Dear Editor:
My father, Raymond J. Brown, was a lieutenant with the 1st Canadian Armoured Carrier Regiment, serving in the Netherlands and Germany at the end of the Second World War. He returned from war as a man committed to justice and truth. He believed that, 鈥渢he only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,鈥� as Edmund Burke said. He taught me that justice requires speaking up for those who cannot speak for themselves, that to be silent in the face of the incursions of injustice is to become complicit in that injustice.
In 1985 the 鈥淜eegstra affair鈥� prompted Dad to write about his own wartime experiences. Here, in part, is what he wrote:
In late March of 1945 the 1st Canadian and 2nd British Armies had crossed the Rhine River and by early April were advancing with armour and infantry columns in a north and northeast direction towards the Ems River.
As a troop commander with A Sqn 1st Cdn Armoured Personnel Carrier Regt our carriers carried infantry of the British 43rd Division, the tanks which led the way belonged to the Guards Armoured Division and various speciality vehicles such as flails, flame throwers, etc. were followed by more infantry in trucks.
Imagine if you will a slow moving, noisy group of armour, probing its way through a heavily wooded area which was lightly defended by slowly withdrawing German troops. Machine gun fire would help clear the way ahead and in the case of larger buildings the tank guns would open fire.
On an early April morning our advance was halted as the message came over our radios, 鈥淏e careful when you fire, there鈥檚 a concentration camp just ahead.鈥� The lead tanks had spotted the high wire fence and the barrack type buildings of a prison camp and as we slowly approached and passed within a few yards of the camp fence we were watched by silent figures standing behind the wire. Little did we realize the horrors that were behind that fence and in other concentration camps.
A few days later, on April 15th, other units of the British 2nd Army liberated a major camp, Belsen Bergen, one of the larger camps in Western Germany. Our division, the British 79th
Armoured was also involved at Belsen and photographed the starving and dead inmates. The official history of the 79th Armoured Div. was published in July of 1945 in Hamburg, Germany and pictures were printed showing the flame throwers burning down the multiple gallows and watchtowers and the bulldozing of the open pits for burying the dead.
My father was speaking as a man who had been there, who had, with his fellow Canadian soldiers, seen the death camps in the immediate aftermath of the war. He, like so many others, returned to Canada with a sober conviction to honour the memories of those who had died by remembering, by being witnesses to the truth. He died not long after writing this memoir and so I share his words now, to honour him and those he remembered.
Kathleen Giffin
