Honour by Yuri Dojc and Sharon Henderson (review)

Care homes for the elderly are all too often places where people lose their humanity. This project by Chartwell Seniors Housing REIT, a national chain of Canadian care homes for the elderly, suggests that does not have to be case. A few years ago the company decided to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the end of the Second World War by documenting the experiences of seniors living in their homes who had participated in the war. Sharon Henderson, Chartwell’s VP communication and public affairs, conducted numerous interviews with both male and female residents while Yuri Dojc, a Slovak Canadian photographer, created black and white portraits. The book contains 35 full-page portraits accompanied by one-page biographies with extracts from the interviews written by Henderson. The accompanying DVD documents the project and contains filmed extracts from the interviews with those profiled in the book.

Many of the stories told by the interviewees were previously undocumented, and Henderson observes in the DVD documentary that there was a need to capture them before it was too late. Although this project had a Canadian focus, it also captured stories which are of international significance. A good example is Gerald Fry (aka Gerhard Frey) who was born in Germany in 1924. Fry came to Britain in 1939 on a Kindertransport. (Henderson does not mention that the following year Fry was interned as an enemy alien and subsequently sent across the Atlantic to internment ‘Camp B’ near Fredericton, New Brunswick.) He was released in 1941 and later enlisted in the British Army, serving from D-Day to VE-Day. The day the war ended he was seconded to the British Intelligence Corps as a war-crimes interpreter for two years. Fry lost most of his family in the Holocaust and when he was demobbed he decided to make a new life in Canada.

The Chartwell project seeks to remember those people who sacrifice their lives for freedoms Canadians enjoy today and honour seniors who live in their homes. Dojc’s photographs have succeeded in capturing the humanity of the seniors profiled in the book while Henderson’s supporting text summarises a wide variety of civilian and military wartime experiences. In addition to Fry, three of the other profiled interviewees were born outside Canada, two in Britain and one in Jamaica. In the accompanying DVD documentary Henderson’s passion for the project draws in the viewer. She captures a wide range of different insights from the interviewees into their experiences of the war.

This book and DVD documentary undoubtedly achieve Chartwell’s objective to honour the seniors’ wartime service. However, one wonders what happened to the various historical artefacts referred to in the documentary and the unedited interviews with the seniors. These deserve to be preserved in an appropriate archive because the experiences they document contribute to our understanding of the history of the Second World War.