Peter Broznitsky is on a mission to discover as much as he can about the names on the cenotaph in Memorial Park, and this year, he focused on the 11 Ladner men who died during the Second World War.
Following his yearly tradition leading up to Remembrance Day, he presented his findings this time to ElderCollege and to the Ladner and Tsawwassen Rotary Clubs. He also included a brief history lesson about the Second World War and what was going on in Ladner during that time.
The self-identified “amateur historian” has presented his different research over the years all across Canada, from Victoria to Halifax.
“I trained as a history student at UBC, and I’ve always been interested in history. I think some of it, too, is [I enjoy] the detective angle of it – finding out cool or maybe not-so-cool facts about people. I wouldn’t say that these are like cold cases, because obviously we know who they are and where they’re buried, but just being able to find stuff about people, I find it fascinating,” says Broznitsky.
He’s found that six of the 11 men were Canadian Air Force, which is a significantly greater number than the one he found evidence of in The First World War among the 27 on the cenotaph.
“The youngest was 20 – there was actually a couple of 20-year-olds who died – and the oldest was about 34,” says Broznitsky.
Bert Frederick and Walter Williams were the only two he found to be married, and Frederick was the only one who had children, who were one and three-years-old when he left for war.
The Ladner men died in England, France, Italy, Holland and over Germany. Some don’t have known graves and were lost at sea, but the rest are buried in England, France and Italy, he says.
“I think it’s important to talk about Canada’s role in the military. Nowadays, we’re known as peacekeepers ... so, I think it’s important for young people to be made aware of it and for older people to be reminded of what many really-young men went through,” he explains.
“There was literally people, like my son’s age, who suffered and fought against evil.”
Through his research, he found evidence of 260 Ladnerites who were in the military during the Second World War, and 15 of them were women.
This year’s presentations come as a long-standing tradition for Broznitsky, who initially started researching the Ladner men named on the cenotaph in 2005.
