Canned food, invisible threat
Why this moment feels like the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again,
I miss blithely going about my daily activities — gone since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In their stead is constant vigilance and a niggling feeling of dread about what the future holds. I haven’t felt like this since I was a child living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then, just as now, everyone became news junkies. Then, just as now, everyone began stocking up on supplies: canned and non-perishable food disappearing from supermarket shelves as quickly as they were restocked. And then, too, the lingering threat was invisible and lethal — radioactive fallout.
Both my parents were Holocaust survivors. For them, knowledge and preparedness were the keys to survival. Still, they often struggled with figuring out how much knowing was enough, and how much was too much for me, the anxiety sponge. So that I could understand why John Diefenbaker’s government was carrying out the Tocsin B drill, they told me about the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and their arms race — each country producing thermonuclear weaponry far more deadly than the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Although Canada was not a likely target of the Soviets, the consequences for Canadians would be grim if the U.S. was attacked. Canada would not escape the deadly radiative fallout from Soviet attacks if bordering American cities like Buffalo were hit. A first-line target was right across Lake Ontario: the Plattsburgh, N.Y., air force base, east-coast operations centre for Strategic Air Command, housing 12 Atlas nuclear missiles.
I could grasp the destruction caused by the explosive and incendiary capacity of conventional bombs, but the barely visible destructiveness of radiation on people — in fallout participles as tiny as a grain of salt — was as unfathomable to me as ghosts. Each grain contained the radiation of an X-ray machine, and I remembered how the medical technician had hidden away in a booth to shield himself from the radiation when taking an X-ray of my broken arm. The radiation caused sickness and sometimes death, my mother said.
At 7 p.m., Nov. 13, 1961, Metro Toronto’s 48 air raid sirens blared. Even though I knew this was coming, it still terrified me as the whole idea of the drill did — the pretend nuclear attacks against Canada’s major cities, including a mock five-megaton bomb dropping at Yonge and Bloor in Toronto, not far from my home.
Every evening as my parents watched “CBS Evening News” with Walter Cronkite, I would wander in and out of the living room, counting the minutes until I could watch my favourite primetime cartoons and shows.
However, on Oct. 22, 1962, at 7 p.m., instead, U.S. president John F. Kennedy was on TV. My parents shushed me and I sat down beside my mother and listened with growing alarm. U.S. spy planes had discovered that the Soviets were constructing nuclear missile bases in Cuba and had been sneaking missiles into Cuba to target the whole western hemisphere; as Kennedy said, missiles that could reach as far as Hudson Bay, Canada, aiming to cause “sudden mass destruction.”
Afterwards my father rushed outside to smoke a cigarette, and my mother got up to shut the TV off. When he returned, he spoke to my mother in Polish — the secrets language, as I nicknamed it because they only spoke it when they didn’t want me to understand — and they looked at each other, as if they didn’t know how much to say without terrifying me further. All I could think about was that the missiles could get as far as Hudson Bay. Before I left for school the next morning, my mother made me promise that if on the way to school or back if I heard a siren like the Tocsin B one, I was not to rush home but to go to the house of one of the neighbours living on my route to school. She had already talked to them.
When I got to school, the day began as it always did with the singing of “God Save the Queen” and the reciting of the Lord’s Prayer. Then the principal announced over the public address system that we all had to pay attention to all air raid sirens — a wobbly pulsing siren warned us to take shelter and a steady long siren was a fallout alert.
Then the fire drill siren came on and we practised the “duck and cover” exercise, with the desk expected to protect us from shards of window glass. We huddled in the gym, not allowed out at recess.
On Oct. 28, the crisis was resolved with Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev announcing the Soviets were withdrawing offensive missiles from Cuba and Kennedy promising not to invade Cuba.
It was finally over. But the Cold War wasn’t. Both countries still had missiles ready to go, and planes ready to drop hydrogen bombs. Every day I was reminded, as invariably the cartoons I watched on Buffalo TV stations were interrupted by the screeching test of the Emergency Broadcast System, followed by a publicservice announcement on how to build your own fallout shelter.
Two weeks later, most kids at school had stopped asking questions about the crisis, their concern lessening, unlike mine. I asked my teacher about the fallout shelters. She said that there was information in two government pamphlets our parents could get from the library, and she wrote the titles on the blackboard, “Your Basement Fallout Shelter: Blueprint for Survival” and “Eleven Steps to Survival.”
After school I went to the public library and asked for the pamphlets for my parents. The librarian had none, but gave me an address to mail away for them. She also gave me a file on shelters where I found a picture of fallout shelter at Queen’s Park and College Street that looked exactly like our garage shed. (I didn’t understand that the structure was above ground only as an example.) Each shelter had to have enough canned food and water for 14 days — by that time, the radiation levels in the air should have gone down enough.
I decided to do it on my own. I couldn’t use the basement because then my parents would catch on, so I used the garage shed.
I started sneaking utensils, a can opener and knife, and whatever food that wouldn’t be noticed — like wrapped rolls of crackers and cookies — and taking empty glass bottles of milk and juice to store water in. When I went shopping with my mother, my mission was to convince her to buy canned food. My mother was perplexed, then annoyed by my relentless suggesting of canned this and that. Her rote response was “Why buy something in a can when I can buy it fresh?” I picked up a can of peaches and my mother sighed, saying “OK, that’s out of season.” I was thrilled to find that was the key. More luck with a can of corn, but when I picked up a can of pork Spam, my mother lost her temper, saying “it’s treyf!” (Not kosher.)
My supply was growing in the shed. I had pushed the lawn mower and rakes to the side, and the bottles of water were on a backyard plastic table, alongside several lawn chairs. The rolls of cookies and crackers and the utensils were in my small suitcase, and I had stowed some torn bedding my mother had left in the basement to rip into cleaning rags, as well as a feather pillow that she had put aside to repair the seams.
One afternoon, my father began shouting to my mother in Polish from the backyard.
“Why have you been putting food in the garage shed?” My mother asked, as we headed for it. We all stood there, and suddenly it looked useless and stupid — there wasn’t enough food for a picnic, let alone 14 days. I started crying as I admitted this was supposed to be a fallout shelter, sobbing that I was trying to save us.
I waited for them to yell at me, but they didn’t.
My mother said I had done nothing to be feel bad about. She, too, had tried to save her mother at the beginning of the war. Standing at a distance, she watched as her mother was arguing with a German soldier who was trying to take away the bundle of clothing she was clutching. When my mother saw the soldier’s horse rear up, she ran to save my grandmother — and in the melee had her nose broken after being kicked in the face by the soldier.
My father then told me he and his brother had tried to protect their father by making money with odd jobs, since the German soldiers were more likely to let boys run about than a grown man.
To console me she told me that lots of people had the same idea — prime minister Diefenbaker had two shelters — one at 24 Sussex Drive and another giant underground one called the Diefenbunker, and the mayor of Toronto, Nathan Phillips, had one too.
The sound of any siren made me jump for the longest time, and when my anxiety was high about anything, my go-to nightmare was that of a mushroom cloud. Yet, the cans of food in the basement my mother had stored to pacify me — which I periodically checked — reassured me. But what reassured me most was the sight of my mother standing at the door waving goodbye as I went to school.
Both my parents had gone through terrible hardship, but they had overcome it with stoical determination, dark humour and infectious joy in living.