Irving Abella and Harold Troper € None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948 € Lester and Orpen Dennys Publishers, Toronto € 1982 € $16.95
The Canadian government has summarily deported 90 refugees to an uncertain future in China.
This is not the first time that supposedly "liberal" and "tolerant" Canada has behaved shamefully towards desperate refugees seeking haven.
Irving Abella and Harold Troper document the terrible treatment received by Jewish refugees in World War II in their classic None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948.
From the time of Hitler's election in 1933, Hitler's attitude towards German Jews was clear to the world.
On April 7 that year, 400 anti-Jewish laws were introduced. Jewish people were not allowed to teach, practise law, or perform any civil service functions. Jewish children were allowed into schools only on the basis of a quota system. Anti-Jewish violence in the streets was encouraged by the Nazi party.
In 1935, when the Nuremburg Laws were put into effect, Jewish people were declared sub-human and denied access to hospitals, schools, social welfare or legal rights including citizenship and the franchise.
The Canadian government was aware of this situation. As thousands of Jewish people flooded out of Eastern Europe to avoid Hitler's expanding empire, a global refugee crisis was pronounced.
The League of Nations approached Canada to take in refugees on a number of occasions, but their requests were denied. Tory Prime Minister R.B. Bennett staved off attempts in the early 1930s and Mackenzie King's Liberal government ultimately shut down any attempt to welcome Jewish refugees to Canada.
Frederick Charles Blair, director of the Immigration branch of the Department of Mines and Resources, provided the bureaucratic basis for denying access to refugees in the King government. Openly contemptuous of Jewish people, he remarked in a letter:
"I often think that instead of persecution it would be far better if we more often told them frankly why they are so unpopular", he went on to assert "If they would divest themselves of certain of their habits I am sure they could be just as popular as our Scandinavians."
King backed up such attitudes with his political refusal to open the doors.
In his diary he gave his reasoning for this refusal. "We must ... seek to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood."
In June 1938, an international conference (Evian) was held to deal with the Jewish "problem". In the end, only the Dominican Republic agreed to take a handful of refugees as the unanimous decision of the conference was that no nation was "willing to undertake any obligations toward financing involuntary immigration."
There can be no doubt that such a failure of the International Community gave Hitler the confidence he needed to carry out his final solution. One Nazi newspaper remarked that "The Evian Conference serves to justify Germany's policy against the Jewry."
A week after Evian, King had a party where he described a meeting he had with Hitler one year earlier. An American diplomat reported to Washington that King "described Hitler as being, in his opinion, a very sincere man. He even described him as being 'sweet'".
In September of 1938 King wrote that Hitler "might come to be thought of as one of the saviours of the world."
Outrage
The complacency of the Canadian government did not go unnoticed by Canada's Jewish community.
The violence inflicted on the Jewish population of Germany by Kristallnacht, on November 9, 1938, sparked mass outrage in Canada. On November 14, 1938, spontaneous protests that had been happening across the country culminated in coast to coast rallies demanding that the Canadian government accept Jewish refugees.
Although King was softening on the question, the thousands who demonstrated the country did not ultimately move him.
The pressure on the government increased and Thomas Crear, immigration minister, wanted to bow to it. He informed the cabinet that he was ready to recommend that ten thousand refugees be admitted.
He was completely dismissed by King. On December 13, a final decision was made by the cabinet: Jewish refugees are not welcome in Canada.
Not even the tragic circumstance of the Jews who sailed in the St. Louis moved the Canadian government. On May 15, 1939, 907 Jews set sail from Hamburg Germany with no other possession than visas to Cuba. After an arduous journey, they reached Havana only to be told that their visas were not considered valid.
Desperate, Jewish organizations internationally tried to find another refuge for them, only to be turned down first by Latin America, and then the United States and Canada. The United States not only ignored their appeal but instead sent a gun boat to trail them in their journey north ensuring that no passenger ever came close enough to the shore to swim to the border.
Canada's Charles Blair again displayed open hostility to the plight of Jewish refugees. He claimed that they did not qualify under immigration policy and that ultimately "the line must be drawn somewhere".
Abella sadly concludes that "the line drawn, the voyagers' last flickering hope extinguished, the Jews of the St. Louis headed back to Europe, where many would die in the gas chambers and crematoria of the Third Reich."
Through the terrible years of World War II, news of the unspeakable violence perpetrated by the Third Reich began to spread.
Increased pressure was put on Canada to at the very least accept Jewish children as refugees. In one meeting in May of 1940 a senior immigration official informed a Polish diplomat that "Jews cannot be treated as a nation or a religious group but [only] as a race," and that "the interest of Canada is to prevent Jewish people from coming to Canada."
This policy stood throughout the war years and when the millions of displaced Jewish people sought a home after the war ended in 1945, Canada was still unwilling to offer them one.
By now, no one could claim ignorance of the holocaust. Georges Vanier, a Canadian ambassador to France, reported after a tour of the concentration camps, crematorium and death chambers the absolute horrors endured by the victims of the Third Reich. Still King insisted that first and foremost, room must be made for the troops to return.
Simply put, there was no misunderstanding of the horror and violence experienced by the Jews of Europe during World War II. Canada took its seat at the feet of British and American Imperialism, with callous disregard for the loss of millions of lives.
Abella and Troper reveal Canada's true role in the progress of European fascism with powerful detail.
It is appalling that two generations later, the Canadian government is still pushing back from its borders people fleeing repression.