Frankfurt Yeshiva Boys in Captivity in Canada

In Tishrei 5701 (October 30th, 1940), an article titled “Yeshiva Bochrim Alles Kreegs Gefangeneh” (Yeshiva Boys as Prisoners of War) was published in the Der Tog newspaper in New York.

The article, whose subtitle reads “Letter from Canada by B. Levinson,” tells about the concentration camps, scattered across Canada, where Nazi prisoners of war lived together with Jews from Germany who were captured by the British army and held together in difficult conditions.

The number of Jewish prisoners, according to the newspaper, was then over two thousand, most of them Jews who escaped from Germany to England before the outbreak of the war, with the intention of staying there or immigrating from there to other places.

Some of the Jews living then in those difficult conditions and were defined as “enemy aliens,” according to the newspaper, held visas for the United States (more precisely: visa numbers), some of them were oriented towards Latin America, and some of them, about 250 in number, were “pioneers” who left Germany to England on the way to the Land of Israel.

The newspaper continued and told:

One group, and perhaps the most interesting of them, is the group of about fifty boys, students of the old yeshiva in Frankfurt am Main. The boys who escaped from Germany to England are held in a “certain place” in Canada, in a POW camp separate from the other POWs. This group has a Torah scroll and other holy books that the Jewish community obtained for them. And so they sit in their yeshiva surrounded by the barbed wire fence (of the rulers).

They eat kosher, and study persistently, and intentionally, just as if there is no war in the world now, as if they are not victims of this war, as if their camp was a totally normal yeshiva.

Later on, the newspaper continues to describe the situation of the Jews imprisoned in Canada and tells about the mobilization of 160 thousand Canadian Jews to help their captive brothers, and about the automatic Canadian aid to England’s war effort.

“Der Tog” was a liberal Yiddish daily, with no affiliation to a particular political party, founded on the eve of the First World War by businessmen and intellectuals, headed by Herman Bernstein, Y.L. Magnes, and Bernard Zemel. At its peak, it had over a hundred thousand subscribers. Courtesy of the National Library

For a long time, I searched for material about this old yeshiva that was exiled to Canada and the continuing path of its students, but I did not find anything. Now, I found in the archives of the “Times of Israel,” a news article published a few years ago, in which the writer criticizes the small history museum established in the city of Sherbrooke, which is two hours east of Montreal, that for some reason ignores “the strange chapter in the history of Sherbrooke: a camp where Jews, Germans, and Austrians were imprisoned during World War II.”

The news caught my eye, especially its title:

Canada is dealing with its past in the Holocaust for the first time: “We were expecting prisoners of war, and we met yeshiva boys.”

The article, I was surprised to see, deals with exactly the matter that I have been looking for for a long time, and therefore, even though the body of the article does not have a significant reference to the group of fifty yeshiva students, I will copy parts of it with editorial changes, since it sheds light on that dark issue. On this occasion, we call on anyone who has any information about the yeshiva and its students in those days, to please send it to Ganzach Kiddush Hashem so that we can complete our research on this yeshiva and bring it to the public eye.

The town of Sherbrooke, located about two hours east of Montreal, is a pleasant place to visit, especially in the temperate summer. There is a waterfall, and a promenade around a lake. In a nearby park, walkways have been built through the swamp to give city-dwellers a chance to enjoy birdsong and admire waterlilies. The town’s small history museum has recently reopened — with hand sanitizer and masked tour guides.

(Courtesy of AP)

But nothing in the museum informs visitors about a bizarre part of Sherbrooke’s history: a camp where German and Austrian Jews were held as prisoners during World War II.

In 1940, biochemist Reinhart Pariser was a student in his early 20s at the University of Cambridge in England when one day police knocked on his door and gave him 10 minutes to pack, his son, David Pariser, told The Times of Israel.

He was put on a boat crammed with German Jews and German Nazis — both labeled by the British as “enemy aliens.” Some boats went to Australia, others to Canada; he ended up on the Canadian boat by sheer coincidence.

According to Pariser, who heard the story from his father, the German soldiers were housed on the upper deck, protected by the Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners of war. The approximately 1,000 Jews were locked in the ship’s bottom compartment. Some got hammocks, others had to sleep on the metal floor. There were no toilets there, not even a bucket. On the third day of the transatlantic journey, dysentery started raging among the men.

The guards who looked after the German Jews were nasty, too,” Pariser said. “Someone told [my father] to go up and serve the German prisoners of war in the canteen. They hit him and kicked him because he refused to do that.”

In Canada, Reinhart looked out of the window of the train and saw signs that read, “No dogs or Jews allowed,” his son said.

His memories of the camp included being forced to dig holes in the snow and then fill them in again. “It was just to keep them busy,” Pariser says.

But worst of all was the camp commander, who had a sadistic streak. According to Pariser, this commander would call the men over, informing them that they received letters from home. He looked at each letter and ripped it up – without letting the prisoners read them. “My father never forgave the man who ripped up the letters. He had a recurring dream where the guy steps on the bus and my dad shoots him,” Pariser said. “One of the ships with Jewish refugees was hit by torpedoes and his parents didn’t know which ship he was on. For six months, they thought he might be dead.”

In Sherbrooke’s Camp N, the men were housed in an old train repair yard. It was cold. There was one water faucet for roughly 900 people, and only nine toilets. The men wore uniforms with a big circle on the back that looked like a target. There was barbed wire and watch towers. One prisoner lost his nerve and ran for the fence. The guards shot him.

About a year later Reinhart was released. He went back to England and joined the war effort. But other men spent years locked up.

Of the 2,284 Jewish men and boys who were held in Canadian camps — the British never arrested the women — 966 were eventually allowed to remain in the country, according to Paula Draper, a historian who wrote her PhD thesis on the Canadian internment camps for German, Austrian, and Italian Jews during the war.

Interestingly, many of those inmates went on to achieve extraordinary success.

“This small group of refugees and the enormous contributions they made is an example of what could have happened if the world had opened its doors to Jews trying to escape the Holocaust,” Draper said.

In general, Draper said, the story about the Canadian internment camps for Jews is a “complicated story.” For one, she said, the Canadians were told by the British to expect “dangerous enemy aliens.” “The military comes to the docks expecting prisoners of war and they see these 16-year-old yeshiva boys,” she said. “The Canadian government knew before they even landed, but they didn’t tell the people who were meeting them on the dock and they didn’t tell the military. And the [military] didn’t know what to make of these young people from yeshivas getting off these ships.”

But, on the other hand, it is also a story about antisemitism in Canada, and the country’s refusal to accept Jewish refugees, Draper said.

Changing attitudes in Canada

In 1962, an article was published in Canada’s Maclean’s magazine under the title “The Welcome Enemies.” Written in an upbeat tone not the least apologetic, and never mentioning antisemitism, the article describes the prison camps in a way that almost makes the reader wish to have been there:

With comparably high-class talent to draw on, the men staged endless concerts, revues, debates, mock trials, parties and bull sessions. Clad in PW issue — blue uniforms marked by a twelve-inch red target patch between the shoulder-blades and a three-inch stripe down one leg — the many scholars gave regular lectures: in English, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, philosophy and electronics, among other subjects…The internees managed to pursue their individual interests as well.

The article even finds some humour in the absurd situation wherein Nazis were imprisoned together with Jews:

By now “incidents” — even a Nazi kangaroo court and the hanging of a Jew — were being reported from all the temporary camps so an attempt was made to sort out the men. It was fairly naïve, since it consisted of a request for the men to declare themselves either Jews or non-Jews. Not only did the men resent this echo of the Nürnberg racial laws but they had grown cynical. As one of them reports it, “We Jews said to each other, ‘Listen. So when did any nation do any good to a bunch of Jews?’ So we signed up as Aryans. But the other boys were saying, ‘Listen. If we say we’re Jews it’ll convince them at last that we’re anti-Nazi.’ So they signed up as Jews.

Articles about the camps that were published in recent years in large Canadian newspapers present the story in a less positive light. A Globe and Mail article was headlined, “The Friends Canada Insisted were Foes.” A Montreal Gazette story states that anti-Semitism was a factor in why these men were interned for so long, and brings up the famous 1939 story of the ocean liner MS St. Louis, which carried 900 German Jewish refugees and was refused entrance to Canada.

In 2013, a temporary exhibit about the internment camps was put together by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center. The exhibit, which can now be accessed online, states that Canada kept the Jews behind barbed wire even after it became clear that they were neither Nazis nor a threat to the war effort.

“Although the British soon admitted their mistake, Canada, saddled with refugees it did not want, settled into a policy of inertia regarding their welfare, their status, and their release,” reads the online exhibit.

Isaac Romano, a Seattle native who founded and runs the grassroots Jewish Community Center of Eastern Townships and Montreal, was involved in bringing that exhibition to Sherbrooke. He actually went on a two-week hunger strike — only drinking juice, he says — because he wanted the city to cover the cost of the exhibit. “I believe there is still unfinished business in the city of Sherbrooke because the city of Sherbrooke should have funded the traveling exhibit. It shouldn’t have been left to the Jews to fund,” Romano told The Times of Israel.

Photo taken by prisoner Marcel Seidler in Sherbrooke camp, around 1940-1942. Seidler secretly documented camp life using a pinhole camera he made himself (Photo: Marcel Seidler/Courtesy Eric Koch/National Library and Archives of Canada)

Romano also believes that the city should apologize for the prison camp, and that there should be a plaque on the spot where it was located.

“The mayor of Sherbrooke and the City Council should provide a formal apology for allowing the city location to imprison young Jewish men who did not harm anyone and should have been allowed to become citizens,” he said. “All of it is associated with the anti-Semitism in Quebec during that period.”

But not everyone is asking for an apology. Rabbi Erwin Schild, a 100-year-old (Note: Rabbi Schild has since passed away in January 2024) former German-Jewish internee who now lives in Toronto, is not worried about a plaque or an exhibition in the museum. “I don’t think about monuments. We only need fair immigration rules,” he said.

(The excerpt ends here)

Who are the group of “16-year-old boys,” the students of the old Frankfurt Yeshiva, who were exiled to Canada, and even there in the land of their enemies, under conditions of arrest and suffering, disregarded what was happening to them and studied the Torah with diligence and enthusiasm?

What was the continuation of their journey, where did they end up, and are any of them still alive, to tell the world and its inhabitants that “All this befell us, and we did not forget You, and we did not desecrate Your covenant” (Psalms 44:18), and “Were not Your Torah my occupation, then I would have perished in my affliction” (Psalms 119:92)?…

To view the original Times of Israel article, by Julie Masis, please click here.