Letters Across the Sea by Genevieve Graham (best short novels of all time txt) 📗

Toronto with her parents when she was two. At five, she lost part of her leg in a streetcar accident. The following year her father died, and so at age eleven, she went to work in a factory to support the rest of her family. But Rhea had big dreams. She moved to New York, then London, working for various newspapers. As a single woman with a disability, a Jewish-Canadian, and a feminist, Rhea was a rarity in an industry primarily run by men. At twenty-four years old, she traveled to the Soviet Union as a foreign correspondent. Before they expelled her—to international headlines—she became one of the first North American journalists to report on the Holodomor, a man-made famine (Holod = hunger, mor = extermination) in which at least five million people perished from 1932 to 1933. As the Nazi party rose to power, Rhea moved to Germany and attended rallies so she could write about them. Remember, she was Jewish! Like Molly, I am in awe of Rhea’s courage.

When I learned about the Battle of Bowmanville, I knew Molly had to report on it. The connection between Stalag VIIIB, a German prisoner of war camp in Poland, and the Bowmanville prisoner of war camp is real. According to reports, Hitler saw a photograph of a small group of German prisoners at Dieppe with their hands bound, which was against the Geneva Convention. The Germans demanded an apology from Britain, and when they didn’t get one, they tied the wrists of hundreds of British and Canadian POWs at Stalag VIIIB with the red string from Red Cross parcels. The prisoners were bound for twelve hours a day and were only untied at night. They suffered ulcerated sores on their wrists, had trouble eating and visiting the latrine. After Molly, Ian, and Mo left the three-day riot at Bowmanville, the hundred German POWs were indeed forced to wear the shackles, but Canadian public opinion was strongly against it. The guards weren’t fans either, and they reportedly dropped keys around the camp so the prisoners could take them off between roll calls.

Over my years of research, I have grieved over moments of inhumanity, but I have also celebrated acts of human kindness. In dark times, those are the stories we must remember. One such story took place at Stalag VIIIB, where some of the Allied POWs captured by the Nazis were Jewish soldiers. Not surprisingly, the Nazi guards treated them more harshly than their fellow prisoners. What the Nazis didn’t expect was for the prisoners to stand in solidarity. When the guards planned to withhold the much-needed Canadian Red Cross parcels from Jewish prisoners, the rest of the prisoners declared that if their Jewish fellows couldn’t have the parcels, well then, they wouldn’t take them either. They were all in it together. During those terrible times, it was friendship that kept the men strong.

As for Max, when war broke out, I knew he would be eager to fight the Nazis as so many young men were, and I took special inspiration from Torontonian Ben Dunkelman. In Cyril Levitt and William Shaffir’s book, they included the following quote from Ben: “As a Canadian, it’s my duty to volunteer. As a Jew, I have a special score to settle with the Nazis.” I had Max paraphrase this when he told his family that he was enlisting.

I had originally planned to send Max to Dieppe. There, he would have been captured by the Germans and taken to Stalag VIIIB. There are many stories about Stalag VIIIB and other German POW camps that deserve to be told. But then I stumbled across a piece of Canadian history that I had never heard of before, one that has largely been forgotten: the Battle of Hong Kong.

There’s a reason this battle is not often discussed. I’ve read military accounts and articles as well as journals and interviews of veterans who survived, and they all tell the same shameful story: the Battle of Hong Kong should never have happened. In fact, it was the only battle in WWII that was 100 per cent a failure. As Molly said, 1,985 men went in and 296 were killed in battle. The remaining 1,689 were sentenced to three years and eight months in brutal POW camps where their Japanese captors had no interest in following the Geneva Convention. Private Robert “Flash” Clayton of the Royal Rifles fought in the Battle of Hong Kong. In the documentary Savage Christmas: Hong Kong 1941, he said, “The government of Canada knowingly put 2,000 men as lambs to the slaughter in order to meet some political expediency.”

Why were they there? As of 1941, the Canadian Army was the only branch of the Canadian military that had not yet seen combat. At that point, Japan had shown no aggression toward the West, but Britain wanted to make a show of force in their colony of Hong Kong to discourage any potential attack. British soldiers were busy fighting Germans, so the Brits asked Canada for reinforcements. Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s government reluctantly sent two battalions for—what they expected to be—garrison duty.

The Canadians sent to Hong Kong were members of the Royal Rifles from Quebec and New Brunswick and the Winnipeg Grenadiers. Together, they made up C Force. Before they sailed to Hong Kong in November 1941, C Force was officially labelled “unfit for battle” due to undertraining and inadequate weapons. They were told that was all right; they had nothing to worry about. After all, they said, there were only about five thousand weak, poorly trained Japanese soldiers, against which the Brits who were already stationed there could easily defend. In fact, there were ten times that many, and they were hardened Japanese veterans loyal to the unflinching Bushido code of conduct, known as “the way of the warrior.”

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was a signal to the rest of the world that Japan was in the war. Just ten hours later,