[the following is a slightly longer version of a story that appears in the Jan./Feb. 2007 issue of Canadian Geographic as "Refuge in Willowdale"]

by Christopher Frey

While growing up in the forgetful, Day-Glo light of ’70s and ’80s Toronto suburbia, where time was marked by the arrival of each new mod con, I could count on one hand the stories my adoptive, German immigrant father told me about his childhood and family.

He celebrated his eleventh birthday on the boat to Canada, seasick all the way, and arrived in Toronto’s west-end in time to witness Hurricane Hazel transform the streets into a cascade of water and sewage. He learned to speak English by cutting class to watch matinees of cowboy movies. His assimilation was almost complete when he proved his loyalty to the Argonauts football team by marrying one of its blonde, high-stepping cheerleaders—my mother. But these were mere thumbnails of a personal history.

Unlike many of my Italian and Jewish friends, schooled in the language of their ancestors, my father never taught me German, other than a few cusswords. And his willful amnesia was reflected in the landscape around me. Willowdale, a pocket of pre-war bungalows and post-war tract housing at the end of the subway line, was busy transforming itself into a parody of a downtown. In the shadows of misplaced, freshly christened skyscrapers, aging store-fronts were knocked down in favour of big box-stores, townhouses and newer malls. Then came the monster homes, eating up as much earth as their lots would allow.

I gleaned one meaningful fact about my father’s past from a silver-tinged portrait on his dresser: his father, Corporal Ernst Robert Frey, died fighting on the Eastern Front before he was born. In this I shared one thing with my dad. Both of us grew up not knowing our biological father. But it wasn’t something we talked about.

Only when I became an adult did I become interested in the quirks of our family history. I learned that my father’s step-father, the man I would grow up calling Opa, ran a brothel in Hamburg with his first wife after the war (she ran the girls, he ran the bar). And my mother’s family was not so fond at first of this foreigner she married, until my father—bless his appetite—ate his way into their hearts.

I enjoyed these stories. I just never felt like they were my stories.

+ + +

Last March, as I found myself driving into the town of Sychevka, 250 kms west of Moscow, the winter night deepened into a curtain of charcoal smoke. A local was making his own coal in a rusting copper tank. The black fog, stinking of sulphur and burnt wood, nearly obliterated the road. Fittingly, I had come looking for ghosts.

It was here, in January 1943, that the 105th German Battalion was struggling to retain a small salient around the town of Rzhev. Ernst had just returned from leave to visit his girlfriend in Heidelberg. One night, while instructing troops how to operate an anti-tank gun, a Red Army soldier lobbed a grenade inside his concrete pillbox bunker. Ernst died from his wounds the next morning, becoming one of the 270,000 civilians and soldiers on both sides killed in over a year of fighting in the area. Locals called these battles the “Meat Grinder of Rhzev.”

The next morning I drove to the mass grave where Ernst lay buried. In the broad sunlight, it was easy to make out the cordon of pillbox bunkers the Germans built that still line the flat country-side, like toppled monoliths of an ancient race. Remnants of the war are never far from the surface; locals told me repeatedly of digging up munitions, uniforms and bodies while planting in their gardens and fields.

Other than a tall, black metal cross at the cemetery’s head there were no markers visible above the almost three-feet of freshly-fallen snow. I trudged slowly onward, though it was impossible to find any signs of my grandfather’s grave. I hadn’t considered how to commemorate the moment, anyway. Instead, I made meandering trails in the snow and thought of my own father and his unspoken past coming to light.

In recent months, I’ve often had reason to be in my old blue collar suburban neighborhood and the change is striking. The landmarks of my youth are mostly gone, the shop signs now blink brightly at night in Farsi, Russian, Chinese and Korean; sixty percent of its residents are now first-generation immigrants. There’s a garish monster home occupying the spot where our modest one-and-a-half storey house used to be. But I feel more connected to the place than ever before. I dawdle in the places I once yearned to escape.

I’ve finally realized that the place does have a history; I now see in its discontinuous sprawl a palimpsest bearing the traces of subsequent immigrant generations and their reasons for coming—fleeing war, persecution, displacement, poverty. I can’t say my trip to Russia brought my adoptive father and I closer together. But the act of going, for the first time it felt, connected me to a past from before I was born-more by choice than blood. It belongs to me, and it intersects and tangles with many other pasts, in the archeology of suburbia.