Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada
Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada

Author: Jan Raska

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2018-08-24

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 0887555705

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During the Cold War, more than 36,000 individuals entering Canada claimed Czechoslovakia as their country of citizenship. A defining characteristic of this migration of predominantly political refugees was the prevalence of anti-communist and democratic values. Diplomats, industrialists, politicians, professionals, workers, and students fled to the West in search of freedom, security, and economic opportunity. Jan Raska’s Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada explores how these newcomers joined or formed ethnocultural organizations to help in their attempts to affect developments in Czechoslovakia and Canadian foreign policy towards their homeland. Canadian authorities further legitimized the Czech refugees’ anti-communist agenda and increased their influence in Czechoslovak institutions. In turn, these organizations supported Canada’s Cold War agenda of securing the state from communist infiltration. Ultimately, an adherence to anti-communism, the promotion of Canadian citizenship, and the cultivation of a Czechoslovak ethnocultural heritage accelerated Czech refugees’ socioeconomic and political integration in Cold War Canada. By analyzing oral histories, government files, ethnic newspapers, and community archival records, Raska reveals how Czech refugees secured admission as desirable immigrants and navigated existing social, cultural, and political norms in Cold War Canada.

Elusive Refuge
Elusive Refuge

Author: Laura Madokoro

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2016-09-26

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0674971515

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Laura Madokoro recovers the lost history of millions of displaced Chinese who fled the Communist Revolution and recounts humanitarian efforts to find homes for them outside China. Entrenched bigotry in predominantly white countries, the spread of human rights, Cold War geopolitics, and the Vietnam War shaped refugee policies that still hold sway.

Holocaust Survivors in Canada
Holocaust Survivors in Canada

Author: Adara Goldberg

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2015-09-11

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 0887554946

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In the decade after the Second World War, 35,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution and their dependants arrived in Canada. This was a watershed moment in Canadian Jewish history. The unprecedented scale of the relief effort required for the survivors, compounded by their unique social, psychological, and emotional needs challenged both the established Jewish community and resettlement agents alike. Adara Goldberg’s Holocaust Survivors in Canada highlights the immigration, resettlement, and integration experience from the perspective of Holocaust survivors and those charged with helping them. The book explores the relationships between the survivors, Jewish social service organizations, and local Jewish communities; it considers how those relationships—strained by disparities in experience, language, culture, and worldview—both facilitated and impeded the ability of survivors to adapt to a new country. Researched in basement archives and as well as at Holocaust survivors’ kitchen tables, Holocaust Survivors in Canada represents the first comprehensive analysis of the resettlement, integration, and acculturation experience of survivors in early postwar Canada. Goldberg reveals the challenges in responding to, and recovering from, genocide—not through the lens of lawmakers, but from the perspective of “new Canadians” themselves.

Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991
Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991

Author: Andrea Chandler

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2024-10-31

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9633867738

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How democratic regimes should engage with authoritarian regimes, or self-proclaimed authorities in states under occupation, has long been a subject of debate. The work examines Canada's relations with member-states of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. Central and East European communist states were nominally independent but established under occupation. Canadian leaders explored whether engaging in foreign relations with these countries would encourage liberalization or embolden dictatorships. Over time, Canada's position evolved as a policy of encouraging bilateral and multilateral diplomacy, while calling for the respect of human rights. However, Canada's economic relationship with East European states was at times at cross-purposes with its democratic principles. Andrea Chandler concludes that while Canada did play a role in encouraging democratization, the country's leaders did not sufficiently consider the impact of these policies on the citizens of Warsaw Pact countries. This book treats Canada’s engagement with Hungary, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakiaduring the Cold War, in which the Western countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (including Canada) had an adversarial relation with the Soviet bloc nations.

Before Official Multiculturalism
Before Official Multiculturalism

Author: Franca Iacovetta

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2022-11-01

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 1487545657

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For almost two decades before Canada officially adopted multiculturalism in 1971, a large network of women and their allies in Toronto were promoting pluralism as a city- and nation-building project. Before Official Multiculturalism assesses women as liberal pluralist advocates and activists, critically examining the key roles they played as community organizers, frontline social workers, and promoters of ethnic festivals. The book explores women’s community-based activism in support of a liberal pluralist vision of multiculturalism through an analysis of the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto, a postwar agency that sought to integrate newcomers into the mainstream and promote cultural diversity. Drawing on the rich records of the Institute, as well as the massive International Institutes collection in Minnesota, the book situates Toronto within its Canadian and North American contexts and addresses the flawed mandate to integrate immigrants and refugees into an increasingly diverse city. Before Official Multiculturalism engages with national and international debates to provide a critical analysis of women’s pluralism in Canada.

The Last Million
The Last Million

Author: David Nasaw

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 069840663X

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From bestselling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII In May 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of global military conflict did not cease with the German capitulation. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate refugees and attempted to repatriate them. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained more than a million displaced persons left behind in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. The Last Million would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, temporary homelands in exile divided by nationality, with their own police forces, churches and synagogues, schools, newspapers, theaters, and infirmaries. The international community could not agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of debate and inaction, the International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. In 1948, the United States, among the last countries to accept refugees for resettlement, finally passed a displaced persons bill. With Cold War fears supplanting memories of World War II atrocities, the bill granted the vast majority of visas to those who were reliably anti-Communist, including thousands of former Nazi collaborators and war criminals, while severely limiting the entry of Jews, who were suspected of being Communist sympathizers or agents because they had been recent residents of Soviet-dominated Poland. Only after the controversial partition of Palestine and Israel's declaration of independence were the remaining Jewish survivors able to leave their displaced persons camps in Germany. A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping yet until now largely hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness. By 1952, the Last Million were scattered around the world. As they crossed from their broken past into an unknowable future, they carried with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and, with profound contemporary resonance, shows us that it is our history as well.

The Constructed Mennonite
The Constructed Mennonite

Author: Hans Werner

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2013-05-15

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0887554385

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John Werner was a storyteller. A Mennonite immigrant in southern Manitoba, he captivated his audiences with tales of adventure and perseverance. With every telling he constructed and reconstructed the memories of his life. John Werner was a survivor. Born in the Soviet Union just after the Bolshevik Revolution, he was named Hans and grew up in a German-speaking Mennonite community in Siberia. As a young man in Stalinist Russia, he became Ivan and fought as a Red Army soldier in the Second World War. Captured by Germans, he was resettled in occupied Poland where he became Johann, was naturalized and drafted into Hitler’s German army where he served until captured and placed in an American POW camp. He was eventually released and then immigrated to Canada where he became John. The Constructed Mennonite is a unique account of a life shaped by Stalinism, Nazism, migration, famine, and war. It investigates the tenuous spaces where individual experiences inform and become public history; it studies the ways in which memory shapes identity, and reveals how context and audience shape autobiographical narratives.

East Central European Migrations During the Cold War
East Central European Migrations During the Cold War

Author: Anna Mazurkiewicz

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-05-06

Total Pages: 717

ISBN-13: 3110607905

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"An extremely useful and much needed survey. Over eleven chapters, authors from eight countries cover the complex history of migration from the perspective of Central and Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1993. Following in the footsteps of Klaus Bade’s Encyclopedia of European Migrations, the authors make extensive use of sources in national languages, while providing an extensive overview of population movements in the region between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas. The individual chapters shed light on phenomena overlooked in other volumes, including individual state reactions to various migratory phenomenon, and the political, economic, and ideological consequences of human movement. The chapters of this volume are uniform not only in their informative nature, but also in suggesting new pathways for in-depth research." Adam Walaszek, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland "Eastern Europe is an emblematic space of mobility and its Cold War history cannot be told without considering migration from and into the countries of the region. This volume comes at a timely moment and provides a uniquely comprehensive account, full with useful information for further research. It will be a must-read both for migration studies scholars and for area specialists." Ulf Brunnbauer, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany "The Handbook is a gift to students of migration on three counts. It gathers the expertise of scholars fluent in the languages – and familiar with the archives – of Eastern and Central Europe. Thus it brings the multi-layered and complex histories of movement beyond the flat descriptor of "Soviet bloc" or Eastern European migrations. The Handbook is both rich and lucid, presenting in-depth materials on the European twentieth-century, on one hand, and organizing each chapter in a similar way, offering the reader transparently comparable histories. From Estonia south to Albania, and from the USSR west to the GDR, each chapter elucidates a complex migration history distinguished by national politics, ethnic composition, and economics – moving from the cataclysmic impacts of World War II to the international migrations and politics of Cold War movement, as well as the politics of Cold War emigrants themselves. Each chapter ends with an epilogue on post-1989 international migrations and a valuable addendum on published and archival sources. Finally, the Handbook models the kind of high quality work produced by international scholarly cooperation at its best." Leslie Page Moch, Michigan State University Table of contents Introduction (Anna Mazurkiewicz) Albania (Agata Domachowska) Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (Pauli Heikkilä) Bulgaria (Detelina Dineva) Czechoslovakia (Michael Cude and Ellen Paul) Germany (Bethany Hicks) Hungary (Katalin Kádár Lynn) Poland (Sławomir Łukasiewicz) Romania (Beatrice Scutaru) Ukraine (Anna Fiń) USSR (Alexey Antoshin) Yugoslavia (Brigitte Le Normand)

Pier 21
Pier 21

Author: Steven Schwinghamer

Publisher: University of Ottawa Press

Published: 2020-08-26

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0776631373

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Between 1928 and 1971, nearly one million immigrants landed in Canada at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. During those years, it was one of the main ocean immigration facilities in Canada, including when it welcomed home nearly 400,000 Canadians after service overseas during the Second World War. In the immediate postwar period, Pier 21 became the busiest ocean port of entry in the country. Today, people across Canada still enjoy connections to Pier 21 through family history and stories of arrival at the site. Since 1998, researchers at the Pier 21 Interpretive Centre and now the Canadian Museum of Immigration have been conducting interviews, reviewing archival materials, gathering written stories, and acquiring photographs, documents, and other objects reflecting the history of Pier 21. Pier 21: A History builds upon the resulting collection. It presents a history of this important Canadian ocean immigration facility during its years of operation and later emergence as a site of public commemoration. Published in English. Also available in French: Quai 21: Une histoire.