Dozens gathered at Fort York’s burial ground on Remembrance Day, Nov. 11. Among them were families carrying the stories of relatives who fought in the wars, and of those who never came home.
Fort York’s military burial ground was a site for veterans and families of the garrison from 1863 to 1911, speaker Richard Haynes said.
British, Canadian and Indigenous defenders fought the U.S. Army on “this patch of ground,” he said.
The site's history gave way to a more personal story when Rev. Jan Hieminga spoke about his grandfather, a supporter of the Dutch resistance. Hieminga described his grandmother waiting for her husband's return after the end of the Second World War.
“My grandmother would sit in the window, looking down the street, to see if her husband would come,” he said.
Her husband never returned. He died in a German concentration camp just before liberation, Hieminga said.
“The Germans took all men between 18 and 30 and shipped them away to work in their factories. If you didn’t want to go, you had to hide. When the Germans came looking, we were hiding under the floor,” said Heiminga, describing the events leading to his grandfather's capture.
Hieminga's grandfather, who used his farm as a secret radio centre for the resistance, was captured that day, and after being sent from jail to jail, was placed in a final concentration camp.
Hieminga had a message.
“It’s important that they never take their freedom for granted,” he said following the procession.
“Because I know what it is like to live when you are not free. When everything is taken away from you, that is the life you could have,” Heiminga said.
Lyle McQueen stood among the attendees with his daughter, Jessika, remembering his father and Jessika’s grandfather, Robert McQueen.
Robert was a Canadian Second World War veteran who served with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, Lyle said.
Jessika said her grandfather had a difficult time speaking about the war, but had handwritten a memoir before passing.
Jessika transcribed her grandfather’s written memoir, detailing his account of leaving training in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., for combat, being sent overseas, taken as a prisoner of war and, finally, liberated.
Robert, 19 at the time, received his call to notice from the Canadian Army in December 1942, Jessika said.
He reported to the Canadian National Exhibition grounds in Toronto on Jan. 28, 1943, according to his memoir.
“The first few days we were billeted in the auto pavilion. The beds were so close to each other that one could hardly walk between them,” Robert wrote in his memoir.
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He recalled first arriving in Scotland. From there, he was sent to train in southern England, while part of his draft was sent to France.
Robert wrote of a submarine scare while sailing across the Bay of Biscay during his deployment. He enjoyed Italy’s weather, but did not enjoy sleeping on the hard terrazzo floors of Italian barracks. During a tour of Pompeii, he recounted the preserved streets, subpar champagne and giant amphitheatre.
“We had never in our wildest dreams thought we would be sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar,” he wrote.
Robert kept his sharp wit through the war.
“This is another case of having a great experience at the Canadian taxpayer’s expense,” he wrote.
Robert turned 21 on Dec. 1, 1944, a day which was also his unit’s “baptism under fire.”
Around 10 days later, Robert wrote that he had been outnumbered by German forces in an Italian farming village, where he was taken as a prisoner of war with 49 other soldiers.
“There wasn’t any water so some of the boys would lick the frost off the bolt heads,” he wrote, describing the journey to Stalag VII-A, the largest Second World War prisoner of war camp in Nazi Germany.
Robert described the hunger prisoners of war experienced.
“One day some of the lads got into a potato bin and on the way back to camp, this one fellow peeled his potatoes, and the guy behind him picked up the peelings,” he wrote.
“In April of 1945, everyone knew the war was ending, so guards took 2,000 hostages out for a march,” said Lyle, Robert's son.
Robert wrote that he and roughly 1,500 other prisoners were liberated by American troops in southern Germany in April 1945.
Robert would eventually return home to Canada, where he would meet his wife Edith and have four children. One of whom was Lyle, who would share his father’s story at a Remembrance Day ceremony in Fort York.
Katie Whitfield, founder and curator of a Remembrance Day exhibit called “They Walked These Streets, We Will Remember Them" in Fort York’s Blue Barracks, spoke of the importance of passing stories on to future generations.
“We need to know who we are and where we come from,” Whitfield said.
“My own grandparents wanted us to know that,” she said.
Whitfield said her grandfather, Bernard McCabe, fought in the Second World War.
McCabe was a sergeant for the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery who trained out of Petawawa, Ont., and England, and served in Belgium, France and Germany, said Whitfield.
A picture of McCabe and his wife, Whitfield's grandmother, rests in her exhibit.
Next to the picture was a book filled with images and stories of Canadian soldiers, put together by Whitfield's high-school students. Each page contains stories of a different soldier's life.
This is the first year “They Walked These Streets” has been an official exhibition, Whitfield said.
It launched with the stories of 60 soldiers seven years ago and now tells the stories of more than 2,000 soldiers who served in the First World War, Second World War and the Korean War.
