Remembering How War Affected My Family

It was Remembrance Day on Friday in Canada and Veteran’s Day in the United States. I imagine many bloggers posted about their personal connections to soldiers and war heroes from battles world wide. My family lacks a strong military tradition and yet I choke up every November 11th when I hear “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. That song more than any other conjures up the senselessness of war and its inevitability. A sense of loss haunts  me.

My father, Jakiem (Jack) Zaryski grew up in a war zone. Born in 1911 in Kasperivtsi, a small village in Western Ukraine, he remembered soldiers of all stripes marching back and forth through the village during his childhood in World War One. Families were forced to billet soldiers and were subjected to their abuses. His mother was shot in the hip by a trigger-happy German when she stooped to pick up a fallen door knob. Dad spent hours hiding in root-cellars when the shelling was heavy and playing war games with other children when the activity subsided. He began to smoke at age ten and later developed a stomach ulcer. You can be sure he was affected by this early trauma and his anxieties, in all likelihood, were passed down to his children.

During this time my paternal grandfather, Joseph Zaryski was conscripted by the Austro-Hungarian Army around 1914 and spent six years fighting on the Eastern Front then later working in Vienna during the subsequent civil uprisings in Ukraine. I know nothing  of his military record, only that he would have been the lowliest foot soldier and fodder for the enemy. How he managed to return unscathed is a mystery I will never unravel. My grandfather never shared his war stories with my father. They are lost forever.

Joseph Zaryski c. 1920

During World War Two, my father's youngest brother Ivan was conscripted when the Russians invaded from the east. He disappeared and all contact with him was lost in 1942. My father searched but never learned what happened to him. Recently I discovered he died in a German Prisoner of War Camp in East Prussia, the victim of Hitler's inhuman starvation policies. I need to read Timothy Snyder's book, BLOODLANDS for the gruesome details. So far I don't have the stomach for it.

During World War Two my father was in Canada, married with a child, me. He never wanted to go to war after what he had witnessed in his childhood. Instead he chose to go to work on the Alaska Highway being built by the United States as a defense to any attack from the east. Perhaps he felt he was doing his patriotic best. His absence during my early life left its mark on me.

On my mother’s side her youngest brother Leon and a brother-in-law enlisted during World War Two. I was born in 1941 so my only memory is of the two uncles staying with us at different times as they passed through Toronto en route to training camp or returning from overseas.  My only war time memories are of Yonge Street parades, rationing tickets for butter and meat and the fact that there weren’t many service aged men around the streets in my neighbourhood of downtown Toronto. That and the absence of my father when I was a toddler.

In my husband’s family many more men served their country. His father Ray Jackson was only 17 when he enlisted in World War One. A strong surge of patriotism and obligation swept the country and made young men feel the need to go to war to defeat ‘the Hun’. He served in France, was shot in the shoulder, and spent years recovering in a military hospital in England in the pre-penicillin age. His wounds never stopped bothering him and he never spoke of his experience.

My husband’s mother had two brothers who served at the same time during World War One. Her favourite, Bill Skilling, enlisted in the army and as a university graduate, was sent to Oxford for officer training. As a Second Lieutenant he was assigned to artillery (Canadian Expeditionary Force, British Expeditionary Force, Royal Field Artillery) as a Forward Observation Officer. In 1917 in France after the first phase of the Third Battle of Ypres (The Battle of Passchendaele),  Bill collapsed on the field  and was taken to hospital in England. He was sent home three years later depressed and with a badly damaged heart which eventually killed him prematurely. He never married because of his health.

When the war broke out, my mother-in-law’s other brother Harold enlisted in the 5th Field Ambulance Corps as a stretcher bearer. After being seriously wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 he was sent to England. When he recovered he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps but never flew a mission because the war ended just as his training finished. I don’t know how the war affected Uncle Harold. He never spoke of it to us. But when he returned to Canada, he broke up with his high-school sweetheart who'd stayed faithful, and never explained his actions.

How did war affect my family? I'm grateful we didn't lose anyone close, like so many families. But it's a loaded question. We know that some family members were traumatized by war. We do know that trauma can lead to personality changes and behaviors that seem normal, but can be traced to terrible events suffered particularly in childhood or at an impressionable period of life. Their trauma in turn affects their spouses, children and grandchildren. The ripple effect steadily moves through the generations. 

How has war affected your family?

For more on Bill and Harold Skilling, see my other blog: http://www.skillingfamilymemories.blogspot.com/

Building the Alaska Highway: Dad's Story

Last Thursday on Remembrance Day I planned to write about my Dad’s contribution to the war effort, building the Alaska Highway. My parents, married in October 1939 just weeks after WW11 broke out, were living and working in Toronto. By 1940 in Canada conscription had been introduced for home defence and Dad was worried. After witnessing WW1 as a child in Europe, he had no appetite for active service.


In 1941, months after I was born, my father took a job with Curran and Briggs, a paving and construction company with the first Canadian contract to work on the construction of the Alaska Highway. My father made that decision without consulting my mother, so she was very angry he was going off for a year, leaving her with a newborn baby and a rooming house to manage in downtown Toronto. From his point of view, it was an opportunity to work at his trade as a welder and earn a lot of money. After finishing a welding course at night school, he’d found it difficult to obtain work in his trade in the 1930s and continued to work in the restaurant business out of necessity. He first heard about the job from a friend, Fred Caruk, who owned Master Welding in Port Credit, just west of Toronto. When Dad was offered a chance to work as welder maintaining all machinery and equipment for this paving company, he saw it as a great chance and a bit of an adventure. It also gave him a way of contributing to the war effort.



Jack Zaryski Pulling Welding Machine for
Curran & Briggs
c. 1942

An Alaska Highway had been proposed and debated in the 1930s, but it wasn’t until fear of a Japanese invasion via Siberia and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour in 1941, that such a road, as a supply route, was thought to be essential for the defence of North America. On February 11, 1942 President Roosevelt officially authorized work to begin by the United States Army Engineer Troops.

According to family lore, my father was already in Alaska by September 1941. He travelled by train from Union Station in Toronto to Edmonton and from there to Dawson Creek, BC. Over the year he would travel with his firm as they advanced construction from Dawson Creek to the highway's middle point. Others were working from Fairbanks, east to the middle point at around Watson Lake.



Route of Alaska Highway
Govt. of Alberta

   Working and living conditions were extremely difficult with temperatures ranging from 90 degrees F. to -70 degrees F. Swamps, rivers, ice, cold, mosquitoes, flies and gnats tested the men daily. Most camps were kept open and machinery operated on a 22 hour basis, with 11 hour shifts. Trying to maintain equipment not designed for such conditions, was an ongoing challenge to the creativity of men like my father.





Jack Zaryski
aka. Johnny the Welder

 

While Dad was in Alaska, Mom would tell me stories about him and read his letters to me. After about a year my dad came home for a two month visit when I was about 18 months old. I have no recollection of his visit in October 1942, only the family story that I cried and clung to him in Union Station when he boarded the train to return.


The highway officially opened November 1942, though improvements continued to be made for months and years later. Dad worked in Alaska for another 4 months before coming home for good in about February 1943, just before I turned two years old.



Alaska Highway
Dawson Creek, B.C.
c. 1940s

 I have no memory of his return or the events that followed. The story is that he returned with $30,000 and invested it in a business partnership that went sour. The money vanished and Mom continued for another seven years to run the rooming house and save her meager dollars for a down payment on her dream house in the suburbs. Ashamed of his bad judgement and grateful for Mom's forgiveness, my father started his own welding business, Ontario Collision and Welding. He persevered and was successful.




Copyright © 2010, Ruth Zaryski Jackson