A deep appreciation for the gift of life

“This was the only thing I truly feared,” confessed Gunther, a big, balding babyfaced 40-something, as he drew a damp rag down the shimmering blade of a nasty-looking kitchen knife.

One of my co-workers in the sanitation crew of a massive Toronto bakery, this normally cheerful immigrant with his thick German accent seemed lost in another time and place as we cleaned cutlery in the experimental kitchen.

He could handle, he quietly explained, the bombs and bullets, the lobbed grenades and incoming shells. But it was the bayonet, the prospect of having a steel blade rammed through his belly and deep into his guts, that still haunted him almost two decades after the Second World War.

Gunther was the first former German soldier I met. For me, raised on a postwar buffet of action comic books and Hollywood movies that portrayed Germans as bloodthirsty beasts, it was disorienting to meet the real deal and find him so disarmingly ordinary.

I asked the obvious questions. Where did you serve? “Italy.” Who, um, were you fighting? “The British and Canadians.”

It got awkward working with him after that. An invisible barrier went up because I couldn’t get it out of my head that this co-worker, no matter how pleasant, might have killed Canadians.

I was, like a lot of Canadians, deeply biased against Germans, our arch foes in two world wars, and it wasn’t until I visited Germany in my mid-20s that I managed to rid myself of that hostility. It’s remarkable what hoisting lagers in Munich beer gardens and Berlin nightclubs can do to break down walls and encourage feelings of brotherhood.

Mind you, a side trip to the grisly concentration camp at Dachau provided a stark, sobering reminder that monsters in human form had control over one of the world’s great civilizations for 12 insane years and unleashed both genocide and a global conflagration that snuffed out 60 million lives.

Over the last few decades I’ve had the privilege of interviewing dozens of Canadian veterans of that inconceivably brutal war. They were, without exception, soft-spoken, humble gentlemen, the nicest people you could ever meet.

It was as if the horrors they had witnessed knocked all the youthful rage and bombast out of them, leaving behind a deep appreciation for the gift of life.

Here’s the thing. In all those conversations I never once heard hostility, let alone prejudice, expressed toward their German foes.

Visceral hatred might prevail on the home front. But among front line troops, there was something close to fraternal respect, of being fellow sufferers in an obviously insane enterprise. There but for the grace of God and all that.

I remember the late Jimmy Coughlin, company sergeant major with the Essex Scottish, a guy who survived the Dieppe debacle and fought in the regiment’s battles across Europe, describing the Germans as first-rate soldiers. He killed them. Yet respected them.

Coughlin, wounded multiple times, made an important observation. He said even in a combat unit, 10 per cent of the soldiers do 90 per cent of the fighting. The rest just fire their guns when required, keep their heads down and pray to stay alive. Why? Because killing human beings, contrary to what cynics might say, is not a natural human trait.

The late Paul Oleynik, a larger-than-life character, flew on 23 raids over Germany as a Halifax bomber pilot while losing only one member of his crew, William Thomas “Junior” Maltby from Kamloops, B.C. who was hit by a tracer slug from a German night fighter. Oleynik was contacted a few years ago by the pilot of that aircraft, Konrad Beyer, a Heinz retiree who by some bizarre coincidence was living just down the road in Leamington. He met and befriended the former enemy. Others weren’t so forgiving. But a magnanimous Oleynik recognized that the German pilot, like him, was simply carrying out the dangerous task he had been assigned.

Then there was the late Gordon Milburn. As a 24-year-old private with First Canadian Parachute Battalion, Milburn was one of the first Allied soldiers to set foot in Normandy on the eve of D-Day.

He had plenty to say about German weaponry, especially massive Tiger tanks. But Milburn, who fought all the way to the Baltic Sea without receiving a scratch, expressed only respect for the tough, resourceful Germans he faced.

I have no idea what became of Gunther. He’s probably dead. But now, when Remembrance Day rolls around, I say thanks for the immense sacrifices made on our behalf while pitying the millions of hapless pawns on the other side whom fate and a madman placed in early graves.