“There were cries of joy, some of sorrow”: Canadian Jewish Soldiers and Early Encounters with Survivors

Auteurs-es

  • Richard Menkis

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-0925.40108

Résumé

A close study of the early contacts between Canadian Jewish soldiers and survivors reveals many of the features largely associated only with the “liberation” of the camps in 1945. Already in 1944, in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Canadian soldiers had encountered evidence of the Holocaust, especially the stories of deportations, deprivation and loss told by Jews emerging from hiding. Many soldiers heard the stories, were deeply affected by them, and reached out to the survivors and wrote about their experiences to family members. Some accounts of these encounters appeared in the Canadian Jewish press. These accounts fed into a homefront discourse and strategy, encouraged by the Canadian Jewish Congress, which sought to demonstrate to both Jews and non-Jews the role of Canadian Jews in the war effort and the need to help European Jewry.

Références

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Canadian War Museum (Ottawa), J. Greenblatt fonds, Accession number 19990209-002, file 58A 1 155.3-6, Joseph Greenblatt to Francis Trachtenberg, 17 October 1944.

Chaya Brasz, Removing the Yellow Badge: The Struggle for a Jewish Community in the Postwar Netherlands, 1944-1955 (Jerusalem: Institute for Research on Dutch Jewry, 1995), 43-47.

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Norman Erwin, “The Holocaust: Canadian Jews, and Canada’s ‘Good War’ Against Nazism,” Canadian Jewish Studies 26 (2016), 117-118.

Richard Menkis, “‘But you can’t see the fear that people lived through’: Canadian Jewish Chaplains and Canadian encounters with Dutch survivors, 1944-1945,” American Jewish Archives 60, no. 1-2 (2008): 24-50.

S. Gershon Levi, Breaking New Ground: The Struggle for a Jewish Chaplaincy in Canada, ed. David Golinkin (Montreal: National Archives Canadian Jewish Congress, 1994), 65.

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Publié-e

2019-06-03

Comment citer

Menkis, R. (2019). “There were cries of joy, some of sorrow”: Canadian Jewish Soldiers and Early Encounters with Survivors. Canadian Jewish Studies Études Juives Canadiennes. https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-0925.40108

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