A Letter from Frank. Stephen J. Colombo

      This book is dedicated to Russ Colombo and Frank Sikora,

      and to ordinary people able to find the decent thing

      to do in impossible circumstances.

      Introduction

      Imagine what I felt, sorting through a cardboard box filled with dusty family photographs, discovering a letter to my father from a German paratrooper. Signed only “Frank,” it thanked my father in Canada for his help at the end of World War II.

      My father died in 1986, and twenty years later I found the letter. I was consumed with curiosity about the mysterious German correspondent: Who was Frank? How had he met my father? What had my father done for him? And most important: Was Frank alive? I felt compelled to enter this gateway into the past.

      This book documents my journey to discover the story behind the letter from Frank. It tells the stories of two lives briefly interwoven but forever linked. The first is about my father, Russ Colombo, who grew up in a small town in Ontario during the Depression, joined the Canadian army in 1940, and served as a tank commander in northwest Europe during World War II with one of Canada’s most prestigious army divisions.

      I also tell Frank’s story. With little more than a first name, sixty years after he wrote that letter, I did find him, alive and living in Germany. In our first phone conversation Frank described how on the final day of the war, my father and he fought for opposing armies. His voice breaking with emotion, he explained the circumstances under which the next day my father accepted his unit’s surrender.

      A year after our first conversation, Frank and I met in Berlin, where I learned more about his life as a German in Czechoslovakia growing up under the Nazis. His story provided me with insight I rarely had of what it was like to be German in Europe between the First and Second World Wars and to fight against the Allies. Frank also explained how my father’s actions and friendship helped him take his first step in coming to terms with being German after the war, culminating in his work in Israel with the German diplomatic service.

      Russ and Frank’s stories come from an important time in each country’s history. Such stories are fast disappearing from living memory and theirs might have been lost forever if not for the letter from Frank. To understand these men I needed more than just an account of the battles they fought in. I also wanted to know what it was like growing up when they did and in the places they came from.

      The men and women who took part in World War II overcame challenges few today can imagine. By piecing together my father’s life, I hoped to learn what it was like to be part of his generation, and how it differed from mine. What was it like living through the Great Depression? Could I have handled the extreme physical and mental challenges and the dangers of being a soldier in World War II? And would I have been able to accept the friendship of a man who, only hours before, I had been trying to kill and who had been trying to kill me?

      In the end, this became my story too: my search for Frank, the piecing together of events from my father’s life, my search to understand what it meant to be a Canadian in those extraordinary times, and its significance for Canadians today.

      One

      “Sweet”

      Ein Kleiner Junge

      A lone Sherman tank stood silently in the sun. The tall man in its turret, field glasses to his eyes, scanned the countryside, searching and listening. “Kill the engines,” Russ ordered the driver. He strained to hear. Far in the distance came the clatter and pop of weapons firing from the direction of Falaise. He ignored them, seeking the groan of a tank motor or the crack of its cannon. There was nothing.

      He stared into the shade of a nearby grove of trees. The breeze brought the pungency of the decaying leaves blanketing the forest floor. The smell was sweet compared to the foul odours below; the unwashed bodies and hundreds of cigarettes smoked in that small space. For a week they had not more than an hour or two sleep each night as they hunted German soldiers escaping from the terror around Falaise. Now they hunted two of their own tanks. In the warm sun Russ relaxed, and with the scent of the forest in his nostrils, his eyes slid closed. That moment he dreamed he was a boy in the forest near his home.

      Russ’s feet sounded like a drum on the path as he ran through the sun-flecked forest. From behind he heard the excited yells of boys chasing him. Volunteering to be their quarry, he’d run ahead while the pack shouted as they counted down. They yelled the final number, announcing the beginning of the chase from the base of an old rough-barked maple tree in an opening in the forest. If caught before making it back to the tree, the penalty was to be dragged to the river and thrown in.

      Hearing their calls, a shiver ran down Russ’s spine. He imagined his pursuers not as sons of respectable families, but as German soldiers from the Great War chasing him behind enemy lines, branches in their hands serving as rifles tipped with razor-sharp bayonets. The boys’ voices grew louder as they spread out along the paths running like veins through the forest. Owl hoots and wolf howls were their signals to one another. Evading capture, Russ finally emerged into the clearing where the large maple stood. But just as he felt triumph surge through him, shouts came from behind.

      “There he is!” they called, the thrill of capture and punishment in their minds. Other boys appeared, all of them sprinting to catch Russ before he reached the tree.

      With a lunge, his hand touched the trunk, just as several pursuers dragged him to the ground. Rising to his feet, one of the boys, bigger than all the others, boldly claimed Russ was caught before touching the tree. The other boys gathered like a jury to listen to the learned arguments of these forest attorneys. Other than Russ, no one was sure what had actually happened, but the thought of throwing someone in the river appealed to them, and Russ knew he was losing the argument. Staring at the bigger boy, Russ said he’d reached the tree safely, and if they insisted on throwing him in the river, he would not go in alone. Everyone knew a challenge had been issued. This might be more interesting. All eyes turned to the bigger boy.

      Before he could reply, to the disappointment of all, the high-pitched blast of a factory whistle sounded in the distance. No one waited to hear the bigger boy’s response as they rose as one to walk towards town. The whistle, heard throughout Owen Sound, signalled the end of their fathers’ workday.

      The boys emerged from the forest along the western side of town. In the distance a large grain elevator stood on the edge of the harbour. The town was the fulcrum between eastern Canada’s cities and western Canada’s farms. The elevators were filled with wheat from the Prairies, brought by lake-going steamers from the western end of Lake Superior across the great inland lakes to Owen Sound. There it waited to be loaded onto rail cars for the final leg to eastern cities.

      Owen Sound was once a small village of fisherman and farmers. But the coming of the railhead created a boom, and it grew wild, like many frontier towns. Strangers and saloons came looking to make cash quickly. Other industries followed; small factories, sawmills, and boat builders. The town was brought under control by those who built churches, elected a mayor, and supported a local constabulary. Among those men who wrestled Owen Sound into order was William Kennedy, who by the 1920s built his father’s business into a thriving metal foundry. It was Kennedy’s whistle the boys heard. As ten-year-old Russ walked towards home, his father Charles emerged from inside Kennedy’s walls, soot on his clothes and pipe clenched between his teeth.

      Russ jerked awake from that blessed moment of unwanted sleep. Any slight distraction could all too easily get him and his crew killed. It was the throaty engine rumble and creaking tracks of an approaching tank that had woken him. In that disoriented instant