I thought I should take the responsibility to post this and remind everyone about what today is.
National Day For Truth And Reconciliation
Both my parents are survivors of the residential school era and my family have had to live with this horror all our lives … whether we knew it or not.
For me the day is not to shame anyone or lay blame on those around me.
But rather to let everyone know about this history and never allow anything like it to ever happen again.
Plenty of pride about fighting Nazis, but not a lot of interest in helping Jews.
I remember our high school history teacher beginning our lesson on WWII. A few days into the lesson (explaining the Holocaust and such) We thought we all knew about it already. Then she asked us how many Jewish refugees Canada as a country took in?
We made guesses. A million, one hundred thousand? Canada is a welcoming multicultural country afterall, as we’ve been taught, so we must have taken a lot!
And then she said Canada took less than a couple thousand Jewish people in. That was quite a shock. The room was silent when she said it. She explained the anti Jewish sentiments of the time. We didn’t want them because they weren’t Christian. It was so strange to us at the time. Why wouldn’t we take them? They needed help. Definitely a strong teaching moment, I’ve remembered it to this day.
Looked it up and this is the official number I guess: Between 1933 and 1948, less than 5,000 Jewish refugees were allowed into Canada - the smallest number of any Allied nation.
Pitiful.