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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Canada's shameful record on Jewish Immigration during WWII,
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This review is from: None is Too Many Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948 (Hardcover)
'None is Too Many.' Thus spake an anonymous member of Prime Minister Mackenzie King's cabinet just prior to and during WW11 about Jewish immigration to Canada.
Thus, the title of this book of shame, written by Professors Irving Arabella and Harold Troper and published by Lester & Orpen Dennys, Toronto in 1982. Despite being a Holocaust researcher, I came to this book very late. In fact, until I read 'Kristallnacht' by Martn Gilbert and checked out a reference, I didn't even know it was on the market. I had, however, heard about the statement: 'None is Too Many.' That sets the whole tone of this book. Although the U.S. also did not have anything close to an exemplary record on accepting Jewish immigrants, Canada's record is even worse. So that, anyone in the U.S.or anywhere else who considers Canada 'a kinder, gentler U.S.' can forget that stereotype right now. The book - and the idiots in the Canadian Federal governement at the time - blame the French, notably in Quebec, saying they were far too prejudiced to allow, ever, the immigration of Jews. Many times in Canada, the French - and their threat to secede from the country - are blamed for policies that the feds won't enact. Although this would be true 10% of the time, it cannot be true 100% of the time. And in this case, it was ministers within the government who were extremely prejudiced. One Jewish person even deposited thousands and thousands of dollars in a Canadian bank on the understanding that this would support him and his family (he could have, at that time, supported most of Canada's small population with the amount) when they immigrated. But after stalling him endlessly, the Canadian immigration office turned down his plea to come to a safe land. I don't think he lived through the Holocaust and I don't know who received his large bank account: no doubt the Feds. Let's not forget that at this time and in the ensuing years, the Germans developed a state-mandated policy to wipe out by murder, all of the European Jews. And Hitler couldn't wait to win the war and also wipe out all of the Jews in North America, he indicated. Six million European Jews were murdered by the Germans and in the meantime, to my shame, the Canadian government did nothing but stall, raise fruitless hope and misdirect. I am so ashamed of my country's record that I am having a hard time finishing this book. As I stated, I am a Holocaust researcher and have read some horrendous records. But this book, I suppose, is too close to home for me. I doubt if I will ever finish it, since the title says it all: for Canada, none was too many. Still, I would strongly recommend this book for all Holocaust researchers. Despite its shame, it does at least set the record straight on Canada's non-role and non-performance when all its space and land - and heart - was needed.
7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A skeleton in the closet,
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This review is from: None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948 (Paperback)
A great country, Canada, but the response to the crisis in Europe caused by the rise of Hitler is a shameful chapter, something almost never talked about for the simple reason that it is not widely known. One cannot read this book without coming to a startling conclusion: that Canada (along with the U.S. and Britain and many other countries) was complicit in the deaths of millions of Jews. The door to this (mostly empty) promised land was slammed shut, with a bureaucrat named Fredrick Charles Blair playing the role of gatekeeper, as good a Nazi as Hitler or Heydrich or Himmler or Eichmann, a straight-laced, stiff-upper-lipped, white Anglo-Saxon male who did everything in his power to keep the legions of anti-Semites in Canada happy by ensuring that the targeted Jews of Europe had no chance of securing refuge on these shores. The details read like fiction, especially when one evaluates this history against the picture that Canada likes to paint of itself today as an accepting, peace-loving, benevolent and humanitarian society. This book documents political ineptitude and bureaucratic blindness at its worst. At times the prose is plodding but the overall read is more than worthwhile.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book gains in relevance over the years,
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This review is from: None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948 (Paperback)
I first read "None Is Too Many" twenty years ago. Just recently I have reread this magnificent work of history and I am even more impressed. "Magnificent ?" Yes, truly so. Nowhere have I found a more accurate discourse of this subject. This book is a world class document for the ages ahead. May our children's children weep for the folly of mankind in its blindness and inhumanity. The authors describe on a day to day basis the Nazi horror and the indifference of the Canadian Government and the Canadian people of that terrible time. I excerpt one page so that you may judge the quality of the writing and the horror of the times:
The Line Must Be Drawn Somewhere/53 like if my son's talent would not be wasted. . . . You would save the future of the grandchild of a rabbi." A seventeen- year-old boy, the son of "respectable parents of the Jewish middle class," wrote from Berlin on behalf of himself. As a Jew, he said, he could neither work nor survive in Germany. He had to leave, and was therefore begging for admission to Canada. From Czechoslovakia a group of two hundred farm families, "with a total of one million dollars in capital," begged for entry visas. They were aware that "the Canadian government dislikes ... to get any Jews into the country," yet had no other choice but to leave their homeland before the Nazis arrived. For the twelve members of the Zuckermann family of Austria, the situation was almost hopeless. As Samuel Zuckermann wrote to the Jewish Colonization Association, "In great distress and desperation a whole family directs itself to you with an appeal for help. ... We have here no possibility whatsoever to maintain ourselves. If no assistance will come to us forth- with, we shall all go under. Please help us and save us. You are our last hope." Even more poignant was the position of Leopold Kluger and his family. A wealthy Jewish merchant, Kluger had been imprisoned in Vienna on Kristallnacht and was released only on condition that he leave Austria by April 1939. Canada was his last hope; he was, he said, in a "state of despondency beyond description" and would soon be dead if he could not find refuge. Similarly, Professor Maximilian Low, a renowned linguist, asked Jewish officials in Canada if they could find a way to admit him and his family. "We have lost," he wrote, 'all rights of existence and life as human beings. To each of these letters the response of Jewish organizations was the same: "Though we sympathize . . . with your plight, ... the Canadian government is not yet admitting Jewish refugees. ... try some other country." But for the Steins, Zuckermanns, Klugers and Lows, for the thousands of Jews trying to get into Canada, there were no other countries. Of course the cries of these Jews were also heard by the Canadian government, through letters or Jewish Immigrant Aid Society and Congress intermediaries. "We are almost inundated," Blair complained to Conservative opposition leader Robert Minion, "with applications for the admission of Jewish people from the whole Continent of Europe. In all the years I have been connected with Immigration, I have never seen anything like it. Thus the authors take us through Kristallnacht, the terror in Poland, the aftermath of the war and the refugee camps. If you have tears to shed, prepare to shed them now.
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