INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON CANADA, THE HOLOCAUST AND SURVIVORS

INTRODUCTION TO CANADIAN JEWISH STUDIES/ÉTUDES JUIVES CANADIENNES SPECIAL ISSUE VOLS. 4-5 NEW PERSPECTIVES ON CANADA, THE HOLOCAUST AND SURVIVORS. Edited by Paula J. Draper and Richard Menkis

Paula J. Draper and Richard Menkis

THE HOLOCAUST, SURVIVORS AND CANADA: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Prior to the 1983 publication of Irving Abella and Harold Troper’s None is Too Many, little thought was given to any role Canada might have played in the Nazi genocide of the Jews. As outlined in Morton Weinfeld’s article in the present volume, although there were a handful of studies that examined the reception of Holocaust survivors, scholars were slow to address the impact that their arrival had on the Canadian Jewish community. Troper and Abella’s volume marked a watershed in the self-perception of Canadian Jewry, sparking heated debate about both government policies vis-à-vis the Jews, and the place of Jews in Canadian society. As a result of that volume, scholars began to focus on the wide range of issues raised by the Holocaust in a Canadian context, and many of these central themes for Canadian Jewry are pulled together in this special issue of Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiennes.

The responses to None is Too Many also led to a sense of commonality between survivors and Canadian-born Jews, a shared sense of purpose that had been only rarely experienced before. Canadian Jews had received their first personal exposure to the victims of genocide from pre-war refugees from Nazi oppression. The last group to squeeze into this country before the full onslaught of the Holocaust were Austrian, German and Italian Jews who had been shipped from the U.K. in 1940, incarcerated in internment camps, and slowly released into homes, schools, farms and factories. Their encounter with the existing Jewish community was hardly smooth. Some refugees did not seem “green” enough, and they both puzzled and angered the local Jewish community, as Mordecai Richler has mordantly recounted in The Street:

I think we had conjured up a picture of the refugees as penurious hassidim with packs on their backs. We were eager to be helpful, our gestures were large, but in return we expected more than a little gratitude. As it turned out, the refugees ...were far more sophisticated and better educated than we were... they found our culture thin, the city provincial, and the Jews narrow....So for a while we real Canadians were hostile.[1]

As Weinfeld points out, these “real Canadians” were in fact much closer to their European roots than were the American Jews discussed below by William Helmreich. So, while Canadian Jews found it difficult to relate to the western European Jewish refugees, it did seem likely that the bonds would be strong with the predominantly eastern European survivors who began to arrive in 1948. Yet, as Paula Draper and Frank Bialystok demonstrate, the larger Jewish communities did not easily absorb this group.

To some extent, the reasons can be traced to the perceptions of Jews as victims, images which were forged by the media preceding and during WW II. In his study of the English language media during the last year of the War, David Goutor demonstrates that coverage of the Holocaust was coloured by a number of factors. War news, casualties, fears of another Depression, and the upcoming summer 1945 election understandably captured the attention of the Canadian public. Yet there was no lack of voyeuristic interest in “Hun Hell Camps” and “Nazi Torture Chambers.” Certainly, Goutor argues, the antisemitism of the times played a role in the camouflaging of the Jewish identity of the majority of the victims and the relegation of “atrocity” stories to the back pages. He indicates that detailed information about the nature and mechanisms of the Holocaust were available to the media, and on occasion, were presented to the public. But the sensationalist reportage led to a “climate of disbelief “and delegated serious coverage to the Jewish Press.

The lasting effects are covered in the other articles in this volume. For Canadians, the Holocaust became a Jewish issue, and for Canadian Jews, survivors were objectified as the “human skeletons” they had read about in the media. The media had depersonalized survivors, and the sensationalistic coverage of the opening of the Camps led to misconceptions that those alive at the end of the War were products of some kind of Darwinian selection process. As Mike Rosenberg describes in Draper’s article, “there was a wrong perception, out there, that you only survived because you did something. That you did not survive miraculously.” This coloured the reception of the survivors, and was one of reasons for delays in their integration into the greater Jewish polity.

The circuitous road towards integration began at Liberation, which Draper illustrates as a time of both trauma and rebirth. The wild teenagers, the black marketeering that supported many in the DP camps, the torture and tattoos—these were the images Canadians saw as survivors trickled into the country. Survivors saw opportunity, struggled to make it without benefit of the education most had desired, and set their sights on the future. No one wanted to really hear their stories, so they kept them to themselves. Jean Gerber describes their reception in Vancouver, and how the smaller community absorbed them socially, politically and culturally in ways that seemed impossible in Toronto and Montreal. Yet, as Robbie Waisman related of his early years in Calgary, the smaller communities may have been more welcoming but were just as resistant to listening. Survivors wore their survival on the inside of their sleeves well into the 1960s.

Both Gerber and Draper do illustrate that in both the smaller and larger communities it was the entrepreneurial spirit of the survivors that served as a conduit into community. Gerber looks at the settlement patterns in Vancouver, where socialization was much more successful than in the cities with large Jewish communities. Instead of creating their own institutions, survivors in Vancouver were integrated into the existing synagogues and organizations. By the 1970s there was no way to distinguish—at least economically or geographically—between survivors and other Canadian Jews.

These two articles and the Waisman testimony all highlight the singular experience of the Orphans who were brought over in groups as wards of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Although Gerber uses the language—–and subterfuge—–of the time and calls them children, few were young of age (the cut off was eighteen, although a number of older survivors managed to circumvent the age restriction), and none were youthful. They stand apart in a myriad of ways. Many did have the chance to complete their education, lose their accents and disappear into the general community. Unlike those just a few years older, a significant number of this group married Canadian-born Jews. But they still did not feel that they could share their experiences, until the long-repressed weight of memory pushed to the surface. Waisman had been advised to forget his past and he says that even though he became president of the Saskatoon Jewish community, they were shocked when he revealed that he had survived the Camps.

Waisman’s testimony highlights the bittersweet essence of survival. As he mentions in his memoir, and Draper discusses in her article, not all made the “successful lives” that Helmreich describes in his book. There were mental breakdowns, lost souls, individuals too old or too damaged to begin again. They are not the authors of postwar memoirs or recorders of testimony. But they must be remembered, and are included in our discussions here. The pieces by Draper, Gerber, Waisman, Helmreich and Weinfeld thus point to new questions for researchers interested in the experiences of survivors. What were the differences between those who submerged themselves in becoming Canadian, as opposed to those who relived the war daily in their extended survivor families? What was the relationship between integration and healing? What were the factors that forced up repressed memories?

In this volume, we certainly see some answers to the last question. In the early 1960s, with an apparent surge in neo-Nazi activity in Canada, the Dutch camp survivor Mike Englishman decided to make matters into his own hands. He infiltrated neo-Nazi meetings, protested their activities in public demonstrations and confronted the Jewish establishment about its methods of fighting antisemitism. The focal point for confrontation, especially for the survivors in Toronto, was a rally of neo-Nazis in Allan Gardens in 1963. Englishman describes his memories of those days, and Frank Bialystok provides a many-sided narrative of the events and an analysis of the consequences. His article highlights the schisms and lack of mutual understanding in the community. As Survivors became more vocal, they voiced their frustration with the methods of the established community, especially the Canadian Jewish Congress, and they let out a hostility that had been resting artificially dormant for too long. The events constituted an important step in the evolution of the survivors’ own identities from ‘newcomers’ and ‘greeners’ into ‘Survivors.’ Congress, for its part, was awakened to the concerns of the survivors, and began a process of incorporation of survivors into the political structure of the Canadian Jewish Community.

There were other catalysts to the public performance of memory, factors that range from the social and demographic—the age and financial security of the survivors and their families, for example—to the patterns of global relations, such as the Eichmann kidnapping and trial in Israel and the threat to Israel in 1967.[2] Many of these issues remain to be explored in greater detail, especially for Canada, and we encourage researchers to take up these issues. Some valuable work on the search for Nazi war criminals residing in Canada has been done by Harold Troper and Morton Weinfeld.[3] Other factors have been mentioned if not developed in this volume. Holocaust denial—that transformation and intensification of the classic antisemitic claim of Jewish duplicity and manipulation of non-Jews—has been all-too-well-represented in Canada by the activities of Ernst Zundel and James Keegstra, as well as others. Mike Englishman and Robbie Waisman specifically mention in their memoirs the role that Holocaust denial has played compelling them to continue speaking out about the Holocaust. Ken McVay and his Nizkor project, with its very high-profile internet presence, is another Canadian-based endeavour spurred on to Holocaust commemoration by the activities of deniers.

The wish—or need—to speak out, for whatever reason, has led to a proliferation of memoirs by survivors. Janice Rosen offers a useful guide to the various repositories holding Holocaust memoirs and other testimonies of Canadian Jews. Only recently have scholars begun to evaluate these texts. There can be little doubt that these memoirs are potential mines of information and sentiment both about the Holocaust and the experiences of survivors. But the caveats in using these testimonies abound. The issues involved in analyzing Holocaust memoirs are sensitively and elegantly discussed by Mervin Butovsky and Kurt Jonassohn. They examine how language informs memory, and point to the need to encourage the inclusion of post-war experiences in these memoirs. Some of the particular pitfalls in the production of Holocaust memoirs are also discussed by Paula Draper in her review of Mina Deutsch’s Mina’s Story. To these comments we can add the wise words of a pioneer in the study of ethnic groups in Canada, Robert Harney, whose views can profitably be applied to all personal testimony, whether written or oral:

Oral testimony can elicit the perceptions of personal and group history, of identity, and of response to immigrant life which shape that invention and cause ethnic persistence. The record of this gradual altering of identity and culture forms the interior history of immigrant groups; it is ethnicity, and it is especially accessible through interviewing.[4]

The proliferation of Holocaust memoirs and testimonies, as well as the publication of more and more books about the Holocaust, demonstrate an interest in the topic that seems very far from the studied indifference of the Canadian press discussed by Goutor. In this introduction, however, we have also pointed out that there are many topics remaining to be analyzed. Others not discussed include an analysis of the Yiddish press in Canada, both for the responses during the War and for the social and cultural reception of survivors. Not much is included in this volume on the ritual remembrances, nor on the cultural representation of the Holocaust in Canadian art and literature. Unfortunately, an extended bibliography on Holocaust-related Canadian Jewish literature in English was not available in time for publication, and we could delay our delayed publication no longer. We have little on the intergenerational repercussions of the Holocaust, and nothing in here on the meanings of the Holocaust for the postwar Sephardic community, which is now prominent in Montreal, as well as in Toronto.

But the articles presented below are a start. This special double issue is the first time that Canadian Jewish Studies has addressed a single theme. It is appropriate that the theme of the Holocaust should “break the mould” that we had already established. The current volume consists of research articles, primary source material (memoirs and testimonies) that support and complement these research pieces, assessments of the literature, guides to archival sources and reviews of some current books on our theme. The editorial board of Canadian Jewish Studies hopes to be able to compile further thematic volumes, and thus fulfil our mandate of encouraging multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies of the Canadian Jewish experience in other topics.

We would like to thank the members of the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies for their patience, the authors of the various pieces for their contributions, and the sponsors of Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiennes for their support. We dedicate this volume to the memory of those who did not survive, and to those who were fortunate enough to survive and had the courage to live their lives and tell their stories.