The Songs of War: WWII Stories of Real People Caught in a Tyrant’s Web

I moved to Germany with my wife and children in 1973, determined to learn how to sing opera. Our parents were devastated that we would take their grandchildren to what they still considered an enemy country. And, as they pointed out several times, we couldn’t speak a word of German.

For a reason I can’t or choose not to remember, I took German 101 in university. I remember throwing the book off a bridge into the St. John River when I finally passed the exam, declaring that I would never utter a word of that hateful language again! To say that I regretted the skipped classes and tutorials as they closed the door on the plane in Halifax would be a gross understatement!

My mother told me that, as a baby, I cried loudly and often, and for no apparent reason. When Mom was at her wits’ end, she put me somewhere dark, and I shut up. I put that down as the reason I still like total darkness. Pain is less, and I feel more secure in the dark. I can also focus in a way I can’t in the light.

But when my aunt Dorothy, who lived with us, sang to me, I became the beautiful, cooing baby in the diaper commercials. Mom wouldn’t do…it had to be Dorothy! And beautiful sopranos, like my wife, still do that to me.

My first official singing engagement was in grade one at the two-room Coverdale School’s Christmas concert, where I put on a red nose and sang ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ at the top of my lungs. My debut’s tremendous success gave me the courage to sing at church, where my boy soprano voice soared over the whole congregation. Dad said that my rendition of ‘How Great Thou Art’ drowned out the pathetic efforts of two hundred parishioners.

After they kicked me out of Sunday school for asking too many forbidden questions, I still went to church. Mom thought I went because she would beat me if I didn’t, but the secret truth is this: I went for the music! I loved to sing those old Baptist hymns, and they still bring tears to my eyes. The salvation of my soul from eternal damnation was purely a side benefit. When Billy Graham came to the local Coliseum, I could honestly stand with the other sinners and know that I was saved. My Mom’s vice-like grip on my wrist had nothing to do with it!

I still hold Aunt Dorothy responsible for teaching me the unbridled joy of singing flat out. She and my uncle Leslie, a tenor who sang professionally in Toronto, gave me a copy of their recording of ‘Life is Like a Mountain Railroad’ that they had made for Grammie. If they had known they were giving heroin to an addict, they might have held off a few years. The whole family got on their knees and thanked God when I finally wore out the record, and I only found out years later that Mom and Dorothy had lied through their teeth when they said that was the last copy!

When I was about ten, give or take, Dad took me to hear Wilf Carter, ‘Canada’s singing cowboy.’ He sang a concert at the Moncton High School Auditorium with the world-famous “Bunkhouse Boys,” a local group that made it big in the Maritimes with well-known hits like “The French Song,” and a regular gig on CKCW radio. Dad knew them on a first-name basis—I think the leader worked in the woods for Dad when he needed money—and of course they came for dinner before the concert.

Dad happened to mention that I was addicted to the sound of my own voice and no one could shut me up, probably hoping Mr. Carter would encourage me to stop my caterwauling. But the world-famous Wilf Carter made it worse! He asked me if I wanted to learn to yodel, and worked with me until it was time for the concert. He must have been a good teacher because I can still yodel like a love-sick cowboy.

Later, when I was 12, I began operating heavy machinery, and I sang every minute I was on a bulldozer, a backhoe, a front-end loader, or in the cab of a truck. People within five blocks could hear me singing country music interspersed with tenor opera arias over the bulldozer’s diesel engine.

I adopted Mario Lanza as a role model, which led to ‘Saturday Afternoon at the Opera’ on CBC, where I heard La Bohème and La Traviata for the first time, and singing like Mario Del Monaco became my goal in life.

When I married my wife, she knew what she was getting. Before and after the wedding, I sang to her constantly… asleep, awake, in the house, in the car, and while mowing the lawn. One day, when everyone had had enough, she conspired with Dad to send me to audition for a singing teacher. Her name was Helen Sternbach, and she was from Belgium, where she had been an opera singer cum Résistance fighter before and during WWII. Frau Sternbach taught me how to sing, and the joy she gave me shaped my life and my future family.

She also told me stories of her life as a member of the Résistance, smuggling Jews and other undesirables like engineers and university physics professors out of Germany. She showed me the Croix de Guerre that the Belgian government gave her after the war. She is the heroine of the first two books of ‘The Songs of War’ series, and she is the reason I wrote the books.

Frau Sternbach sent me to Toronto to study, where I sang for Hermann Geiger-Torel, manager of the Canadian Opera Company. He brought in a German conductor, the music director of the opera house in Flensburg, who was conducting Wagner’s last opera, ‘Götterdämmerung.’ He also invited Jean Cox, the tenor who was singing Siegfried.

I sang several opera arias, and the Flensburg music director offered me a contract. Still, everyone agreed that a year or two at a German music conservatory would be a good idea. I went home to get my wife, and Mister Geiger-Torel tried to ruin everything by telling her we probably wouldn’t have a bathtub in our apartment and we would freeze in our bed. But she laughed and said, “That sounds like fun… Let’s go! How bad can it be?” And then everyone laughed. We stopped laughing when, a few months later, we found out Mr. Geiger-Torel was an optimist. I’ll skip the gnashing of teeth and go straight to where I enrolled at the Nordwestdeutsche Musikakademie, with Professor Lindenbaum (Book Five, Kindersoldat) as my singing teacher.

The whole family immersed itself in German music and culture. It took our three girls six months to become fluent in the language, but despite the efforts of multiple teachers and tutors, it took me two years to learn to speak German well enough to leave ‘point and grunt’ behind.

My first professional singing engagement, set up by our children, who were singing in a professional choir and appearing in the opera house’s children’s chorus, was with the local opera house, the Detmold Landestheater. Following a brief interview, in which I was asked whether I could ‘Steltzenlaufen,’ I auditioned by running across the stage on stilts. My rare prowess landed me a role in the second act of La Bohème, where I ran across the stage on stilts and fell in front of a bunch of laughing, musical kids, two of whom were mine. That led to 80 performances a year in the choir as a ‘guest,’ bypassing the onerous work visa requirements. I even worked a few performances as the stage manager, but don’t tell the German government!

I got to know the men who changed the scenery, the men and women in the choir, the repetiteurs who taught everyone their roles, and the conductors. Beer and chess were the time fillers in the opera house, and both worked better with conversation.

In the mid-1970s, the war was still recent; the twenty-year-old men and women who lived through it averaged fifty in 1975. Their memories of the war were still fresh and terrifyingly real, and their reluctance to talk about it was understandable; most had never spoken to anyone about it. For some reason, the Germans I met trusted Canadians, especially this one. It seemed that, as soon as they had fifteen minutes to get to know me, they ripped off the emotional Band-Aid and blabbered like children, leaving nothing out. I got to know men with their blood type tattooed under their arms who were members of the SS (Book 4), a Luftwaffe fighter pilot who had flown a Messerschmitt night fighter against the rivers of bombers, shooting down about 30 of them, and several Wehrmacht soldiers who fought on the Russian front Books 4 and 5.

Ten years later, when I was in Germany on business, I met a woman in Stuttgart who had been badly burned by phosphorus firebombs in Heilbronn. I bought an excavator from her son, who was nine when he watched flames engulf his mother’s air-raid shelter. That’s all in Book 3.

I met a British RAF officer who had been a rear gunner in a Lancaster, survived three bailouts and made it back to England every time. Before I went to Germany, I lived next door to a man who had been a bomb aimer on a Lancaster during the firebombing of Hamburg, and he cried like a lost child as he sat on his front porch and told Dad and me that the aimer’s normal position at the bottom of the fuselage was too hot from the fires to lie on. Still, he flipped the switches to release seven tons of bombs because there was no way he could miss the ocean of flames passing under the bomber! That’s also Book 3.

The ‘Songs of War’ series tells personal stories that represent the experience of fifty million people who weren’t as fortunate as the narrators who survived. Reading these books isn’t a boring history lecture; it’s a journey into the lives of real people who lived through the most horrible period in human history. I didn’t meet anyone who survived that awful time without deep scars.

If you can read these books without crying, and sometimes laughing as the characters go through life’s normal routines despite the horror all around them, you probably need help. If the characters don’t become your friends, and you don’t miss them when you finish the last book, there’s no hope for you as a romantic idealist