First-hand look at war
Students learning to remember during World Wars tour of Europe
Casey Lessard
Northern News Services
Published Monday, November 3, 2014
IQALUIT
When Julia MacDonald visits her great-great-uncle's grave this week, she will be the first from her family to do so. He was killed fighting in Europe, and the Inuksuk High School student's visit will be only part of a trip to learn the history of the First and Second World Wars.
"I'm really excited for Paris, and for Amsterdam to see Anne Frank's house," said MacDonald, one of 25 students making the trip. "We've been looking over the result of the Holocaust and the lives of people afterwards, as well as pictures and videos from during when it happened. Just trying to get a full understanding of what happened."
To prepare for the annual trip, organized by teacher Renata Solski, students are reading Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir, Night.
"They didn't know anything was happening, and all of a sudden this horrible thing was happening to them," said Tuqqaasi Nuqingaq. "I'm going to learn a lot about what it's like to be human."
The trip has sparked conversations about the forgotten warriors.
"Tuqqaasi wrote me a beautiful essay about the Inuit who were in both wars, and they get lost," Solski said. "We don't hear stories about them."
"I remember it was hard finding reliable resources" of information about Inuit soldiers, said Jessica Matthews. "It was a book summarized. Inuit in the war were forgotten or neglected in the war. Learning about it was hard for me. It's our history. It's Nunavut's history. We have to learn about our history to know about our future, to see how we've changed and how we've learned from this."
The students, in Grades 10 to 12, have also been learning about the realities of war for people their own age.
"A lot of Jewish families were taken out of their homes, the boys at age 15 were taken from their homes, and they were told they were going to go fight for freedom," said Kundai Macheke, who grew up in Zimbabwe and knew little of the wars until moving here. "Most of them were killed and those that were able to do hard labour were sent out to the camps, and they had to work hard, even in the most extreme temperatures, and they were treated like dogs. It was a death factory."
The students will tour a gas chamber, where people like the ones Macheke describes, died.
"(Regardless of) whether there are survivors from an event," Solski said, "when you can experience the event by being there, it changes your life."
The tour, supervised by four chaperons, includes Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and Normandy.
On Remembrance Day, a student plans to place a wreath at the Menin Gate, a memorial to soldiers killed at Ypres, Belgium, in the First World War.
Inuksuk students who took the tour last year encountered veterans with an important message.
"That whole week we are there, Europe is full of veterans," Solski said. "They came up and thanked us, and said 'Soon, we will all be gone, and you guys have to carry this torch, you have to make sure people don't forget.'"
Before they leave Canada, they will stop in Ottawa to place a wreath, as a group, at the War Memorial in Ottawa to honour Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, killed by a self-styled terrorist last month while standing as an honour guard.
"As much as we think that war ends, it doesn't," Solski said. "It goes on and on. It could be a personal war, a political war, we have the war on terrorism. We all have to stand on guard, and be sure we are proud to support each other."
