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“Next to that I have a picture of my brother in his air force uniform with a smile on his face that could melt your heart. He was so handsome. His picture looks at me every day. I think about him all the time. I shake my head.

“He was fantastic, one of the smartest around in Timmins. An all-around athlete and good looking and, boy, that helps. He played hockey. And he was killed right on the button, right at the end of the war.

“My parents were devastated. We all were. It was indescribable, and I hate to have to think about losing him, all over again, because I already put it to bed, years ago. It is difficult to relive the thing. Even talking about it with you, 69 years later, gives my heart a twinge.”

Wilfred Tarquinas DeMarco, Lancaster bomber pilot, Northern Ontario boy, Italian-Canadian, gold miner, hockey star, prankster, big brother, has been dead for almost 70 years. But his ghost is stirring, now, thanks to the mayor of an Austrian mountain village where the handsome Canadian pilot’s stricken bomber crashed with three other men aboard.

Burgomaster Wolfgang Auer begins our conversation by apologizing for his “bad” English, which isn’t too bad at all, and by telling me that the day the bomber went down in Adnet was The Event of the Second World War in the village.

“My father was only six years old and he remembers it,” Mr. Auer says. “The older people always talked about the plane when I was growing up.”

Adnet is about 15 km from Berchtesgaden, Germany, home to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, a stone chalet with spectacular views and a warren of tunnels beneath it.