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None is too many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948

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'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.

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.

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.

The quote "None is too many" is attributed to "an anonymous immigration agent", supposedly uttered over 70 years ago. That's pretty convenient. If you manufacture the premise, you can pretty much proceed in any direction you like. You can attribute anything to an anonymous source and massage the context to suit any purpose. Taking a swipe at Canada, whose citizens sacrificed much to put Hitler out of business (before he was able to fully implement "the final solution"), is downright ungrateful and more than a tad disingenuous.

I, for one, do not believe the premise that everything Canada did or did not do was rooted in anti-Semitism.

To call this a work of history is a very long stretch. Moreover, this book minimizes a couple of other, relatively minor historical events the other reviewers may have heard of; namely The Great Depression and WWII.

In 1938 at the Evian Conference, inaction ruled the day because Hitler promised he had nothing bad in mind for the Jews and the other "undesirables". He also had Chamberlain (an idiot) and Stalin convinced that war was not in the cards. Thus it was reasonable for the conference participants to conclude that they had time to act on behalf of the Jews if things got worse. This book fails to recognize that once war had been declared, or even earlier if we use Kristallnacht as the defining moment (November, 1938 vs. July 1938 for the Evian Conference), it was too late to help the Jews.

Once war had begun, do the authors believe the allies (without the USA 'til the start of 1942) could just trot past enemy lines saying "excuse us, please don't shoot, we're just going to pop into your country to save the Jews and we'll be on our way, thank you"?

The authors' minimize The Great Depression in terms of its affect on immigration policies. To import penniless immigrants who would compete for already scarce jobs, inescapably driving down labor rates in the process was politically untenable for any government of the day. One of the other reviewers states a few thousand dollars would have been more than sufficient to sustain the entire population of Canada at the time for an indefinite period. You might want to revisit the math on that statement as Canada's population was about TEN MILLION during the 1930's!

Saying Canada "sentenced the Jews to death" is absurd. In my opinion, this book does the Jewish people a great disservice by lashing out at Canada. Blame is a fickle mistress.

Lastly, this "holier than thou" book fails to juxtapose Israel's immigration policies. I defy anyone to claim Israel does anywhere near as much as Canada. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. "But Canada is much bigger and it doesn't have the defense challenges Israel has to deal with." That might sway my opinion if Israel didn't openly restrict immigration to Jews.

By the treatment of Palestinians and land-grabbing tactics, Israel is making Judaism the new Fascism.

This book is a bitter work of fiction. Alienating friends, like Canada, is a bad idea.

None is Too Many is a must read for any Canadian as well as anyone interested in Government and politics. It details the tragic events of the Holocaust and the even more tragic actions of the Canadian Government. A real shocker that should be read and passed down over and over again.

That first reviewer obviously sums up what the Canadians thought about Jews. What good is letting us into the country AFTER the war?

An important study of the discriminatory immigration policies Canada had in the interwar period this book is nevertheless flawed for advocating, very effectively but not very historically, that only Jews suffered from racist attitudes against their immigration. Many other communities, before, during and after the Second World War, were victims of racial profiling and stereotypical attitudes that resulted in their exclusion or limitations being placed on the numbers admitted. And after the war, despite the apparent biases of a very small minority of Canadian officials, Jews were actually given preferential treatment in coming to Canada, a trend that has continued to the present day (we are still getting Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, some claiming to be "refugees"). This is a valuable contribution to Canadian immigration history and certainly presents a pro-Jewish position forcefully, but it is only a partial and somewhat polemical account of a subject that is far more complex than here presented.