Shake Hands With the Devil Read Online Free PDF Page A

emotion, but the war had left some very deep scars. Sometimes, perhaps out of sheer loneliness, she would confide in me, and stories would bubble out of her. I would be swept away with her to the dark, dangerous streets of wartime Holland. She would tell me about the friends she had lost—especiallyvivid to her was a young Jewish man who had been rounded up in the middle of the night by the Gestapo and disappeared into the nightmare of the Holocaust. With every retelling, I would hear the sharp rap on the door, see the ominous gleam of boots in the moonlight, the white, staring face of the young man, his dark eyes wide with terror.
    She would tell me of the noise and fear—and hope—brought by the Allied bombers as they pounded cities and farmland in front of the Canadian Army’s advance to the Rhine. She would describe the sound of the transport aircraft and the sight of thousands of paratroopers filling the sky as far as the eye could see during the Allied push to Nijmegen and Arnhem. I felt her mute horror as she told me of how she and her family had watched flames engulf the centuries-old towers and graceful cathedrals that had been the landmarks of her childhood. She showed me the devastating costs of war, but even as she did so, she always cast the Canadian soldiers as the heroes in her tales, larger-than-life saviours who brought light, hope and joie de vivre into a wartorn land. She instilled in me a thrill of pride in Canada, a nation unthreatened by war, which had sacrificed its youth to save the world from the dark power of the Nazis. These stories had a profound impact on me. Unlike many of my generation, who became passionate peace activists determined to put an end to war, I took the opposite lesson. I saw in my parents a courage that had led them to look beyond their own self-interest, to offer their own lives to defeat an evil that had threatened the peace and security of much of the world. It was a model of self-sacrifice that I tried to follow, playing with my soldiers on the rug.
    Our first family home was a tarpaper temporary barracks, or H-hut, which we shared with two other families. Dad and some friends from the Service Corps managed to scrounge building materials to divide up the space for more privacy, but the toilets and bathing facilities remained communal. We lived there until 1951, when my father was finally able to afford our own home.
    Military pay was low. Dad sometimes earned extra dollars fixing his neighbours’ cars to support his growing brood; he was fifty when my youngest sister, Yolande, was born. We lived in basic wartime housing,cheek by jowl with oil refineries and chemical plants that spewed their poison in thick, dense clouds over the neighbourhood. At the time, east-end Montreal was one of the largest centres of the petrochemical industry in North America. There were days when the air was so foul we couldn’t play outside—it would burn our throats and send us back indoors, choking. The houses were cheaply and shoddily built; there were no basements and no central heating, just an oil stove, the huge fuel drum that fed it hunkered outside the window. In the winters, ice would form small mounds along the sills and freeze the towels we put there to stop the drafts. The winter wind whistled under the doors and around the window frames, sending sharp fingers of cold into the cozy nests of our beds.
    It was a tough, gritty, blue-collar district and you had to be scrappy to survive. Our neighbourhood was divided into two parishes, one French and Catholic, the other English or allophone (immigrants who had chosen English as their second language) and Protestant, each with its own separate schools, churches and institutions. People tended to stick with their own. But even though we lived in the French parish and were devoutly Catholic, my mother, who spoke English well, found herself more comfortable with the allophones—many of them new Canadians like