Editor: I read with interest Kim Cooper’s article in The Chatham Voice, “Do many of us really understand?” in the Nov. 6 paper.
I was born in the middle of the Second World War, so I don’t, of course, remember things, that happened then. What I do remember is sitting at the dining room
table, my father answering the phone and with shock said, “Doug is dead.”
Yes, my cousin Doug was killed in Korea near the end of that peace-keeping mission. I still remember a young man who treated his little girl cousin so well.
Years later, I moved to Nanjing China (Nanking in those days). I went
to the museum of the Japanese attack on Nanking. It was terrible to
see what was done to these people.
Then I read the Rape of Nanking and was sick. Many lives were saved when a woman climbed a fence into a university I know well, but not enough lives.
There is a part in the book that tells of the German Counsel in Nanking. He saved many, many Chinese lives when this was happening. When he went back to Germany, he of course wasn’t thanked, and, I think if I remember right, he died in
poverty.
These are the things I think of on Remembrance Day. I also think of
how lucky we are to live in Canada, when things around the world are
not like our safe country.
Susanne Salmon
Chatham-Kent
