The man who never said goodbye

Bill O’Donnell must have been a very engaging man. His friend Wolf Solkin (96) always has Bill’s portrait with him. On memorial days he places the photo of his friend on the chair beside him.

Solkin lives in Ste Anne Hospital in Montreal, a hospital that specializes in the treatment of veterans. Solkin moves around in an electric wheelchair. He skillfully manoeuvres through the corridors. He stops at a plaquette for a moment; on it the fallen veterans are commemorated. On the door of his room is a full-page article from the Toronto Star, the biggest newspaper of Canada. Solkin may be an elderly man but the veteran never stopped fighting. He now fights for the rights of his fellow veterans, whose treatment has not improved since the financing shifted from federal to provincial funds.

{photo: Wolf Solkin as a young lieutenant. Photo Wolf Solkin}

Solkin’s small room resounds with the music of Scarlatti, graceful harpsichord music from the 18th century. It keeps the 96-year-old Solkin young. On a small table near the window is the portrait of Bill O’Donnell. When Solkin lies in his bed and looks in that direction, Bill smiles at him.

On the wall at the head of his bed hang the pictures of Wolf’s wife, children and grandchildren. He proudly relates about his family. They have a reunion once every five years. The latest was in 2018, when Wolf celebrated his 95th birthday. William Edward (Bill) O’Donnell was born on July 11, 1911. His friend Wolf William Solkin more than ten years later. Despite their age difference they became really close friends.


{photo: Bill O’Donnell. Photo: Information Center Canadian Cemetery}

The friendship between Bill and Wolf dates back to 1943, when the two first met in England. Bill was some ten years older than Wolf .”He was an only child and I was an only child. To me he was the elder brother I had never had. We chatted about everything, we went out together, we went dancing, it was almost intimate”, Solkin told in an RTV Oost documentary to which he contributed. Bill and his wife had been in a difficult relationship, until they divorced. This was one of the many points of conversation between Bill and Wolf.

They had both rather been officers with the Black Watch, a regiment from the Montreal area. But when the opportunity presented itself to become officers with the Algonquin regiment, they decided to seize that chance. This way they could stay together.


{photo: Bill O’Donnell in England. Photo: Information Center Canadian Cemetery}

They were shipped to the front in March 1945. They realized they could get wounded, or even be killed. They were each other’s witnesses when they had their testaments made on March 26, 1945. Bill legated his possessions to his sister Helene O’Donnell. Not his wife, not his daughter, but his sister became his first and sole heir. “And we promised to inform our families in case one of us should die”, Solkin says.

Solkin looks a fragile man in his electric wheelchair. He proudly wears his army-green beret, and his shirt is adorned with the medals he was decorated with for his service in the Second World War. He has a flaxen beard, and his skin, white as parchment paper, is colored by his constant smile. He takes his time for his story, because he has to be economical with his energy. He is eager to tell about his mate, who got killed somewhere in the Friesoyte (Germany) area.

Wolf was not there when it happened.He was the commander of an other platoon within the same regiment.When the officers made the roll call the following day , he heard how his friend was killed. “There was a group of Germans that wanted to surrender. But they refused to surrender to a private.

They asked for an officer. That’s when Bill got up”. This proved fatal to him. A German sniper shot Bill down. Wolf did not go to the funeral of his friend, who got a provisional grave in Germany. “We had no time for a funeral. We had to fight. We were happy when we could lay the dead bodies along the road, away from the traffic. There were corpses everywhere, Germans, Canadians, Brittish, I remember Polish too - they fought along with us”, said Wolf.

The deep and warm friendship between Bill and Wolf abruptly ended. For Wolf life would never be the same again since the moment he had met Bill in the Infantry Battle Course in England. The death of his friend meant that he had to keep his promise to Bill. Bill had left a message for his little daughter Marcia.



{photo: Wolf Solkin always has the portrait of his friend Bill O’Donnell with him. Photo Jan Braakman}.

Wolf contacted Bill’s ex-wife. But when he had explained the reason for his phonecall, she told him she didn’t want to hear anything about Bill, and that Wolf should never bother her or her daughter again. She hung up on him. Solkin was stunned but accepted her reaction. Meanwhile, something peculiar was going on around Bill O’Donnell’s legacy. Bill’s sister, as the only heir, refused to accept the legacy. The reason for this may have been the marriage settlement between Bill and his wife Mary Edna McCallum. In it they had settled that Bill’s heirs owed an amount of 5000 dollars to his wife.

When Bill’s sister died years later, it turned out that she had bequeathed 10,000 dollars to her little niece Marcia, Bill’s only daughter.

In the meantime Wolf Solkin waited until he thought Marcia would be old enough to deal with this. He then tried to contact her again. He looked for every O’Donnell in the Montreal telephone directory, and called each and every one of them. But none of them was related to Bill or Bill’s daughter.

Wolf was at a loss ; he did not know how to continue his search. He let it be for a while until it occurred to him that he might be able to contact the daughter with the help of the Ministery of Defence. The Ministery found her, contacted her, and told her about Solkin’s search. Daughter Marcia rang Wolf Solkin, and after the call, a visit followed.”I told her about her Dad. I told her Bill asked me to tell her he loved her. She knew nothing about her father. Her mother had not told her anything about him. We had a long chat, we laughed and cried”.

Bill and Marcia have been friends ever since. Wolf says that Bill would have been proud of his daughter. In letters to him- which he has had secretly delivered to his grave- he writes that she has grown into a strong and independent woman, a mother of six. ”He lives on in his daughter and in a next generation of six families”.

He himself never visited the grave in Holten. He is silent for a while when he is asked why not. He swallows his emotions and says: ”I don’t know. I think I could not face the idea of all my friends being buried there. I probably wasn’t up to it. And now I am not able to go anymore”.

But Bill’s grave is well taken care of, he knows. ”I should hope I will get such a nice last resting place when I will be buried in Canada. But I am afraid the Canadians do not pay as much attention to their fallen soldiers as the Dutch do”.



{ photo: Bill O’Donnell’s grave in Holten. He lies in plot V11, row D, grave 14. Photo Jan Braakman}.

In the near future, he wrote to his friend, “I will be in your fine company again, my good friend and comrade”. Then he will be reunited with the friend he never said goodbye to.