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December 15. 2005
Filling in the Picture of the Personality—You Never Know Where the Pieces are Coming From
by - Joan Balinson

When I began doing my research into my husband's family, I had a great deal of factual information about his brother. Alex Balinson served as a gunner on the Wellingtons in WWII and was killed on the ground in Malta and buried there. I had the name of the cemetery and plot number. My husband and I had visited his gravesite. We knew he had been killed on the ground but little more. The family assumed his body had been shattered and this fact had caused my mother-in-law added grief as she could not bury her son whole.

I am an event co-ordinator and back in 2001, Central Secondary School in Hamilton had a reunion. I was handling the registration. A gentleman called because he saw my name listed on the materials and wanted to know who I was and if my husband was Morley Balinson. He was compiling a list of all the Hamilton men who had been killed in both World Wars, arranging for their stories to be written and a pen and ink sketch done. These sketches are presented each year to the secondary school these men attended. He had taken Alex's name off the cenotaph in Beth Jacob Cemetery and wanted a photo. Alex's sketch now hangs in Westdale Secondary School.

Through this gentleman, I was put in touch with another man, whose uncle from Hamilton, a member of the famous Dam Busters, had been killed in the same crew with my husband's cousin, Albert Garshowitz. (His sketch is hanging in Sir John A. MacDonald Secondary School as Central School was closed.)

One day, this gentleman called me to say he had found a book In For A Penny, In For A Pound which told the story of how my brother-in-law, Alex, had died. We were flabbergasted. I obtained the book and had shivers as I read a first person account of Alex's training and death. The author of the book trained with him in Canada and Britain and flew many times with his crew.

The true story was that Alex and the rest of the flying crew had landed after a major sortie with the Germans during the siege of Malta. As more planes strafed the airstrip, Alex, another crewman, and a number of civilians took shelter in a quonset hut. A bomb fell outside the hut and they were all killed by the explosion. The author made a point of saying there was not a mark on Alex's body. Here I was, 58 years after his death, learning that he went to his grave a whole body. That piece of information would have given my mother-in-law a little comfort in her grief.

Although I knew the dates and the places, this particular information helped me fill in the story - the story which makes the gathering of the history all very worthwhile.