NEWS AND VIEWS: Remembering Kingston's Moses and Canada's internment camps (03/31/02)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Remembering Kingston's Moses and Canada's internment camps

by Lubomyr Luciuk

I never met him but I know he had chutzpah. His name was Isaac Cohen. He owned a scrapyard on Montreal Street in Kingston's North End. I lived south of Princess but played with other kids at the Bagot Street Ukrainian Hall. Fondly, I remember buying penny candies from the grumpy old guy who ran the long-gone North Street corner store, or sneaking around the Davis Tannery, across from Ivan and Motria Gadowsky's home, sometimes trekking further, in odyssey to the very gates of Cohen's domains, though never daring a venture in.

Those North End neighborhoods were populated by all sorts of East European families, by boys with surnames as odd-sounding as mine - Polomany, Tanovich, Tarvicz, Yankovic. Not that we were friends. Sure, they were Catholics, but their kind hadn't been good to Ukrainians in the "old country." So it wasn't until I went to high school, to Regi, that we met. But they remained Polacks or Russkies, and I a Bohunk, expletives deleted. Decades passed before those attitudes faded. Prejudices are perennials.

And there were the Irish, lots of them. The red-haired, much-freckled Brian O'Brien not only treated me to buttered bread, oven-toasted and powdered with cinnamon, but boasted that the Irish had their own North End plot, Skeleton Park. That sounded cool. Years would pass before I swooned for an Irish-Canadian lass or understood why the bones of Celtic immigrants came to be sewn into the soil of Kingston's working class quarter.

I knew nothing of the Cohens. The only Jews I met were the family of Harold Marans, my father's boss at Brock Jewelers, a friend to the Luciuks. He taught my dad to drive, brought our first black and white TV, helped when I went to Queen's, and, for years, broke matzo bread with us at Passover.

I knew that had to do with the Biblical Hebrews fleeing bondage and being determined not to forget it. But why include us? Because, I was taught, Jews had been driven from their homeland, much as my parents had been forced from Ukraine, a country which, in those days, nobody except others like us would even admit existed. So, rich or poor, Jew or Christian, we were much alike - exiles, outsiders.

We had nothing in common with Kingston's patricians, the "Old Stones." True, some Ontario Street corners were rough in the 1960s. Positioning yourself outside the Indian Room saloon almost guaranteed a Saturday evening's spectacle, "the fights." But those domiciled in the more genteel reaches of this city's very own South, the "Blue Bloods" of Sydenham Ward, denizens of venues like the Yacht Club, otherwise lived lives truly off limits to us proletarians. Even if a few "foreigners" ran boarding houses around Queen's, those Kingston cantons were turf rarely intruded upon, save for occasional trips into the public space of Macdonald Park, there to clamber onto its sentry lion.

I never wondered why that bronze beast was posted there, defiantly roaring at those living on the other side of Lake Ontario. This most unconditional reminder of British Empire, a rampart guard, was just another in a cityscape infused with telltales of who this city's and country's rulers were. Obviously, not us.

An even more imposing presence perched above. Sometimes we got a Sunday visit there, to Fort Henry. Running around the walls and clambering into surrounding moats was a lad's delight. I did not know this fortress had been the first of 24 camps into which "enemy aliens" were herded during Canada's first national internment operations. Although German POWs were detained, most were "second-class" civilian internees, Ukrainians intermingled with Serbs, Croats, Hungarians and other Eastern Europeans, categorized as "Austrians" since most came from the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire.

When I began master's research, I met a survivor of the fort, Nykola Sakaliuk. He recalled what was done to him and the others. Thousands of men, and some women and children, were rounded up, compelled to do heavy labor under trying conditions, to others' profit. What little they had was confiscated. Mr. Sakaliuk never learned that a portion of that looted wealth remains in the Bank of Canada's coffers.

I was never taught this. These internment operations had a crippling impact on Ukrainian Canadian society. Yet establishment historians have ignored evidence like an RCMP report which confirmed that, even decades later, many Ukrainians were still "in fear of the barbed wire fence."

While investigating this blank page in our nation's history I, by chance, read an amazing story in the Daily British Whig. Within a few weeks of the war's outbreak, in mid-September 1914, when wartime xenophobia was intense, Isaac Cohen marched manfully up Fort Henry hill. A Jew was held there, misidentified as German. This hapless fellow, Mr. Cohen reassured the powers that were, was actually Russian. So he was freed. While others would later be paroled, as labor shortages grew acute following the slaughters in the abattoir that was the Western Front, I know of no other instance of anyone plucky enough to secure an internee's release.

My notes about Mr. Cohen's pilgrimage up the very same hill I so naively ran down as a boy were discarded, long ago. But he reportedly intervened again that winter, to deliver three more captives, Galician Jews, in time to celebrate Chanukkhah. And so I have come to think of Isaac Cohen as Kingston's Moses, a North End Jew with the chutzpah to enter a Canadian concentration camp out of which he led his people to freedom, during the very peculiar Passover that took place in what once was the King's Town.

Prof. Lubomyr Luciuk teaches geography at the Royal Military College. His most recent book is "In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence: Canada's First National Internment Operations and the Ukrainian Canadians, 1914-1920" (Kashtan Press, 2001).

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