My dad died when I was two. As the youngest by several years I never knew him. Sergeant Thomas P. Winter was just 18 when he left New Zealand. He served in the 25th Battalion, 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force. “At the end of the war, men returned from the battlefield grown silent — not richer, but poorer in communicable experience,” wrote Walter Benjamin after World War I. Like many, my dad did not share his war stories, except this one, as told to my older brother, Peter.
Every November it was the same ritual. Buying Christmas presents for The Box. Though desperately ill, dad himself took responsibility for wrapping everything and taking it down to the post office. He’d whistle as he worked, he was always whistling no matter how bad the pain, but sometimes he would curse, too, when the sticky tape stuck to his fingers. By the time he was done The Box had grown heavy and he would buckle a couple of times as he carried it out to the car. This was his mission and his alone, so mum always left him to it. She wept more than once at the sight of him.
Once tall and strong and happy and loud, my dad, a ginger-haired haberdasher and the life of the party before the war, now diminished and bent, struggling to send off an anonymous box of gifts all the way across the oceans from New Zealand to Germany, for the family of the man he had killed in battle.
He had a rough time of it in the war. He was badly wounded in the battle for Sidi Rezegh in Libya, the bullet went right through him, finally escaping, maximum damage achieved, through his thigh. The few who made it back home to New Zealand with him used to tease him about what he said to the chaplain who crawled out to give him the Last Rites. “If you don’t get your bloody arse down Padre, I’ll be giving them to you.”
Before Egypt and Libya there had been Greece and Crete. Once someone came up to him, thanked him for his service and called him a “hero.” He was lost for words and embarrassed and didn’t quite know how to respond. “When everyone’s a hero, no one is,” he said as his admirer walked away. “We had a job to do, that’s all.”
When the SS paratroopers jumped by their thousands into Crete, the Kiwi battalion was waiting for them. One trooper came down from the sky near the olive grove where dad’s platoon was dug in. Dad shot him just as he hit the ground. Then he ran forward with bayonet fixed, he leaped into the stream bed where the German soldier was lying, mortally wounded, to finish him off. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.
All day the two teenagers huddled together while the furious battle for Crete went on around them. Dad was helpless, his field dressings did nothing to stem the blood. Slowly the life ebbed from the German soldier as he lay in my father’s arms. He took off his scapular medal and gave it to my father, along with his compass and a photo of his family that had been carefully tucked away in his breast pocket. They prayed together, the Our Father, endless Hail Marys. My brother has the photo now, the address on the back has long since faded away but you can still make out the family quite clearly, standing together in their Sunday finery in a park somewhere in Hamburg in the late 1930s. Mother, father, son, and daughter. My dad died from his wounds, just a decade after the war ended. Every year The Box was sent.
There will doubtless be other stories from your family about those times. The heartbeat of our lives is measured by the stories we tell. As I discovered when working with the UN, recording the stories of others is so very important to the quest for justice.
Professor Stephen Dobson is Dean of the Wellington Faculty of Health at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. He writes that storytelling is a crucial coping device, enabling you to situate yourself in relation to a bigger event. He says storytelling requires a listener, and hence a community of shared experience emerges, building understanding and acceptance. These are crucial for promoting a sense of belonging and wellbeing. These can provide us with a way to chronicle, share, and make meaning of experience, thereby enabling a retelling of the events and a personal acceptance of them.
And so JANZ encourages times when we can just be together as a community of judges and family to share our stories. I encourage you to come along to our “after work’ drinks coming up in Wellington, Christchurch, and Auckland. Our Wairakei gathering in September 2021 has deliberately avoided any heavy message. It is a weekend away and time to gather together for a conversation about the things that matter to you, that have impacted you, that have impressed you or your family about this judges life. Do join us.