the next few years behind enemy lines. By the end of the war, he also spoke Dutch, Finnish, some Hungarian and a few other languages.
I was his youngest child and the only one still living in Montreal between 1983 and 1990. It was the last few years of his life. We saw each other a lot and he told me many stories that I doubt anyone else ever heard. Many of them were deeply and profoundly uncomfortable for me to listen to, but I have always been grateful for his uncompromising honesty and how much I learned.
He told me killed a lot of people during those war years, he didn’t know how many. Some of them were up close and personal. He spoke to me about the physical and emotional experience of killing and his own heartbreak about being a man who killed. That had not been his vision of his future when he was growing up.
Until the day he died, he mourned the lives he took and felt like if there was a hell he was going there. At the same time, he was certain that the evil that was Hitler had to be stopped and that even if he did go to hell, he had done the right thing to fight and kill.
After the war ended, it took my dad quite a while to get back to Canada. He knew what had been happening in the concentration camps, he had been sent on a mission to find out more during the war. So knowing he was temporarily stuck in Europe, he went and volunteered after the camps were liberated.
Although he told me many stories about the horrors of the concentration camps, there is one that I find particularly relevant to me at this time in history.
He was asked to guard a female SS concentration camp officer who had committed unspeakable atrocities and created a trophy room of mementos that horrified even the most battle-hardened soldiers who saw it (he never told me her name or the camp).
The allied commanding officer knew my dad was Jewish, asked him to guard her without a second guard present, letting my dad know that if anything happened to her there would be no consequences.
My dad spent hours alone with her, listening to her pride in the many barbaric things she had done to Jews, especially Jewish men. My dad told me how horrific she was, how excruciating it was to hear her boasting, and how much he really did want to hurt and kill her. He imagined all the ways he could do it, and as an expert in hand-to-hand combat, he knew how. But he didn’t, he finished his shift and left.
I asked him, “Why didn’t you?” He told me if it had been before the war was over or if she hadn’t been under arrest, he might have. And then he said, “I may have killed during this war, but I choose to be an honourable man. I fought to stop barbarism and evil, I will not be it.”
Although I have always been a pacifist, his stories made me realize that sometimes wars need to be fought. Evil is not a popular word to use any more and certainly not a word I say lightly. But I have thought about this story my father told me so many times since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, and I’ve thought of the Canadians who have gloried in and justified the Hamas attack. This attack that goes beyond terrorism and war into barbarism and evil.
I believe, like I’m sure my father would, that it doesn’t matter if it’s Nazis, Hamas, Hutu militias, the Khmer Rouge or Sudanese government/militia forces. It doesn’t matter if the victims are Jews, Tutsis, Cambodians, Darfuri or any other group. There is no justification ever for this type of barbaric evil.
I am proud of my father – he fought in a war against the evil of Hitler, and after years of war and killing, when faced with a truly evil person, he chose the path of being an ethical and honourable man.
And on Nov. 11, I will remember him and all the many soldiers who have fought and died to protect and defend.
Mara Shnay lives in Vancouver.
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