"None Is Too Many"
by Sasha Tate-Howarth, 2005 MWS graduate

"None is too many." These words evoke the extreme and official anti-Semitism in Canada, both before, during and even after the Second World War. I have grown up thinking of Canada as a compassionate and caring country, multicultural, diverse and, above all, tolerant of differences. Yet, as I have now learned, Canada, especially during the years of the Second World War, was the exact opposite.

These famous words were said by an anonymous senior Canadian official who was asked by journalists in 1945: "How many Jews should be allowed into Canada after the war?" "None is too many" came his reply. This phrase seemed to convey how Canada responded to the Jewish refugee crisis.

The book None Is Too Many, by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, is fascinating and I encourage all of you to read it. It is a custom in many Jewish traditions to retell stories. We tell the story of Purim each year and the story of Passover. I think that it is important to retell this story so that it will never happen again, to Jews or to all others who are today discriminated against.

Of the millions of Jewish refugees struggling to flee Europe, only 5,000 were admitted into Canada from 1933 until 1945. Despite the ever-growing dangers of the Nazis expanding power, many countries shut their doors to Jewish refugees. But Canada was the worst.

In 1931 there were 155,700 Jewish people living in Canada, of a total population of ten million Canadians. Anti-Semitism was everywhere in Canada before the war and continued after the war. There were many places, like restaurants and beaches, where signs would say: "No dogs or Jews allowed here". Many jobs, both professional ones and even minor ones, were denied to Jews. There were quotas to limit how many Jewish people could enroll in law schools and medical schools. However, this general anti-Semitism did not affect the numbers of Jews allowed to enter the country before 1933. Even though the Department of Immigration was hostile to the idea of admitting Jews, placing various obstacles in their way, still approximately 40,000 Jews did succeed in entering Canada between the two World Wars.

In 1933, Hitler ascended to power in Germany and his ideas and attitudes of discrimination and prejudice against Jews spread around the world. Meanwhile, the situation for the Jews in Europe started to get worse. Laws were passed that discriminated against Jews, taking away their jobs, their property and even their education.

Jews from Europe desperately wanted to leave. During the 12 years of Nazi terror, from 1933 until 1945, the United States accepted more than 200,000 Jewish refugees; Palestine 125,000; Britain, even though at war, 70,000; Argentina 50,000; distant China 25,000; tiny Bolivia and Chile 14,000 each. Canada accepted fewer than 5,000. Over twelve years!!

Perhaps one of the best known examples of the world's rejection of the Jews is the infamous "Voyage of the Damned", the story of Jews who set sail on the St. Louis. On May 15, 1939, 907 desperate Jews from Germany left their home, having already been stripped of their houses, jobs, possessions and money in Nazi Germany. They were educated and many had been well-off, but in the eyes of all the countries they tried to enter, all they were, were Jews, the enemies of the world.

They had entrance visas to Cuba, but upon reaching Havana on May 30, the Cuban Government refused to recognize their visas. They were not even allowed to disembark, and had to go elsewhere to seek haven. Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Panama, indeed all of the countries of Latin America, rejected them. They turned to the U. S. who did not even bother to reply to their appeal, but instead sent a gunship and told patrols to keep them away from the U. S. coast, at all costs.

Their last hope was Canada. Many influential Canadians, not Jewish, tried to plead their case and even sent a telegram to the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, begging him to show "true Christian charity." King passed the request onto other government officials. Some were "emphatically opposed" to admitting the passengers, while Frederick Charles Blair, the Director of the Immigration Branch, added that "the line must be drawn somewhere."

The Jews aboard the St. Louis, after Canada drowned their last hope, sailed to Belgium. Many of them died in the gas chambers.

Frederick Charles Blair was the main senior bureaucrat who developed and enforced the laws that denied Jews entry into Canada during these years. He plugged every loophole that anyone could find to allow Jews in. He was proud of his success in keeping Jews out of Canada. He did not see himself as anti-Semitic, but rather as being realistic, realistic about the unsuitability of Jews living in Canada.

Mackenzie King was the Prime Minister of Canada during this time and after the Evian Conference on European Refugees in 1938 he said, "As far as he was concerned the admission of refugees perhaps posed a greater menace to Canada in 1938 than did Hitler." At an informal gathering at his summer residence he fondly recalled his meeting with Hitler in Germany a year earlier. He described him as being "SWEET - He had a good face".

I have to keep asking - Why? Why was the world so opposed to Jews? This is a question that neither I nor anyone else may be able to ever truly answer.

There were Canadians opposed to the official anti-Semitic policy of the government. Of course, Jewish organizations and individuals were adamantly opposed to their government's policy of not accepting Jews, but many other Canadians who were Christians also passionately disagreed with their government's behaviour. Georges Vanier was Canada's ambassador to France and he was deeply affected by the plight of the Jews. He wrote to Mackenzie King personally to ask him to consider accepting more Jewish refugees. Vanier did convince the Minister responsible for immigration to consider changing the laws, but few others in King's cabinet agreed. Ultimately, Vanier's proposal was rejected.

There were a few bureaucrats in the government who tried to let Jews into Canada. Escott Reid was at the Canadian Embassy in Washington during the war and he tried desperately to let in some of the Jewish refugees. He wrote: "If I could find a loophole, I'd feel I'd justified my existence." He did everything he could to get others to relax their opposition to Jewish refugees, begging them to at least let in the children. But nothing worked. Canada slammed the gates on refugees facing almost certain death.

In 1943, a Gallup Poll asked Canadians which nationalities they would oppose admitting to Canada after the war. Germans, Japanese and Jews topped the list. At the time, of course, Canadians were at war with Germany and Japan, and Jews were being killed in concentration camps.

Perhaps the saddest stories recounted in None Is Too Many are the ones about the children who were never allowed into Canada. In 1940, the government agreed to accept 5,000 children, but only those of British, French, Belgium or Dutch origin. Even Jewish refugee children living in Britain were refused. Throughout the war years, heartbreaking appeals were made at various times to accept Jewish children. All were denied.

There are so many moving stories in None Is Too Many. Here is one: "Work came to an abrupt halt one morning in a factory in Winnipeg in May, 1945. Women in the plant gathered around a fellow worker. The worker had just received a letter from her sister in liberated Poland. This was the first word she had received from anyone in her family since the German invasion of Poland in the autumn of 1939 - six years earlier. Over that time, her entire extended family of 85 people had all been killed, with the exception of her sister writing this letter, and her child. The company owner appealed to the Canadian Jewish Congress to help bring over the sister and child. Everyone tried, but there was no hope of them coming. The government refused them entry."

The Immigration branch would continue, in one way or another, to keep the door to immigration for Jews as tightly closed as possible until 1949. After the war, immigration numbers went up a bit, though not immediately. Still, there were many obstacles put in the way of Jews coming to Canada, and many negative reactions to Holocaust survivors. Even after the war.

I urge you all to read None is Too Many, and keep retelling these stories so we can remember, and do our part. In this way, maybe we can contribute to building the compassionate and caring Canada that I once thought had always existed.

As eloquently written in None Is Too Many: "Never again should none be too many."