This poem is a story and has a story.
My grandparents married in 1912 and raised 9 children—3 girls and 6 boys. My mother was the eldest; her brother Fred was the youngest. All the boys went to war, but Uncle Fred was killed on December 31, 1944. The family received this news while packing a care package for him on New Year’s Eve.
My grandparents raised their children as Christians in the Dutch Reformed Church, but as we all know, kids don’t always absorb their parents’ values or faith.
Shortly before he was killed, Fred wrote a letter to his father in which he stated: “Pop, I know now what you’ve been trying to teach us all these years by word and example. I have come to know Jesus as my Lord and Savior.”
According to my Mom, my grandfather carried that letter in his pocket until his own death in 1977.
Some years ago, my husband and I traveled through Holland and Belgium to Luxembourg and visited my uncle’s grave. He is buried in Luxembourg along with General Patton, under whom he served. Yearly, my uncle is remembered when Clifton displays its Avenue of Flags on Veterans Day and other national holidays.
Avenue of Flags, Clifton, New Jersey. Photo by Marian Nawrocki
Uncle Fred- I never knew you but for family photos taken before I was born. Your life was torn from us— a song just begun, so much of it left unsung, lost in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest, in the frost of one December day. You are remembered— your name inscribed on a World War II monument in the town that you were from. Yours is a flag among many that grace the grounds of the municipal hall on Veterans Day and other special memory days when Clifton, New Jersey remembers its’ sons. Your grave is in the foreign soil where your sacrifice was made, in the blazing sun and manicured lawns of the American Cemetery in Luxembourg where one day I knelt and laid a kiss upon your cross. That day it rained. You are the uncle— lost, but found in Jesus just before he took you home. You are the uncle I’ll no longer miss when one day we stand together without pain before God’s throne.
© 2022 by Barbara R. Williams-Hubbard