By Greg Nikkel
The first wreath to be laid at Weyburn’s cenotaph for Remembrance Day on Saturday, Nov. 11, will be placed by this year’s War Mother, Helen Flaaten.
A longtime Legion member, Helen feels highly privileged and honoured that she was asked to serve in this honourary position by the Weyburn branch of the Royal Canadian Legion for this year’s Remembrance Day service. “I thought it was very kind of them. I feel it’s a great honour to be asked,” said Helen.
She was chosen as her late husband, Norvald, as well as her late father, Teodor “Fred” Gawiuk, served in wartime. Norvald was a driver/mechanic with the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada in the second division, sixth brigade, in the Second World War, while her father fought with the Ukrainian Army in the Austro-Hungarian war and then in the First World War.
Helen also had a brother-in-law who served in the war, the late Tommy Huston, who knew Norvald in training, and later fought in Italy during the war.
Helen was about 10 years younger than Norvald, and didn’t meet him until after the war. They met while both worked at the Saskatchewan Hospital in Weyburn where Norvald began working in 1946. Helen came to the facility as a student nurse from her home in Unity, and the couple was married on July 1, 1951 and together they raised two children, June and Norlee.
Both were strong members of the Weyburn branch of the Royal Canadian Legion. Norvald served for 65 years and was honoured with a life membership, and Helen was in the Ladies Auxiliary at the Legion for many years.
Teodor joined the Ukrainian army in 1909, based in Galicia, and he worked in the horse hospital during the First World War, achieving the rank of Divisional Sergeant Major. After the “Great War”, he fought in the Polish-Ukrainian War from 1918 to 1919, and then the Polish-Soviet War from 1920 to 1921. Galicia went under Polish control in 1921, and Polish government policies were unfriendly to minorities like the Ukrainians. Teodor grew tired of the many wars he was forced to fight in, and left the Ukraine for Canada in 1927.
A driver-mechanic during his wartime service after enlisting in August of 1941, Norvald was attached to the Rocky Mountain Rangers, a B.C. Regiment while serving in the Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific, where their mission was to rid the Aleutian Islands of the Japanese.
One hardship that Norvald wrote of in his diary was from his time on Kiska Island in the Aleutians of Alaska. He wrote that after spending six months living through an Alaskan winter in a tent, he and the troops were finally returning to Vancouver. The Bering Sea was rough, and he and many others experienced seasickness. The real hardship came when the day before landing in Vancouver the sergeant told the troops that if any of them whistled at the girls while marching from the Vancouver dock to their camp, the he would deny them their shore leave.
On his return, Nor was involved in a strenuous Commando training course at Vernon, B.C. in preparation for front-line combat. He boarded the Queen Mary, and arriving in Scotland, he went on to Reyburn, England where he met up with the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders of Canada, the regiment he fought with until the end of the war. After landing in Normandy, France, close to Dieppe, Nor was involved in front-line combat along the west coast of Normandy, through Belgium, Holland and was in Odenburg, Germany when Armistice was declared. He returned to Canada in November of 1945, and early in 1946 began work at the Saskatchewan Hospital.
For her part, Helen came to Weyburn at the age of 17 to begin nurse training, after her first choice of school in North Battleford was filled up.
“They said I could come down to Weyburn, and after graduation I could transfer back up to North Battleford — but I never did,” said Helen, recalling with a smile meeting Norvald one evening when the Salvation Army band from Regina came down to Weyburn to play. She and two friends went with three guys (including Norvald), and walked down to the Salvation Army church from the nurses residence, located where the psych centre was later centred. She noted that as a nurse student, she was paid $100 a month, of which $60 went to her room-and-board — but she wasn’t complaining, as times were hard then.
“There were no jobs in Unity, and I really wanted a job,” she said, noting she saw a notice in the Unity Herald about the opportunity to take psych nurse training. Of the $40 she would be left with after room-and-board, she said, “$40 was more than I had ever seen in a month.” She graduated in 1951, the same year she married Norvald.
As Norvald was a Second World War veteran, he was entitled to get one of the Department of Veterans Affairs houses on Elgin Street, which was right near the Saskatchewan Hospital, and they were able to walk the path through the woods over to the sprawling brick structure. Helen heard a number of stories from her husband about the war, but mostly anecdotes, as he didn’t talk a lot about the war action itself.
A favourite story was how a Hollywood producer came up to film scenes for a war movie called “Commandos Strike At Dawn”, using the locale as Norway, and Norvald was involved with the filming.
As he recalled, he was in the movie’s final scene, which depicts a soldier taking down the Nazi swastika and raising the Norwegian flag. The sweet part, for him, is Norvald’s family is Norwegian. He never saw the movie until some 50 years later when his children managed to find a copy of it, and he was finally able to see it, including his scene at the end.
Helen related one story where Norvald was located with his regiment near German forces on a Dutch farm. They wanted to eat porridge for breakfast, but had no milk. Spying a dairy cow in a nearby field, Norvald went out and milked it, until the cow kicked the pail. Norvald figured he had enough for them to eat breakfast and took the pail back to the house, and as he did so, a shell landed near the cow, killing it.
As Norvald related later, he thinks this was an example of God looking out for him, because had he lingered and milked the cow some more after she kicked the pail, he would’ve been killed by that shell.
Norvald worked as a psychiatric nurse, and later he took courses through the University of Regina that eventually allowed him to be registered as a social worker. He ended his career in 1984 as the supervisor of the Mental Health Approved Home Program for southeast Saskatchewan. He passed away in 2011.
The morning will start with the parade to the cenotaph at 10:45 a.m. up Third Street, with a moment of silence at 11 a.m., followed by the laying of the wreaths, beginning with the War Mother. Following the outdoor ceremony, the service will be held indoors in the Legion auditorium, starting with the marching in of the colours and dignitaries, and a speech by Mayor Marcel Roy. The War Mother’s luncheon will follow downstairs in the Legion, and all residents are invited to stay.
