Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 1947–1955 by Adara Goldberg (review)

As immigration and refugee issues continue to prompt debate around the world, Adara Goldberg’s new book reminds us that the challenges and possibilities of resettlement are not new. While much has been written about the Holocaust survivor experience in the global context, Goldberg’s is the first book to deal with the post-war period of arrival in Canada. In doing so, she paints a complicated picture of acceptance, prejudice, integration, and exclusion, one not dissimilar to the present day.

The early part of this story is most well known: the Canadian government’s disappointing record of accepting few Jewish refugees (approximately 5000) before 1947. Many readers will be familiar with the 1938 Evian Conference and the rejection of the St Louis, a ship carrying 937 Central European refugees in 1939. Less well known are the “accidental immigrants,” Jews who landed in internment camps in New Brunswick, Ontario, and Quebec because of British anti-alien policies. Popular presentations of these prisoners-turned-immigrants can often be celebratory, but Goldberg rightfully criticizes the political and social climate of anti-Semitism that hampered wider aid before and during the war.

Canada’s gates finally opened in 1947 in response to international pressure, growing public outrage, and a need for cheap labour during an economic boom. The key strength of Goldberg’s book is her insistence that the 35,000 Jewish immigrants did not represent a homogenous group, nor were Canadian reactions to their arrival uniform. Indeed, the bulk of this volume is spent deconstructing the image of the “typical” Holocaust survivor. By supplementing archival research with hundreds of oral interviews, Goldberg presents a careful, detailed, and multi-faceted picture of the key nine years of arrival, 1947–55. She finds that Holocaust survivors spoke different languages, were varying ages, had diverging educational and professional backgrounds, and had experienced Nazi violence differently. The Jewish women, men, and children arrived under different sponsorship programs, which influenced the services they received, how they were treated by community members, and their subsequent place in public and historiographical memory. To give one example, the War Orphans Project brought 1,123 Jewish youth to Canada in the post-war period. The young war orphans tended to receive more public goodwill and assistance because of the publicity surrounding their program. In contrast, Canadians tended to be more suspicious of children sponsored by individual families, arguing that those young refugees were too young to be traumatized by Nazi terror. Likewise, adult survivors who arrived in the later period, either as trans-migrants via another country or because they stayed longer in Europe to assist other refugees, tended to receive a cooler welcome and less access to crucial supports than those refugees who entered Canada in the late 1940s.

One of the true strengths of the book is the focus on oft-neglected narratives. Goldberg deftly provides contrast, for instance, between Jewish survivors who built thriving religious communities in Canada and those who converted or embraced atheism after the war. She includes testimony from childless women and men, some whose physically scarred bodies could not reproduce or whose traumatic experiences deterred healthy intimate relationships, as well as those who simply refused to bring another generation of children into the world. Goldberg interrogates neatly gendered categories by highlighting the struggles of single fathers, chronically unemployed men, and women who worked outside the home.

Holocaust survivors were provided varying levels of support, guidance, and acceptance upon arrival in Canada. Indeed, the reader more fully understands the complicated nature of the integration process, as Goldberg describes how most social workers and teachers lacked training in working with victims of extreme trauma; how power relationships between sponsors and refugees could easily become strained; and that not all neighbourhoods were welcoming and tolerant. Indeed, in order to combat social exclusion, financial insecurity, and prejudice, Jewish refugees quickly formed survivor networks, mutual benefit aid societies, and informally shared information and...