Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - May 8, 1985, Winnipeg, Manitoba Winnipeg free press May Page 7 soldiers sing out in Celebration of peace by Peter Mclintock special to the free press there Are some moments in a persons life which remain Indeli ble moments when one remembers exactly where one what one was even 40 years it is with be people in the big cities Ottawa re member the wild the dancing in the the near those of us who were still in the Field remember though not less be Day was officially pro claimed for May but for troops in Northwest Europe the end came at least for Many at on the night of May when the american expeditionary forces network broke into their programs with a Flash to say that the War was Over in Northwest All that Day the regiment had been pushing North through Ger Many towards the North sea and the town of Over battered roads and in a driving on the Way we passed streams of liberated prisoners coming Back slowly in the driving to one Side of the Road the railway tracks out of the town of bad wis Chenhan Lay on their running crazily off into the Boggy before supper time we pulled into the grounds of a Large estate House with about 30 built in with six big barns and Many smaller nailed to the front As required by Allied was a list of the eight people living in the the previous we were a German general had slept on the barn door was a list of 12 russian slave labourers who had worked on the All but two had a ukrainian boy in the regi ment tried to communicate with one of the russians who but without much when confirmation of the end of hostilities came on the nine Oclock news that everyone gathered round the with a feeling of elation that held throughout the reinforced by a triple rum ration broken out by the Quarter master and some fairly potent Apple cider which some enterprising souls had Many people had their first peaceful sleep in months that even the medium guns to the North kept slamming As the official cease fire did not take effect till 8 the next that on the we woke with the same kind of feeling we used to have As children when it was Christmas Day or our German prisoners flocked into the estate by the dozen and were directed Down the Road to the pow All weekend hundreds of dutch and belgian men and women passed Down the Road at the end of the walking Back to the Homes from which they had so Long been when announcement of the total surrender in Europe it was slightly All Day on official be we sat around and looked at each the initial excitement had worn everyone Felt a bit lost now that the main reason for our recent existence had to keep spirits every now and then someone broke out another because it seemed the Only thing to but other than listening to broadcasts of the celebrations be Day in Northwest Germany was pretty much just another so by the end of the Day some of the livelier spirits in the regiment decided that we too would have our be Day at one minute past Midnight on the morning of May the official time of the end of the six of our guns were set in a Circle in the Corner of a at precisely each pumped 48 rounds of ammo into the Black German the noise was deaf ening and very Lovely and a Little sad As we knew that this was the last time we would hear our guns firing and watch the Little red balls of tracer hang in the night in keeping with the we All broke spontaneous and rather into land of Hope and glory and o that would have been a lofty air on which to end the festivities and the but soldiers being what they particularly when full of rhenish wine and an assortment of liberated we went on to wrestle with theres a Long Trail i love you truly and Roll me Over All scurrilous the celebrations were disturbed by the angry ringing of the Field Telephone in the orderly a waspish voice from div arty was on the other end complaining that artillery fire had been reported from our would we please investigate and report but nobody could find a and we never did discover if div arty believed after the for was canadians celebrate Day in Mother pays tribute son killed in the War to a Echo of War is still heard in soviet Union by Yevgeny Pozdnyakov special to the free press about a year ago my wife and i were invited to the office of the citizen in Ottawa for a preview of the film the Day in the interview that followed my wife could not help her we both belong to the generation of soviet people As experienced the horrors of the nazi invasion during the second world the bombs were dropped on civilian quarters of the cities and Low flying German pilots strafed trains with evacuees and machine gunned women and Chil Dren who tried to run for we saw toddlers crawling on top of their dead mothers and mothers cradling their bloodstained recollections of these horrors evoke in us an emotional re my wife crying brought to my mind the tears i saw on my Moth ers face 40 years it was on a sunny but Chilly morning on May i was sitting at my desk at school in a South siberian Village close to the Altai mountains where my Mother and i had been evacuated from the Black sea City of Odessa at the beginning of the suddenly the door of the classroom swung open and the school Princi pal appeared on the he was unusually its Victory he no More lessons go to the Fields and Tell everybody because of the time difference the news arrived the Day after the signing of the unconditional it was sowing time and most of the villagers mainly women were in the before going i rushed Home to Tell my Mother the on hearing my Happy its Victory its Vic tory she burst into i was Why Are you crying i everyone should be Happy now the War is you Are too Young to under she but you will understand she was it came to me after Many i was at the Piskarev memorial cemetery in Leningrad with a Friend of a foreign when suddenly i realized i could not say a word and Felt tears running Down my it struck right into my heart that All those people lying under Mounds of common Graves Here in As Well As millions of others who were killed at that could have been alive and enjoying All the happiness and sorrows of life if it had not been terminated for them by the ugliest and crudest of wars Ever experienced by with the tears i could not Stop came the understanding of Why my Mother was crying in a Remote siberian Village on that sunny morn ing of that marked Vic tory she cried because she knew despite the Joy brought by the life would never return to Normal for her and people around to a 12yearold the War meant military sex victorious reports from the to her it was while the War was going everybody tried to keep shut deep inside their souls feelings about the deaths of their Dearest the miseries and the Vic tory loosened this tight grip and the Joy with Victory was strongly permeated with grief that this Joy could not be shared with those Emo would never Rise from the death Beds of in almost every soviet Home you can see on the framed photo graphs of Young people As we will never grow old they were killed at an Early age in the Many of those who returned were maimed without a leg or without an Arm or sometimes also my Mother used to teach them in a special boarding school set up for War invalids in i went there often after my school hours to read to them from their textbooks As they prepared them selves for a new they looked like grownups to me at that but actually they were very in their Early As Young As my eldest son for those who survived had their sleep interrupted by War my wife still wakes up at night now and then because the bombs and explosions she experienced in still haunt her in her during the War the permanent slogan was everything for the everything for the Victory in the Village where i school children would go to the Field to collect ears of Grain which remained there after thirty or 50 collected by each of us was not much if counted but since this was done by it meant a significant addition to the country Grain prod teenagers who were Only three to four years older than i was then went to the factories and plants to substitute for their fathers and older in Many cases wooden boxes were put under their feet when they worked on machine tools were too Short for the Standard women had to take heavy jobs there were few men to do and Many women remained on these jobs after the War was Over few men returned to replace foreigners who after the War visited our country were surprised to find women engaged in Railroad maintenance or working at construction or even in mines and at blast but that was the toll the War imposed upon it was not a usual War when armies fought from the very outset it was a War against the a it was then that the term War criminals a to Mark those who killed civilians and burned women and children alive in their the War took away my it seems strange As a i never Felt it was during the almost All the males of the Village where i lived joined the not Many re in the fall of my classmate in where i re turned from invited me to his Home i was surprised to find out he had a most of my friends had the whole Genera Tion of people of my age were left fatherless because of the a Man in his late fifties i once travelled with on a train told me he was 18 and a Navy Cadet in Lenin Grad in 1941 when War about cadets of his Navy school went to the front lines to defend the approaches to the by the end of the War Only seven remained a whole generation of Young men in their twenties never became a they were married to Over 17 million soviet women could never get married or Remar ried after the War there were no men in a wide age bracket to it meant millions of person Al tragedies for a generation of soviet even now we feel the consequences of the because few children were born during and right after the every 20 years the birth rate in the country goes Down sharply the children of those War years children Are still too few to fill the every 20 years it gives economists and planners headaches As to How to Deal with the drop in the the number of school the Echo of the second world War is still being heard in the Yevgeny Pozdnyakov is press at tache with the embassy in Ontario election is warning for Federal tories too Many or the absence of the Trudeau there Are not quite theories about last weeks Ontario provincial election in which the liberals came within a hairs breadth of toppling the 42yearold conservative although the liberals wound up with four fewer they actually bested the tories in popular the Ontario results follow a dramatic decline of conservative fortunes in Newfoundland and the loss of a tory sinecure to the liberals in new to University of Toronto political scientist Stephen it All adds up to Confirma Tion of the pendulum theory of Conedera canadians Are redressing the balance of a lopsided Federal tory majority and tory governments in eight of the 10 they Are reacting to Canadas dubious distinction As the closest thing to a on party state among the Westem you can almost feel the from Newfoundland Clarkson said in an in Ontario outcome says a lot about prime minister Brian Mulroney misconduct the patronage and the inability to make Clarkson All those things were thorns in the flesh of the Ontario As and other conservative provincial have lost a crucial strategic weapon the ability to portray themselves As defenders of the provinces interests against the fact there is a government of the same political Stripe in Power federally takes a string from each one of their Federal Liberal sources claim the Patron age As usual climate in in direct Frances Russell Defiance of last Summers Campaign prom really Hurt the conservatives in the final Days of the we heard it a lot at the especially in Ottawa one aide to a Federal my Clarkson says it is impossible to divorce the Ontario results from the National in an unusual and risky break with Mulroney intervened if he want he now knows his presence didst there was almost a Complete identity Between the Federal and provincial election machines of both major John Turner and Jean Chretien campaigned for the and Mulroney and the legendary big Blue now partially resident in pulled strings for the Winnipeg pollster Angus who conducted opinion surveys for Southam news and several Ontario says Ottawa influence was Felt More in the absence of Pierre Trudeau and the liberals As a convenient tory whipping the pendulum theory of confederation May be an excellent Reid said in an but think the essential in Ontario and in Newfoundland and probably in other provinces to is that there Are no meanies in Ottawa any More for the provincial tories to whip up anger and emotion Trudeau has gone and now these govern ments Are going to be scrutinized More and judged on their own Reid agrees that the Ontario tories were certainly unable to put across the message that now our friends Are in you should vote for us and he shares Clarkson View that the Ontario outcome has breathed new life into the federally and not Only establishing them firmly As the alternative to the but also attracting an influx of new people and Reid says that if the negative of Trudeau has been lifted from Liberal it is Clear for All his apparent popular is not a positive in All i expect that shortly we will see the liberals moving up to the mid30s in the National there was a window of Opportunity for the nip this fall and Winter to supplant them but for whatever they didst take advantage of it and now it is Reid says his surveys show some of Mulroney key constituencies falling business support is Clarkson says the polls the tories Arent leaking to the Media indicate canadians Are anything but Happy with Mulroney subservience to president Ronald there is a growing perception in the electorate that the tories knew How to but dont know Why they wanted they dont seem to have any coherent Agenda for governing nor any Clear idea of where they Are for appears to be nothing More than a series of Photop the Ontario Cliffhanger May spell an end to Mulroney plans virtually to abolish the preoccupied with clinging to Power by his Premier Frank Miller could do without an extraneous controversy Over the canadians should Hope this is major constitutional and institutional change should not come about because of a fit of prime ministerial Canada needs a reformed not its us ineffectiveness has already damaged Conedera allowing too much Power to flow to the As the political Hue of the provinces Mulroney May come to see the Wisdom of representing the regions at the rather than relying on the essential incoherence and indecision of Federal pro Vinci Al doonesbury by Garry Trudeau boy looking Nancy Reagan i i i i ;