NIPAWIN — In Woodlawn Cemetery the mini-flags blow, placed by students row by row.
Instead of holding its Decoration Day on the closest Sunday to June 6, D-Day, the Nipawin Legion decided to invite a Grade 8 class from LP Miller Comprehensive to come out and decorate veterans’ gravesites as part of an effort to pass the torch of remembrance on to the next generation.
Jenna Taylor, one of the students, said her class is learning about the Second World War in social studies right now.
“[This is important] so we can learn more about the veterans who sacrificed themselves for our country and so we can appreciate them and what they did,” she said.
The student said as she decorated the gravesites, she felt sad because in Europe, there’s a lot of gravesites from the war full of unknown people that never had a chance to pass on their final letter, often somewhere on their uniform, to their loved ones.
She said the event, which featured a ceremony at a war memorial in the cemetery after the decoration of the graves was important.
“[It’s] so we don’t forget what happened in the past so it doesn’t happen again.”
Shauna Grassing, the president of the Nipawin Legion, said it was the second time her organization decided to have students decorate the graves.
“I came up with this idea following my participation in the Legion pilgrimage of remembrance to France and Belgium where we place Canadian flags at many cemeteries and performed Legion services of remembrance,” she wrote in a prepared statement. “The number of headstones in cemeteries was overwhelming and out of the sadness that I felt, I developed an overwhelming sense of pride, as often tourists and locals joined us in our ceremonies.”
The Legion president said she hopes the exercise causes the students to forge a personal connection to the wars.
“I would think that they see the [family] names and think, ‘hey, there’s somebody on my street with that name.’ That’s my hope, that they’ll make a connection to them,” she said.
