Refugees Daily - Internal Global Press Review

Opinion | Editorial

It's raining refugees. It has rained before.

Thanks to our Oct. 19 election, Canada is now taking in 25,000 Syrian refugees, despite initial — and very un-Canadian — opposition based on suspicion, racism and fear. Once again, I am jarred by our failure to learn from history. Have we not been through this before?

If Canadians could recall the last time the world saw such convulsion and mass flight, maybe they would be universally more generous. In 1945, the Second World War had just ended, millions of people were lost in Europe, and those who could not return to their home countries were begging for food, shelter and a plausible destination. Canada did not distinguish itself. Refugees were called DPs or "displaced persons." We took in very few. We plucked them from the masses to suit our own purposes. It's an ugly story and we can learn from it.

A begging letter arrived on my desk this morning from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) asking for donations to help refugees across Europe and the Mediterranean. So far in 2015, over 856,000 people have made their way to Europe, with thousands more arriving daily.

The UNHCR was set in motion decades ago. In 1943, the organization that was about to become the UN set up a group (UNRRA or United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) to deal with the human catastrophe that would follow Hitler's defeat. (How did they know the Nazis would be defeated? It was a given. They had to be finished off. You fought until the war was won, or you died, it was that simple.)

I am relying on British historian Ben Shephard's 2010 The Long Road HomeThe Long Road Home on the pale obscure exhausted years in Europe between 1945 and 1950. He writes ruefully that this story has since been overshadowed by surrounding events. Admit it, the Second World War has been glamourized. The Holocaust was the worst thing humans ever did. The Cold War took place at home.

One million refugees had what the great journalist Gitta Sereny called the "goody-goody" problem. Writes Shephard, "In our modern culture — where evil is sexy, goodness is dull, and organized goodness is dullest of all — can we find a way to make organized altruism interesting?"

So millions left in Europe with nowhere to go was a dull story without personality. But the DPs were "Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Yugoslavs" and others, many expecting a Soviet bullet for having survived outside Soviet borders at all. The Soviets wouldn't hand back Allied POWs unless the Allies returned the DPs in their European sector for Soviet misery, imprisonment or execution. (We returned many.)

Canada, a big country with a population of 12 million, was seen as a nation of plenty — the storage warehouses at Auschwitz-Birkenau, near two of the crematoria, were named "Canada" to reflect this — and was expected to step up. It did not.

A 1946 opinion poll showed only 37 per cent of Canadians willing to accept northern European DPs, with overwhelming hostility to Eastern and southern Europeans, Shephard reports. But the wartime economic boom had left us short of labour, and politicians understood that Canada had to help out if it were to maintain its position on the world stage. So why not cream off the best, an attitude described by Canadian historian Modris Eksteins.

In 1946, Canada offered space for 30,000 people who already had relatives here. In 1947, we invited the young and strong to mine, log, farm and clean house. The U.S. was hostile to DPs, England was poor, South America and Australia too distant and exotic. "Canada," writes Shephard, "was huge, empty and safe."

Canada didn't want intellectuals. DPs warned each other to say they had worked in the woods, Shephard writes, and to watch out for the handshake strength test when they were interviewed. "If a Canadian shakes your hand, then squeeze it so hard you crush it!"

The racism was extraordinary, one high official liking Latvians and Estonians but despising Poles, Lithuanians and Jews. (The cruelty shown to Jews who survived Hitler will leave you shaking, and I don't just mean American complaints that the Dachau survivors were criticized for being "apathetic or paranoid." )

Canada eventually admitted 35,000 Ukrainians, partly as an anti-communist force against communist-sympathizing Ukrainians already here, writes Shephard, referring to a 1949 explosion in a Ukrainian Labour Temple in Toronto that seemed to end the dispute. After that, Ottawa boosted DP cultures only — ethnic dance, say — and no longer backing DP political groups.

And then there were the blond Eastern European and Nordic children kidnapped by the Nazis for their alleged "Aryan" looks to be raised as Germans, part of the Lebensborn program. The story of the sometimes disastrous Child Search repatriation is one of the strangest of the postwar years, but some of them ended up in Canada, never to know who they truly were.

I knew little about DPs in Canada, but the Syrian refugee crisis made me recall a reference to "displaced persons" in the late 1940s in Margaret Atwood's 1993 novel The Robber Bride. "DPs meant Displaced Persons. They came from the east, across the ocean; what had displaced them was the war. Roz's mother said they should consider themselves lucky to be here. The grown-up DPs had odd clothes, dismal and shabby clothes, and strange accents, and a shuffling, defeated look to them."

Toronto was a boring city then, buttoned-up, censorious, Anglo-Saxon, religious, and of course the food was dreadful. It's hard to even imagine Canada before it was a multicultural nation but I recall my Great-Aunt Ida taking me to lunch at Murrays, an Anglo chain built in the 1920s. The pancakes were dusted with icing sugar. This was "ethnic food."

Arguments over refugees will seem absurd soon because humanity is on the move as climate change forces desperate people from their homes. Refugees flee tyranny, civil war, international war, invasion, sexual brutality, starvation, drought and other terrors.

At this point, I will mention news reports about Denmark that were initially thought to be a hoax. Denmark is searching the clothes and luggage of refugees to seize jewelry and cash to "make them pay for housing, health care and some education," the BBC reports. The ruling centre-right Venstre party and right-wing, anti-immigration Danish People's Party back the bill, which will pass by February. Refugees may keep wedding rings and watches, plus items of "sentimental value" if not too flashy. No word on gold fillings and the hair on their heads.

Danish Jews had the highest survival rate in Europe during the Second World War; they were rescued and protected by Danes.

See what happens when you don't remember history? The Danes don't recall how great they were, Canadians don't remember how equivocal. What caused this? The Danes elected a hard-right government. Canada just got rid of one.

I am so proud of a Canada that brought Syrian refugees here, the children shy, dark-haired and wide-eyed, being welcomed with stuffies and winter clothes by prime ministers, premiers, mayors and citizens (like torontoharbour.org, city professionals raising $35,000 for a family of five). Remember Germans clapping as refugees arrived in Munich?

It won't be easy for Chancellor Angela Merkel to convince Germans to remain welcoming, but she is altering how Germany has been viewed since the Second World War catastrophe it created. Change is possible.

It's a fight to welcome refugees and keep them warm and safe. History tells us that. Right now, history is giving us a slap.