Midweek November 7, 2018

This edition of Midweek, hosted by Molly Pendergast and Katie Jacobs, was devoted entirely to themes linked to Remembrance Day: service, sacrifice, persecution, resistance, wounds, healing and never forgetting.

We turned first to history: Danielle Edwards told us about the attacks against Germany’s Jews on Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, and Laura Atherton reported on a new film documentary called That Never Happened about how Canada imprisoned thousands of Ukrainian immigrants in work camps during the First World War — and in some cases for years after it ended.

Midweek’s Jensen Edwards revealed the role played in that war by lumberjacks of the Canadian Forestry Corps in France and Britain.

History and news intersected in another report by Jensen on the Canadian government’s official apology on the day of our show for having turned away more than 900 mostly Jewish refugees aboard the M.S. Saint Louis in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War. More than 250 of those forced to return to Europe on the spurned ship were murdered in the Holocaust.

Reporters Sam Berube and Jason Dubois went down to the National War Memorial in Ottawa and reported live into the show about people already pausing to pay respects and leave tokens of remembrance, and Liam Leonard explained an initiative to put poppies on military graves called No Stone Left Alone.

Liam also spoke with Ash Abraham, a Carleton University master of journalism student who is the first recipient of an academic award named for war correspondent Peter Stursberg. She’ll use the award to research the lives of North Korean women who’ve fled to South Korea, but have often ended up shunned and isolated.

Midweek’s Hunza Chaudhary told us about a groundbreaking research-based mental health clinic for first responders in Ottawa, and Molly Pendergast found out about growing up on the move in a modern Canadian military family.

Midweek’s Corey Price looked at how the passage of time is changing life in branches of the Royal Canadian Legion.

Corey’s visit to the Legion’s Strathcona Branch 595 in Ottawa took an unexpected turn when he was offered a bowl of soup and got chatting with Derk Duermeyer, who was a boy in the Netherlands when Canadian soldiers liberated his town near the end of the Second World War.

Duermeyer told Corey how this convinced him to later become both a Canadian…and a Canadian soldier, serving 32 years in this country’s army. He’s a man with a lot of memories — and a deft hand at cabbage soup.

Some of the most moving ways to remember are through the arts, and Midweek’s Reina Cowan reported on how music can be a powerful way to never forget.

Kiera Kowalski explored that idea further by introducing us to the Ottawa folk band The Riverthieves, whose latest album is called Soldier.

And Katie Jacobs took us down to a new multimedia project in Confederation Park, visible only after dark.

All that an much more on this special Remembrance Day edition of Midweek — well worth a listen!