Photo Submitted By: Lois Doucette

Lois Doucette during World War II.

By: Darcie Thom

It was May 1940, the beginning of World War II in Holland and (then) sixteen-year-old Lois remembers every moment like it was yesterday.

This Kipling resident and World War II survivor, known today as Lois (aka Alice) Doucette, began her story with a sigh and a smile followed by a statement that her story might seem ‘boring’. It was quite the contrary.

Lois shared her memory of the first attacks on Holland, her homeland, when the Germans bombed Rotterdam, an area that was barely an hour worth away by train from Lois, her parents and her two brothers in Bergen Op Zoom.  She recalled the smoke and lights that were visible at such a distance, the sounds of the frequent bombings and the horrifying knowledge that some of her family were located there. When the bombings ended, the land was flat and nothing was left over.

In the beginning, Lois and her family found the war had made living harder by rationing food and demanding a curfew to those who were not with the German Army. Despite the ongoing war, Lois and her friends still attended the dances, which usually went on into the early mornings due to ignoring curfew and having to stay put where they were. “Even in those days, the party didn’t end at eleven!” said Lois. She remembers a time when the dances didn’t seem so welcoming, after the boys left for the army.

In the first few months to a year, the boys who recently graduated were sent off to work or were sent to Germany with the ‘option’ to work there or join the army. It was at that point that Lois recalls the Germans shut down the Universities.

“My brother had to go to Germany, he was sent there to work as a hospital aid in Munich,” said Lois, “then to Poland to work with a vet who wrote up false papers so he could be sent back to Holland”.

Eventually, Lois and her family were sent to reside in a basement for a more structured, protected and safe environment compliments of their alies and the area, as she recalled, was liberated by Canadians Lincoln and Wellends at about the same time.  The alies gave Lois and her family about an hour of deprive per day which was just enough time for her brother to get low quality blue-ish/grey milk, her second brother to visit the bakery and return home with a dark brown gooey loaf of bread, to complete her task of gathering buckets of water for washing, drinking and the toilet that would last them until their next deprive while their mother worked on cooking whatever was available from surrounding gardens. Lois, her mother, siblings and grandfather lived together in the basement home where she remembers her grandfather’s strict and old-fashioned ways. Because he had not felt right about having his grandchildren and daughter seeing him in his night garments, he spent most of the war sleeping in the coal bin to provide the much needed privacy for himself and his family.

“We were bad, not starvation bad, but we were hungry and did with what we got,” said Lois. “We were the only part of the country that was liberated at that time. We managed to exist day by day”.

Lois, from the sounds of it, was an upbeat character with anticipation to do and see more than the average young lady and filled her boredom by joining the army. She and her friends were shipped off to England to complete their basic training and remained in the program from April to May. Following the war, Lois retreated back to her homeland to help in the food distribution within the various starving communities. “People were dropping on the streets in the north,” recalls Lois, “everyone was so hungry.”

During the end of World War II, Lois’ mother received a letter which stated the official execution of her husband which happened to be scheduled two days after D-Day, a day that as luck would have it - saved his life. At this point in the war, the German soldiers were no longer marking graves for the executed and deceased and when the war was finally over (as of D-Day), any of the prisoners were sent off to cells without word to their families. These prisoners survived on potato peelings, soup and to spice up the diet once in a while, added a bit of turnip peelings. They were found in an industrial area of Germany almost a year later by American troops.  Upon being found, very few of these men weighed more than 100 lbs and were taken to a hospital for recovery and care. “Dad walked into the house a year after he was executed” Lois said with a smile, “and wouldn’t you know it, that man lived to be 89″.

In May of 1945, Lois met a Canadian soldier by the name of Ira Doucette. She had made it very clear that she did not want to marry a Canadian because the only knowledge was that they were prairie people, simply ‘cowboys and Indians’, but come November of that same year, she found herself the new bride of Mr. Ira Doucette.

Mr. Doucette arrived in Canada before his bride was able to join him but did manage to make it to Canada by the following summer, she remembers the day that she arrived in Kipling, the beginning of July in the early morning, approximately 8:00 am. That’s when her life on the farm began and what she felt was a ‘primitive camping trip’ (compared to the novelties of her former home before the war) but soon grew to love the prairies and eventually got to enjoy running water and a flushing toilet.

Through her extensive education in Holland, Lois was one of the few War Brides to come to Canada with a full english vocabulary. She remarked about how terrible she felt for her husband due to her poor cooking skills which resulted in many nights of sandwiches for dinner. Her gardening wasn’t much better, according to her own personal belief, but with time improved with everything else.

“I have no regrets. I never had a desire to go back - but isn’t that what love does to you?!” said Lois, “I had been back several times to visit with my children (Rob, Ken and Lynn)”.

Lois celebrates her life with the fond memories of the days when her homeland was young, even though she lost out on a time when teenagers were supposed to worry about clothes, weight and boys. She regrets that she didn’t have new clothes during four years of the war, but recalls it as a time of worry about the lack of food and concentrated her mind on things like white bread and french fries.

“When they bombed, it was something that I can’t forget - you can forgive these people because they are gone, but you can never really forget,” says Lois, a mother of three, grandmother of 8 and great grandmother of 4.