Day Sixty-Three

Frankfurt, Germany

Today was a lot to handle.

Today we decided to leave Amsterdam and travel south towards Frankfurt, stopping only in Nijmegan to visit the Groesbeek Canadian War Memorial where my great-uncle is buried. We arrived in Nijmegan shortly before noon and began to wander around the somewhat small city trying to figure out where we had to go. We really had no idea where it was, all I had been told was that is was only 'ten minutes' from the train-station, so we found a map and tried to find it. We found a street called Groesbeek, so we figured we'd try there. After walking for 15 minutes we had had no luck finding anything other than some small residential cemeteries, so I decided to ask an older woman on the street for directions. What happened next was one of the luckiest, most memorable things to happen to me, ever.

Through a thick dutch accent the lady went on to tell us that, not only did she know where it was, but that she loved the Canadians and that her and her family have a deep admiration for them and everything they did for The Netherlands during WWII. Not only that, but her husband had housed Canadian soldiers, in the house they currently live in, near the end of WWII after the Germans were driven out of their country. They even keep in contact with the decedents of the Canadian soldiers to this day. Words cannot describe house nice they were. They invited us all in for tea and offered to drive us ten minutes out of town to the memorial. We never really got their names, but if I am ever in Holland again I am going to go to their house to say thank you.

After tea, a little conversation, and a picture the husband drove us to the memorial and said goodbye. We walked into the memorial to see a sea of identical graves. They were slightly eerie and one of them belonged to my great-uncle. I found a duotang by the entrance that had all of the dead soldiers' names and looked through until I found his name. Pvt. George Preston Smith. It gave the location, but we weren't entirely sure where it was, so we just walked in that general direction until we found the right row. Once we had found the row it wasn't hard to find his stone because placed in front of it was a single white rose (it was relatively fresh looking too) lying parallel to his grave. This might not sound strange, but there were no flowers by any of the other graves, and my family hasn't been to Holland since my mom and her sister visited in the 70s. Either way, we had found it.

I had obviously never met the guy, he died 64 years before I was born, and my grammy hasn't told me much about him. All I really know is that he was my grandmothers brother and that he died in WWII, so I didn't feelhave much of a connection to him and I really wasn't sure what to expect when I came to his grave. It wasn't until I saw his age inscribed on the headstone that I felt any strong emotion.

He was my age when he was killed. He was only Twenty-one years old. Never have I felt so mortal. A million things raced through my head at that moment. I had never really put two and two together. The fact that these soldiers were so young had never been so tangible before. I couldn't contain myself, I was sobbing as I looked around at the graves of thousands of teenagers and people my own age. I guess before when I thought of soldiers I naively pictured the wrinkly old men that we see at Remembrance Day ceremonies. Truth is, those old men were most likely my age or younger when they fought in WWII, along side all of the young men that populated that cemetery. Not knowing what to do, and becoming increasingly overwhelmed with the entire experience, I un-clipped the little cross my grammy gave me for good luck and left it on his grave. I figured getting there and meeting that couple was testament to our incredible luck thus far, so I thought I'd leave it there.

I've seen many documentaries about the war and learned about it in school, but this was my first real taste of WWII history since we've been here, and it has blown everything I've ever learned out of the water.

As for the rest of the day. It was spent riding along the Rhine (beautiful) to Frankfurt and yelling at Zac at a trainstation somewhere in Germany. Emotional day, sorry about that Zac.

-Pat