St. Louis apology lauded
Re: Canada to apologize for barring ship, May 10, and Righting and rewriting the past, John Ivison, May 10
Prime Minister Trudeau deserves credit for committing to a formal apology for Canada’s shameful rejection of Jewish refugees aboard the St. Louis. Community members with relatives who were on the ship reached out to CIJA (Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs) to affirm the importance of an apology, which sends a powerful message to survivors and their families.
This should not cause the government to incur financial liability. Nor is the goal to impose a sense of guilt upon Canadians. Canada today is not the country it was in 1939.
To the contrary, addressing past injustices should only highlight Canada’s greatness. We are a country of high ideals. It takes courage and honesty to confront those moments in our history when we failed to meet those ideals. Doing so will help ensure we always stand for what is right in the future, particularly in the fight against anti-Semitism. Shimon Koffler Fogel, The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Ottawa Yes, in the run-up to the Second World War “the Canadian government heeded anti-Semitic sentiments” and would not let fleeing German Jews into Canada. Yes, it barred the ship, but it was much worse than that.
My father was one of the young officers at our Embassy in Washington in 1939. American Jews would go to see him to try to get relatives fleeing Germany into Canada because the U.S. government quota was overloaded.
In his memoirs* he writes: “Every time one of them comes in it leaves me shaken and ashamed of Canada. It’s like a bystander at an especially cruel and long-drawn out murder. I learned from dealing with these cases that within the Canadian government humanitarian considerations were not strong enough to overcome the pressure on the government from anti-Semites, especially those in Quebec. If I could find a loophole I’d feel I’d justified my existence before I became a machine-like cold-blooded bureaucrat. It aroused my contempt for the policy of my government.”
My father (Escott Reid) would be so pleased with our prime minister’s statement that “this long overdue apology will bring awareness to our failings, as we vow to never let history repeat itself.”
Tim Reid, Toronto (*Radical Mandarin: The Memoirs of Escott Reid., University of Toronto Press,1989.)
Re: Conservative MP questions whether Justin Trudeau’s official apologies are sincere, May 9 (online)
In her article (in which she quotes me), Janice Dickson of The Canadian Press states about half of the 907 Jewish passengers on the St. Louis, the ship that Canada refused the right to land, were accepted by the U.K., France, Belgium and the Netherlands, while the remainder were returned to Germany.
Ms. Dickson’s statement appears to be incorrect. The entry titled “Return to Europe of the St. Louis,” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website (ushmm.org) states that 906 passengers were dispersed to four European countries: U.K. 287, France 224, Belgium 214, and Netherlands 181. There is no mention of any passengers being returned to Germany. Of course, many did not survive the Nazi occupation of the latter three countries.
Also, many people appear to think that the phrase “None is too many” was used at the time the St. Louis was rejected. But it was actually a senior Canadian official who said this in early 1945, after he was asked how many Jews should be let into Canada after, not before, the war. (Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948, p. xxi).
It is regrettable that these two myths about the St. Louis are circulating so widely among Canadian Jews and the Canadian population at large. Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada Research Chair in International Human Rights 2003-16