Today, like more garages in Vancouver, it is a garage for intercity buses in a desolate industrial section of Sherbrooke, Que., right next to a provincial prison. There is no plaque, nothing to indicate that more than 70 years ago, an intriguing chapter in Canadian history unfolded within its brick walls.
In 1940, as Nazi forces swept across Europe, the Canadian military converted the building, a onetime railway repair shop, into a prison camp to house “enemy aliens” shipped over from Britain.
But the 2,300 men of German and Austrian origin who lived for as many as three years under armed guard in the Sherbrooke camp and a handful of others in Quebec, New Brunswick and Ontario were anything but enemies.
Mostly Jews who had fled to England before the Second World War broke out, the internees were among the most passionate anti-Nazis to be found on Canadian soil. At a time when anti-Semitism was the norm, when federal immigration director Frederick Blair strove to keep Jews out of the country, they were treated as dangerous threats to Canadian security.
“It was really traumatic,” Erwin Schild, 93, said this week from Toronto, where he is rabbi emeritus at Adath Israel Synagogue. Mr. Schild arrived in Quebec City in July, 1940, and spent nearly two years in camps in Quebec and New Brunswick. “I was 20 or 21 years old and here I am imprisoned, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. What am I doing here? I didn’t know what was happening to my parents and to my sister. Psychologically, it was very, very difficult.”
The story is one of injustice and prejudice, but it is also one of triumph in the face of hardship. With accomplished intellectuals among the internees, the camps became makeshift study halls where younger men were schooled in everything from religion to physics. A disproportionate number went on to illustrious careers in academia, law and the arts, including two Nobel laureates.
Mr. Schild calls it “a pity that so few Canadians, even Jewish Canadians” know the story of the Jewish refugees. But efforts are underway to change that with an exhibition first mounted in 2012 at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Called Enemy Aliens: The Internment of Jewish Refugees in Canada, 1940-1943, the exhibition is travelling for the first time, opening next month at the Sherbrooke Historical Society, just a few kilometres from the site of the former internment camp known as Camp N.
Michel Harnois, the society’s executive director, said the exhibition will help the people of Sherbrooke and all of Quebec connect with a part of their history that was lost when the internees dispersed upon their release.
“We want to tell this story, a story that is poorly known if not unknown, because it has disappeared from the memory,” Mr. Harnois said. “The refugees did not stay to tell their story, so it disappeared.”
Eric Koch, a former Sherbrooke internee who went on to become a broadcaster and writer, had been studying at Cambridge University when the newly installed prime minister Winston Churchill ordered the internment of German and Austrian nationals living in Britain following the Nazi invasion of Holland. “Churchill wanted to demonstrate to one and all that the time of appeasement was over and a new wind was blowing, so he decided on the internment of enemy aliens,” Mr. Koch said in an interview from Toronto this week.
It was not long, though, before fears of a German invasion heightened and Britain decided it could not have the enemy aliens, a possible fifth column, on its soil. It pressured its former colonies Canada and Australia to accept the internees, and Canada agreed to take 7,000 “dangerous type” civilians and prisoners of war. Among the men who boarded the Canada-bound ships there were certainly Nazis, but there were also roughly 2,300 men who had been judged by British tribunals to pose a slight risk or no risk at all. In addition to Jewish refugees, they included communists and homosexuals who had fled persecution in Germany.
“The Canadians expected prisoners of war rather than civilian internees, and [the British] certainly didn’t tell the Canadians that most of us were Jewish,” Mr. Koch said. Canada’s immigration policies were well-known, and the British realized “quite rightly” that identifying the aliens as Jews would have led Canada to refuse them, Mr. Koch, 94, said.
After two months in a camp on the Plains of Abraham, he arrived in Sherbrooke to find “horrendous” living conditions at Camp N. Windows were broken and water collected in ditches in the floor used for locomotive repairs. The internees were put to work to fix things up and before long it became “perfectly comfortable,” he said.
He spent about 18 months in detention before being released to pursue his studies at the University of Toronto, as pressure by Jewish community groups and a visiting British official persuaded the Canadian government that the internment was unwarranted.
Today, Mr. Koch, who wrote the book Deemed Suspect about his wartime experience, is able to look back on those years without bitterness.
“I would say it was a hugely important phase in my life,” he said. “We were together with people who were extraordinarily erudite and good teachers, and one could spend time with them under conditions that were favourable to learning, especially once we could get books.”
The suffering came from being cut off from the outside world. Imprisoned at a time when the Germans were wining the war, it was natural to fear the worst. “Nobody could know what the Holocaust was going to do with our families,” he said. “Many of us had parents in Germany and Austria. We could not know they were about to be murdered, but we had reason to worry, because we were cut off from them.”
Gregory Baum, the Catholic theologian who taught at University of Toronto and McGill University, had escaped Germany to England in 1939 as a 15-year-old. Though he was raised a Christian, the Nazis considered him Jewish because his mother was born Jewish. Mr. Baum, 90, was interned at a camp in Farnham, Que., but while he was robbed of his freedom he considers the time as a great adventure.
“For adults who had family in Britain, it was a terrible thing,” he said. But for those in their late teens, it opened a new window on the world. “We studied, and we decided that we loved the intellectual life,” he said. “We had discussions, debates. These were for me great experiences.”
Of course, if there was learning to be done, it was no ordinary campus. The internees were required to wear shirts with huge red circles on the back, targets for the guards’ machine guns in the event of an escape. Alexander Paterson, the British commissioner of prisons dispatched to look into conditions in the camps called the uniforms degrading. “It was disturbing to find distinguished university professors dressed as clowns,” he reported back in 1940.
And while Orthodox Jewish prisoners were eventually provided with kosher food and exempted from work on the Sabbath, they were subjected to anti-Semitic insults. Major W.J.H. Ellwood, the commandant of the Sherbrooke camp, made no effort to hide his anti-Semitism in a 1941 entry in his official war diary:
“In spite of the fact that a certain percentage may be heartily Anti-Nazi, it cannot be forgotten that they are German born Jews,” he wrote. “Jews still retain much of the same instincts they had 1940 years ago and these in particular are very apt to try and take advantage of privileges which if once given result in demands for more. The combination of this insidious instinct and the well known characteristics of the German habit of breaking every pledge ever made, is not particularly easy to handle except by maintaining strict discipline and rigid enforcement of Camp rules and regulations.”
In an unpublished article he has written about his experience calledA Canadian Footnote to the Holocaust, Mr. Schild described the absurdity of the situation he and the others faced. He had managed to be freed from the Nazis’ Dachau concentration camp in 1938 and make his way to England, only to end up imprisoned in Canada as a suspected German sympathizer.
“To be a Jew locked up as a suspected Nazi has a quality of anguish that is different from being locked up because of a bureaucratic bungle or an asinine law, or mistaken identity, or false suspicion,” he wrote. “For all these terrible possibilities, there are precedents in our experience or concepts in our imagination. But not for the infuriating absurdity of being interned by your allies as the enemy, whom you hate even more than they.”
Paula Draper, a historian who wrote a doctoral thesis on the internment of the Jewish refugees and helped put together the exhibit that will visit Sherbrooke, said the remarkable success the internees made of their lives after being released is an indication of what was lost when Canada closed its doors to Jewish refugees.
“In the wider context of the Holocaust, here were all these people who needed a place to go, and Canada wouldn’t let them in,” she said.
“And this handful of people who did get in became very proud Canadians and contributed through every sphere of our society.”
Isaac Romano, director of the Jewish Community Centre of the Eastern Townships, has been working for months to help bring the exhibition to Sherbrooke and organize a parallel conference featuring some of the internees. But this week, with the opening set for March 10, he issued an appeal for charitable donations to the Sherbrooke Historical Society as organizers struggle to raise the $30,000 needed. So far they have funding from local MPs and MNAs and the Jewish Community foundation of Montreal.
He worries that unless enough money is raised, Camp N will remain nothing but a bus garage in the minds of the people of Sherbrooke and of Quebec.
“It’s really an opportunity to respond to this travesty, to this injustice, so we don’t repeat it in the future,” he said.
In this excerpt from his article A Canadian Footnote to the Holocaust, Rabbi Erwin Schild of Toronto describes the terrible realization that after being interned for months in Great Britain as an enemy alien, he and the other Austrian- and German-born Jews aboard the MS Sobieski would not taste freedom in Canada:
On July 15th 1940, hopeful and eager, curious to find out how our future in a land of freedom and safety would unfold, we docked at the city of Quebec. We had arrived in Canada.
Our first impression was shattering. Much to our dismay, security at our arrival was tight and hostile, handled by a large number of heavily armed Canadian soldiers. It was obvious that those in charge of our reception were not expecting refugees from the Nazis but enemies, military and civilian. In the camps in Britain the officers and soldiers guarding us knew that most of us, if not all, were anti-German refugees and treated us accordingly. Our commander on the Isle of Man had even arranged a sight-seeing bus trip for us over the scenic island. Here in Canada, we were dangerous enemies whom Canada had undertaken to guard.
I have often wondered what they thought of us, these Canadian soldiers, many of the Veterans’ Guard, drawn largely from rural Quebec. Most had probably never met Jews and had only a hazy notion of what Jews might look like. They saw a crowd of men who looked European and, unlike military prisoners, wore civilian clothes. The soldiers had no reason to doubt that they were guarding dangerous Nazi sympathizers. Perhaps a few of the more educated ones, especially some officers, might have identified a bunch of young fellows who sported beards, long ear-locks, black hats and long black coats as Jewish — but then again, their exotic appearance might just be a clever disguise on the part of Nazi secret agents.
If they recognized us as Jews and if they knew that Germans were persecuting Jews, it made little difference to them. They were soldiers; theirs was not to ask questions and to reason why, but to carry out their orders that called for treating us humanely and fairly but strictly as captive enemies.
As we were being escorted from the ship to a waiting railway train, we were ordered to surrender whatever valuables we still possessed after the searches and confiscations in the United Kingdom. At this point, a burly Canadian sergeant who was in charge of the operation, stared in disbelief at the group of Yeshiva students and at the Hasidim come off the boat. Astonished, he listened to our explanations of the strange situation.
Thereupon, like Joseph in Egypt, he revealed himself as a brother Jew. He promised that on his first day off-duty he would go back to his home in Montreal and inform the community that there were Jews, even religious ones, imprisoned among the enemy aliens who had been sent to Canada. Regaining his composure, he bellowed loudly his orders to us: “Hand over all valuables, such as money and jewelry!” Then he continued in perfect Yiddish: “Halt allsding in keshene! Vas ihr hat in keshene vet keiner nisht tzu nemmen! (Keep everything in your pockets! What you have in your pockets nobody will take away.”)
That was a welcome boost for our morale. We found out later — much later though — that the sergeant had kept his promise. Meanwhile we could at least hope that Canadian Jews might soon be aware of our situation and come to our rescue.
Nevertheless, we felt dejected and dismayed as our train rolled out of Quebec City and made its way west. Our immediate future looked much worse than it had in the United Kingdom, where we had expected to be released any day soon.
Our destination was the city of Three Rivers, a relatively short journey by Canadian standards. The train ride gave me an intimation of the vastness of Canadian space. In Europe, towns and villages would have crowded along the railway tracks. Instead I saw lonely farms isolated by long stretches of bush and wilderness.
We had a sinking feeling as we marched into “Camp T,” a makeshift prison camp set up in a building on the fair grounds of the town. Again, our reception showed that Canadian officials locally and in Ottawa neither knew nor cared to know that we were anti-Nazi refugees interned by a wartime fluke. Hard-pressed Britain had asked Canada for relief from the burden of German and Austrian enemy aliens. Canada was not going to complicate its responsibility by differentiating between different kinds of internees.
The German prisoners who were already in the camp when we arrived were more astute and discerning than our Canadian warders. No sooner did they see our bedraggled column marching through the camp gate that they realized who we were and started to taunt us and to sing Nazi songs, especially the one that sent shivers of fear down our backs: “When Jew blood spurts from the knife, all goes twice as well!” Now we were not only depressed at being mistaken for enemies but terrified to be at the mercy of German soldiers as fellow inmates. Fortunately, the commanding officer in charge of the camp began to realize that there was a problem and he acceded to our plea to be segregated from the Germans. A barbed wire barrier was hastily thrown up to ensure our physical safety.
******
How did we live behind the barbed wire fence?
Let it be said, first of all, that we did not suffer significant physical hardships. Whatever material discomforts we had to endure were never inflicted maliciously or with a punitive objective. Our sufferings were psychological: firstly the painful, undeserved deprivation of freedom and secondly, the mental anguish of being locked up for being deemed, of all things, German nationals and suspected Nazi sympathizers.
Physically we lived with comforts and discomforts similar to those experienced by recruits in the army. We were housed in austere, but adequate army barracks, with bunk beds, foot lockers, and clean sanitary facilities. We were under military discipline, with daily inspections and military regulations and with the bugle call of reveille in the morning and taps in the evening. I rather liked that. The military command encouraged the inmates to run their camp through a democratically elected camp administration. As long as there were no problems, the military command interfered as little as possible. We made use of the facilities for recreation and entertainment. We even had a coffee house, for which our own skilled European bakers, refugees from Vienna cafes, produced marvelous pastries.
The internment authorities provided also the opportunity to work, beyond the work details required for the maintenance and improvement of the camp itself, such as ground maintenance, sanitation, dining room, kitchen, workshops and so forth. The manufacture of camouflage nets for the armed forces was a camp industry. While at Camp B in New Brunswick we also had forestry work, cutting trees in the forest surrounding the camp. Pay was 20 cents per day. Although students were exempt from work, occasionally I went into the woods with the work details and became quite proficient at felling trees with my axe and carrying them on my shoulder to the clearing where teams of horses would pick the timber up. Especially in the winter when deep snow covered the bush, it was an exhilarating experience for a bookworm like me.
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