Behind the Headlines the Long Journey of the Jewish Dps

Canada’s policy towards the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust was “as mean-spirited” after Ottawa had ascertained the full facts of the horror as it had been before.

This was the bald assertion of a Canadian historian, Harold Troper, in a paper he presented last week to the Yad Vashem Sixth International Historical Conference here. The theme of this year’s conference was the Sheerit Hapleta — the survivors of the Holocaust and their story.

Troper, who with Irving Abella wrote the book, “None Is Too Many,” which detailed Canada’s policy toward Jewish refugees during the war, and who is professor of history at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (affiliated with the University of Toronto), said that although Canada was a country with infinite possibilities for providing a haven for persecuted Jews, only 5,000 were admitted between 1939 and 1945.

Among the reasons cited at the time, he said, were that Jews tended to be town dwellers while Canada’s interest was in populating its vast rural expanses.

In fact, as early as 1923, Jews were placed in a “special permit group” by the Canadian government. This was the least desirable category of would-be immigrants: they required a special permit issued by an immigration official — and few Jews succeeded in obtaining it, Troper said.

PRESSURE BY THE CJC AND GARMENT INDUSTRY

In 1945, Jews comprised 1.5 percent of Canada’s population. Demobilized soldiers returning from the battlefields placed a burden on the economy — another cause of the unpopularity of new immigrants at that time. In an opinion poll in 1946, 49 percent of those questioned checked off Jews as undesirable immigrants.

Only in 1948, Troper said–after the admission of 1,000 Jewish teenage refugees by special agreement, and with the opening of a special quota for 2,000 Jewish tailors and their families following pressure by the Canadian Jewish Congress in cooperation with the garment industry–did Jewish DPs (displaced persons) begin to come into Canada in significant numbers.

Later that year, following the creation of the State of Israel, which Canada ardently supported, the barriers to Jewish immigration finally came down.

RECORD OF THE U.S. SCRUTINIZED

The record of the United States was also critically scrutinized at the Yad Vashem congress, and found sadly wanting.

Leonard Dinnerstein, a professor of history from the University of Arizona, and author of “America and the Survivors of the Holocaust,” stressed that the U.S., too, could with relative ease have absorbed the survivors of the Holocaust — but here, also, tough immigrant restrictions foreclosed that option for the majority of the refugees.

Dinnerstein noted that the American Zionist movement, moreover, was agitating for a solution in Palestine for the homeless Holocaust survivors.

Britain’s objections kept the DPs languishing in camps through 1946. Polish Jewish refugees, returning to their homes to find their families gone forever and their homes and property irrecoverable, moved on to Germany, as did 150,000 Jewish refugees who had fled to the USSR during the war and were now allowed to leave that country.

(The Kielce pogrom of 1946 catalyzed this drift of the refugees away from Poland and to camps in alliedoccupied Germany and Austria. D.L.)

SWELLING MASS OF MISERY

It was the seething, swelling mass of misery in the DP camps which brought President Truman, in 1946, to recommend that the DPs be permitted to enter the U.S.

But only a year later, Dinnerstein continued, did the Senate begin to move on that recommendation — and then on the question of the immigration of DPs in general, with no special treatment for the Jews. The “Volksdeutsche,” on the other hand, received preferential treatment.

Only in 1950 were the American regulations to become more liberalized towards the Jews. Between 1945 and 1952, the U.S. admitted some 400,000 DPs, Dinnerstein said. But only 20 percent of them were Jews. With the creation of Israel, he said, the U.S. felt relief at the imminent solution of the DP problem. But the suffering of the DPs had dragged on much longer than it should have.