The trauma of victims of Communism
The planned memorial must go ahead, writes Marcus Kolga.
Do Canadians who fled communist terror and contributed to building this country deserve a memorial in our nation’s capital?
The current memorial location near the Supreme Court was publicly announced over two years ago and was approved by the National Capital Commission.
Beyond fair criticism of the memorial design, some anti-memorial critics have cynically questioned the very existence of any victims of Communism. Such hurtful discrimination against the experiences of those Canadians whose families were victims of Communism and who fled to Canada is divisive and painful.
My own family’s experience isn’t unique, but it is representative of the typical Eastern and Central European wartime refugee experience. My father was born in Nazi-occupied Estonia in 1941. Earlier that year, when Stalin’s communist forces occupied Estonia, my grandfather was forced to surrender to Soviet authorities after they threatened to rape my grandmother, murder her parents and burn down their farm. Around the same time, my grandfather’s uncle was tortured to death for owning one too many goats: he was found in a ditch outside the local secret police headquarters with his eye gouged out, his feet burned and his tongue hacked off.
Along with 30,000 other Estonian men, my grandfather was deported to a Soviet slave labour gulag camp in arctic Russia where over one-third of his countrymen died of starvation, disease and neglect. He was lucky to escape. Once reunited with his family, he made plans to flee — along with hundreds of thousands of other Baltic refugees — to safety in the West. Had he not, his family would have been among the masses who were murdered or deported by Stalin’s communists who attempted to ethnically Sovietize the region.
Joining the mass of European refugees, my grandfather only felt safe once he arrived in Halifax in 1951. So desperate were refugees to escape communist terror, that they arrived on merchant vessels, liners, small craft and even flotsam. When they arrived in Canada, most families were separated. The men were forced to work in Canada’s northern mines and forests, for less than $35 per month. Such was the cost of freedom — but it was worth it. Burdened by the extreme trauma inflicted by communist terror, these refugees worked to build new lives in Canada and became active members of our society. They helped build the Canada we live in today.
But the over 250,000 European Displaced Persons (DPs), who were admitted into Canada between 1947 and 1962 faced considerable discrimination following their arrival. A 1950s newspaper article quotes a government minister saying that, “We cannot be expected to accommodate displaced persons whose mental attitude is completely alien.” In April 1955, a letter to an editor complains about discrimination against a Victoria Cross recipient due to his unpronounceable “foreign” Eastern European name.
Members of my own family anglicized their names to a more British-Canadian sounding ones to avoid racist DP-bashing.
Yet those millions of refugees and their descendants take tremendous pride in their significant contributions to this country. Their trauma is part of our national fabric. Suggesting that it does not belong in the Canadian conscience on Wellington Street — or worse, that it should not be recognized at all — is painful and hearkens back to a darker time in Canada when chauvinistic and racist attitudes were tolerated and even encouraged.
The suffering and experience of the millions of refugees who fled communist tyranny and their families deserve to be included and recognized as a part of our national identity. By moving the memorial we would shamefully deny the victims and refugees their place in Canadian history. Criticize the design, but the location must remain.