CANORA, SASK.- At 11 a.m. (the eleventh hour), on Wednesday, Nov. 11, people in Canora who have gathered for the Remembrance Day service at the local cenotaph, will stand in solemn silence for two minutes. The Cenotaph (empty tomb), stands as a universal surrogate grave for those individuals serving in the military who never returned home. Of these individuals, “the unknown soldier,” represents every single person who died in battle and whose name, or resting place, is lost. Private Metro (Dmetro) Kopty, A.K.A. Mathew Kaffer, is Canora’s unknown soldier.
Private Metro (Dmetro) Kopty/Matthew Kaffer’s life prior to his enlistment with the 78th Overseas Battalion (Winnipeg Grenadiers), Canadian Expeditionary Force, is largely unknown. In Kopty’s attestation paper he had enlisted as Mathew Kaffer and up until his death on April 9th, 1917, in the advance on Vimy Ridge, this is who he was known as. The rational for enlisting as he did is not located in his Personnel Files. The March 8, 1922, post war audit simply listed his parents, as John Kopty and Tacka Paluch of Canora, Sask. At the time of his death he was 28 years old and single.
Approximately 1,100 Canadian soldiers, including Private Metro Kopty, died during operations at Vimy Ridge and have no known grave/are unrecovered or buried as unknowns. His names: the alias, and the name he was found to possess, can be found on the Canadian National Vimy Memorial as one of the 11,285 Canadian soldiers who died in France with no known grave throughout the First World War.
People are invited to come to the Royal Canadian Legion and read Shelley Price-Jones’ research containing more details about Private Kopty’s life, as well as those tributes to other people who have served, or in the case of the hometown children, still serve today.
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