There's nothing like being there. Or, if you're a student learning about Remembrance Day, there's nothing like hearing it from someone who was there.
On Friday, students at Fairwind Public School in Mississauga got that chance when three veterans capped off a moving Remembrance ceremony by talking about their roles in World War II.
I talked to several veterans this year for Remembrance Day and I asked some of them a question that they don't really want to think about: Will those ceremonies have the same impact a decade or two from now if there is no one to relate their first-hand experiences?
It's one thing to see a video about World War II, but it's quite another to see 87-year-old former RAF Sergeant Dorothy Jamieson walk, with the aid of a cane, to the front of the school and instantly command the attention and respect of the entire student body. Never one to mince words, Jamieson delivers a telling message in a few curt words: "Freedom is not free. Freedom is kept for us by the men and women who put their lives on the line every day so we can live in freedom."
Would that turn of phrase have the same impact coming from a teacher?
A few minutes later, Peter Porter, Honourary Colonel of Canadian Transport Squadron 437, speaks of the chill he felt when, for the first time, he saw from the air the thousands of simple white markers from World War I that signified so many other young lives, never fulfilled.
Later, the 82-year-old Mississaugan, a long-time employee of the Peel District School Board before his retirement, speaks of his experiences flying food and VIPs to the Potsdam conference in 1945 and pulling his plane up beside Air Force One, which had delivered President Harry Truman to the scene to hold discussions with Stalin and Winston Churchill.
Even more vividly sketched in his mind are the memories of transporting those who had been in the Bergen-Belsen POW camps in Germany to Brussels.
"Most of them didn't weigh more than 40-50 pounds," said Porter.
When we lose the generation that fought the Second World War we will lose a connection that cannot be replaced.
CFRB Radio host John Moore, who came to Fairwind's program this year after Jamieson described it on his show this year, was one of the platform guests Friday.
He told students he felt uncomfortably out of place on the same stage with those who had really experienced the war.
The old newsreel footage that was shown as part of the ceremonies, black-and-white and badly faded, gives an impression of lives that are almost other-worldly and ancient, said Moore.
But don't be fooled, he said.
"They were just as real as you are today."
When students could listen to Jamieson's speech and then walk out into the lobby and see the vivacious young woman she used to be pictured on the front of a British newspaper as she hauled her gear through a train station as she headed off to war, Moore's point was hard to miss.