Fighting to honour those who fought for Canada
Author tells stories of Canadian Jews who served during Second World War
When Flight Sergeant Nathan Dlusy of the Royal Canadian Air Force died in August 1944 on a mountaintop near Inverness in Scotland at the age of 23, he was fighting for Canada. And yet, he was never recognized as Canadian.
His brother, Jon Dlusy, wants to change that.
As Jews, the Dlusys managed to escape Berlin in 1938, just before Kristallnacht. “We left everything behind,” recalled Jon, now 91.
They arrived in Montreal, where they were naturalized as British subjects. Nathan enlisted in 1942 to fight the Nazis. When the Canadian Citizenship Act came into effect in 1947, anyone naturalized was automatically made a Canadian citizen. But by then, Nathan was dead.
“I have been looking into whether posthumously he could be issued Canadian citizenship because he gave his life for Canada during
the war,” Jon Dlusy said in an interview Thursday.
The story of Nathan Dlusy is one of hundreds in Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II (New Jewish Press, $26), a new book by journalist and Seneca College professor Ellin Bessner documenting the contributions of the 17,000 Canadian Jews who served in the Second World War; 450 never made it home.
Bessner will speak Sunday at the Shaare Zion Congregation; Jon Dlusy will be there as well. “It is a mission, a duty, to have their contributions recognized in history,” Bessner, a former Montrealer, said Thursday. “You hear about the victims, but you don’t hear about the liberators. My mission is to tell the story of the ones who were liberators of the victims.”
Many thought of the Jews as victims during the Second World War, “but they were also the liberators. They were aces and heroes,” she said.
Bessner’s interest was piqued in 2011 when she was in Normandy on a family trip. At the Beny-surMer Canadian War Cemetery — about four kilometres from Juno Beach, the site of the landings of Canadian soldiers on D-Day in June 1944 — she read an epitaph on the gravestone of Bombardier G. Meltz, of Toronto, who had died in July 1944 at 25. A Jewish star on the stone identified him as Jewish.
“He died so Jewry shall suffer no more,” it read. That epitaph “reached out to me from the grave,” she said. “After 70 years, I had to know more about the man.”
Bessner went home and Googled G. Meltz. She learned his name was George Meltz, located relatives and heard stories from them about him. She wrote about it for her blog, now the website ellinbessner.com, and for the Canadian Jewish News, and people started to reach out to her with their stories.
Bessner believes her book is of interest to any student of Canadian history. She will be travelling in the coming months to speak at various locations. When she travels, she visits Jewish cemeteries in which Canadian servicemen are buried, says prayer at their graves and places stones on their gravestones, a sign that someone has visited. This month Bessner visited the mountaintop where Nathan Dlusy’s plane crashed, as well as the cemetery where he is buried.