Gertrude Kofin always had a colourful joke ready and waiting to brighten someone’s day, and inevitably their cheeks.
Many of them came from her eldest son Tom. He’d print them and send them off to her, so she’d always have a fresh quip ready for an opportune moment to make someone laugh.
“The naughty jokes were for her, but if she got one, she told everyone,” said Tom with a laugh. “She loved telling jokes. She liked to laugh.”
Lorna Chisholm, at the Seton Healthcare Centre, can attest to that. Gertrude, a life-long volunteer for the Ladies Auxiliary, would poke her head in Chisholm’s office nearly every day, just to check if she had time for a chuckle.
“She brightened all of our days that way,” said Chisholm. “She will definitely be missed by us. There have been people already saying, ‘We miss seeing Gertie everyday.”
Gertrude passed away May 25, less than a month before her 92nd birthday. As well as being a joker, she was also a tireless volunteer, recognized by the municipality as Volunteer of the Year in 2011 and by the province for her 60 years of service to the Ladies Auxiliary in 2012. Despite those honours, she was quick to brush them off with one of her jokes. She even admitted to being embarrassed when recognized with her provincial award last August.
Gertrude spent the last three years on oxygen and in the last days of her life was suffering with water in her lungs. But even lying in a hospital bed couldn’t stop her feisty spirit—right to the end she was making her nurses blush.
She is survived by her three children, Tom, Christine and John, and five grandchildren. She was predeceased by her husband Fred in 2011, after residing in Jasper together since 1949.
She was born Gertrude Knueppel on June 18, 1921 in Magdeburg, Germany. As a young woman, she was an accomplished pianist and rower, who loved to swim. Although she didn’t like to talk about it, she was also a survivor of the Second World War, having just finished high school when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.
Being the courageous, resilient woman she was, she didn’t let the war stop her from attending teacher’s college that same fall. Her class was made up of hundreds of women—as all the men had already been drafted.
By the time she was 19, she had lost her father and brothers to the war. Five years later, she lost her mother, grandmother, aunts and cousins when a misdirected Allied bomb fell on already occupied territory, including her family home. It was just weeks before the official surrender of Germany.
At the end of the war, Gertrude was the only remaining member of her family. Because of all she saw and all she suffered through, she was a strong opponent of war.
“She lived through the horrors of war and realized nothing good could come out of it,” said her youngest son John. “She wanted to give peace a chance.”
Following the war, Gertrude met her future husband, Fred Kofin, a Pole who had been a political prisoner in Auschwitz. Because of their union, neither Germany nor Poland wanted them, explained John. So Fred emigrated to Canada and found work near Jasper. The following year, in 1949, he sent for Gertrude. She and Fred remained in Jasper for the rest of their lives.
For many, Gertrude will be remembered as the woman who swam across Lake Annette each year. Although an amazing feat for a woman her age, she was never one to seek the spotlight, so she refused to sit down with the Fitzhugh to talk about it, saying something like, “Go interview someone that’s doing something important.”
Last year, at 91, she made it halfway. On that trip, she was accompanied by John, who brought a life jacket, saying it was for him, because of course Gertrude, being the feisty woman she was, would never have taken it.
She loved water. She found peace sitting next to Lac Beauvert, and for years, until she was at least 85, she was Ron Steers’ go-to paddler, rafting or kayaking on the Sunwapta and Athabasca rivers.
“Ron would take her whitewater rafting, often times twice in a week. He’d say, ‘Gert, I need you up front, I have some people that aren’t strong enough paddlers,’” remembers Tom.
“‘No problem,’ she’d say, and out she’d go. She had no fear of water.”
If his mom is anything it’s courageous and strong, he said.
“Most of all she was warm hearted and loving, especially when it came to family,” said John in his eulogy. “I would equate her to a mother grizzly protecting her cubs, and yes, even to the end of her days—as old as we are—she was protecting us.”
A funeral service was held for Gertrude June 8 at the Jasper Lutheran Church. The family asked that she be remembered through the sharing of jokes and through donations to the Ladies Auxiliary.
