On Remembrance Day, meeting the stranger who knew my grandfather’s war

It was in the middle of a busy workday earlier this year when a WhatsApp message arrived from a U.K. number I didn’t recognize.

“Hi. My name is Andrew Clarke, and I live in London, U.K., and I am contacting you because my father, Capt. Derek Clarke, knew your grandfather in the Second World War. They were both in the 16th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry and both severely wounded at the battle of Sedjenane, Tunisia, on 27 February 1943.

“Not only that, but they shared the same two-bed ward in two hospitals in North Africa before being sent back to the U.K. after three months. My father helped your grandfather recover and wrote his letters home to your grandmother, until Lionel was one day able to write a letter himself with his left hand … I’d love to share more with you and your family.”

I wasn’t sure if it was a scam, an AI-generated message, or my cousin Zac playing a practical joke. Some of what Andrew wrote could have been found online. But one detail stopped me: my grandfather’s left-handed letter writing. That wasn’t public. I messaged Zac. He confirmed it wasn’t a prank and suggested we search online for “Andrew Clarke” to see if he was a real person.

As we were doing so, it came to me: I remembered the name “Derek Clarke” from a box of wartime letters my grandfather had sent to my grandmother. Could this be real?

What We Knew, and What We Didn’t

By way of background, my grandfather, Lionel Kauffman, was Canadian and had earned a scholarship to study at Cambridge University. When the Second World War broke out, Canadians studying in Britain were given a choice: return home to enlist in the Canadian forces or remain and join Commonwealth forces under British command.

He remained, not because of policy or opportunity, but because he had met a young woman in London — my grandmother — and love, as it does, decided for him.

He was deployed to North Africa, where he suffered a head wound — it read in the telegrams as “gunshot wounds to the head” — and fell into a coma. He was treated in field hospitals until he could be evacuated back to London for further medical care.

Family legend is that when he first heard he had a newborn son, he woke up from his coma — the movie version of his survival.

When he returned to Canada, it was with permanent right-side paralysis and a metal plate in his head. He also suffered from seizures — I remember him regularly counting out his pills, kept organized in long sectioned pill boxes.

He became a school principal, then later a social worker, working for a period in the juvenile justice system. By far, though, his greatest contribution was at home: he was a devoted husband, father and grandfather.

We remember his humour, often silly, his love of peanuts, and his commitment to his Jewish faith. He died at 69 after a series of strokes, succumbing after years of fighting his war injuries —  too young by many accounts, though in truth, we had him on borrowed time.

When we were young, my brother Adam and I often asked our grandfather about the war. He always deflected. My grandmother followed his lead. In our home, the Second World War was the unspoken reason behind a limp and a dominant left hand.

It was my cousin Zac who opened the door into what had always been left unsaid. In high school, a teacher asked if any students had war veterans in their family who might share something for Remembrance Day. Zac volunteered.

Afterward, he told us he had read aloud a wartime letter my grandfather had written to my grandmother from a field hospital in 1943. “What letter?” we asked. That was when Zac revealed that a box existed, filled with my grandfather’s wartime letters.

A few weeks later, we gathered as a family and pored over the newly discovered telegrams and letters. Several of the letters from my grandfather were from his time in hospital in North Africa and had clearly been written on his behalf by someone else.

We had them all digitally scanned so they would be available to everyone in the family for generations to come. I enlarged and framed one — the letter that mentioned my father’s birth. Today it hangs on the wall of my living room. For years, that was as far as our story went.

“I think you’ll be excited to see this letter”

Now back to that mysterious WhatsApp message from a U.K. number — the one we weren’t sure was even real. It was about to become the bridge to a story we thought was lost.

Zac went into the family’s digital scans and found a three-page letter Capt. Derek Clarke had written on behalf of my grandfather to my grandmother in 1943. I sent Andrew a photo of it, with my first reply to his initial outreach: “I think you will be excited to see this letter. Clearly, we need to find a time to connect.”

He replied almost immediately: “I’m in tears looking at that letter. My Dad often talked of ‘Kauffy’… I can’t tell you how happy I am to have found you … My Dad died, aged 101, in 2014, but was bright and lucid all the way to the end and always spoke most warmly of your grandfather. He’d be amazed that we are now in touch.”

Then came the first of many gifts from Andrew. He enclosed a copy of a painting that hangs above his desk, depicting the view from the veranda of the hospital room his father shared with my grandfather. “There is a chapel on the hilltop,” Andrew wrote, “which I like to think is a way of showing that God had saved them and was looking down on them and this timeless land.” This was the very scene my grandfather and Andrew’s father had looked out on in their darkest months.

Suddenly, I felt closer to my grandfather than I had in the 17 years we shared before he passed.

Since Andrew had sent me a piece of art, I responded with one of my own: the wartime letter from the box, the one framed on my living room wall. I hovered over the message, then added one more line before hitting send: “Is this, by chance, your dad’s handwriting?”

Within seconds, Andrew responded: “Yup, that’s my dad’s scrawl all right….. Is the baby talked about here your dad? Am I right that it’s ‘David’?”

I paused, incredulous. The handwriting on my living room wall belonged to Andrew’s father, not to a nurse taking dictation, as we had always believed. And Andrew knew my father’s name, something Andrew had to have learned from his father. My mind was blown.

How he found us

We set a Zoom date for Andrew to meet us: my parents, my aunt and uncle, the grandchildren and even some great-grandchildren. Andrew answered the question on all of our minds — how had he tracked us down?

“I knew from a reference in one of my father’s letters that Lionel was Jewish, had come to the U.K. to study at Cambridge and that he lived near me in Clapton. Some years ago, I think I found a reference online to him marrying Min Kurrant and moving to Canada.

“Just last week, I picked up on this again and found a pic on Wendy’s Instagram or LinkedIn with a poem Lionel had written, then a newspaper clipping that gives Wendy’s company name, so it was easy to find the webpage and contact details. I should say, I’ve recently retired from 40 years as a journo, so I know how to be dogged in pursuit of information!”

In that online meeting, Andrew began sharing what his father had left behind, along with Andrew’s own research into this lesser-known battle in North Africa — maps, letters, diary entries, and memories of the officer affectionately referred to within the battalion as “Kauffy”— unlocking the story of what happened to the two men who had been nearly fatally wounded in battle on Feb. 27, 1943.

Capt. Derek Clarke’s Voice

In his diary and letters to his wife, Capt. Clarke gave little snapshots of his and my grandfather’s agonizingly long recovery together.

He recorded the nightmare 12-hour ambulance journey that took them to a hospital further back from the frontline dressing station, tracing the arc of my grandfather’s struggle and the fear he might never recover. On March 1, 1943, Capt. Clarke described “poor Kauffy” as “quite imbecilic” from his head wound and added that he feared Kauffy would never speak again.

Five days later came the first glimmer of hope: words beginning to return. By mid-April, my grandfather could walk with support — something unimaginable only a week earlier. Little by little, the entries hint at long hours spent together, sharing the details of their lives, engaging in philosophical discussions, and even lighter moments.

An entry from May shows Capt. Clarke, amused at my grandfather’s eating through the night from a long-delayed parcel of chocolate cake and gum, sent from Canada, “like a mouse in the cupboard.”

After a frustratingly long time cooped up in hospitals in North Africa, by the end of May both men had returned to Britain.

My grandfather was transferred to St. Hugh’s Military Hospital in Oxford, while Capt. Clarke recovered in London. A final diary entry by Capt. Clarke records that, on July 3, 1943, he and his wife, Ann, visited my grandfather and grandmother, Min, at their home in Clapton for afternoon tea — the only evidence we have that their wives met, and a poignant reminder of the women whose loved ones were sent into battle. Those women also carried the burdens of war and were among its heroes.

Andrew told us how his father, who lived to 101, would often recount stories of the war when the family was gathered for Sunday lunch. The stories invariably circled back to Tunisia and would frequently mention “Kauffy.”

The stories my brother and I begged to hear were told, just not to us. Decades later, they found their way home.

This Remembrance Day

This Remembrance Day, my parents and are flying from Toronto to London to meet Andrew in person. We will stand at the Remembrance Sunday parade with Canadian flags for Lt. Lionel Kauffman, the Canadian who served with the British Army’s 16th Battalion Durham Light Infantry, and spend Nov. 11 with Andrew.

Remembrance is more than a moment of silence at 11 a.m. It is the work of listening, of piecing together the lives behind the medals and the wounds. It is opening the letters, reading the diaries and discovering the voices that were waiting to be heard.

On Feb. 27, 1943, two young officers were wounded near the Tunisian village of Sedjenane. They became hospital roommates, then friends, and for a period, one became the other’s hand and memory. Decades later, a son shared those wartime stories with a stranger he found through an Instagram post and became the bridge connecting two families across 80 years.

This Nov. 11, I will stand in remembrance of my grandfather, Lt. Lionel Kauffman, and Capt. Derek Clarke. And I will carry forward a new story — one that is not only about the war, but about care, duty and the way acts of compassion can echo across generations.