From IJR:

My grandfather, a World War II veteran, died of cancer when I was 15 years old. He hadn’t talked much about the war — when asked, he always repeated the same two stories: one about eating canned spaghetti for Christmas dinner and the other about a kind Belgian woman who had let him pass a cold night in her basement, despite knowing she could be killed for helping an American soldier.

But PopPop, as we called him, never told us a lot of things — and in the months and years after his death, a picture began to take shape.