Pier 21

Pivotal role in Pier 21

Ruth Goldbloom stands in Nation Builder Plaza in front of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax. (photo from CMI at Pier 21)

The museum at Pier 21: National Historic Site opened on Canada Day, 1999. Built to commemorate the almost one million immigrants who passed through Halifax’s Pier 21 between 1928 and 1971, it was renamed the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 and designated as a national museum in 2011.

But back to June 30, 1999, the day before it all began. There was a luncheon for the people who had helped turn a shed on the water into a comprehensive museum. Chief among them was Ruth Goldbloom, without whom the museum likely never would have been established. Goldbloom was chair of the Pier 21 Society from 1993 to 1999, and remained active on the board afterward. In 2004, she created and chaired the Pier 21 Foundation, a role that she maintained until just before her death in 2012.

Also present at the luncheon was Rosalie Silberman Abella, who passed through Pier 21 in 1950 as a 4-year-old refugee. In 2004, she became the first Jewish woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada.

At the luncheon, Silberman Abella shared two stories. Her parents were married in Poland the day that the Second World War broke out, she said. Her infant brother was killed, and her father’s side of the family was wiped out in the Holocaust. Her parents spent four years in concentration camps, but both survived. In 1946, Silberman Abella was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany.

“It was their way of proving to the world – and themselves – that their spirit was not broken,” she said in her speech, referring to her parents.

After years of trying, the Silbermans were granted entry into Canada. Silberman Abella’s father, a lawyer by trade, was not permitted to practise law in Canada until he became a citizen – but he couldn’t wait the five years it would take to become a citizen to work, as he had a young family to support. So, he became an insurance agent, and inspired his daughter to go into law. He died just before she graduated.

“But he knew somehow it would turn out alright for his family because he was confident in Canada’s generosity,” said Silberman Abella at the lunch. “And how generous it has been! The child my parents had to rebuild their hearts in Germany in 1946 became a judge in Canada in 1976. Remarkable.”

Canada Day, she continued, is her birthday. And what better present could there be than coming back to Pier 21?

“I will never forget how lucky we were to be able to come to Canada, but I will also never forget why we came,” she said. “These are the two stories which complete me – one joyful and one painful – and which merge in the next generation into a mother’s irrevocable gratitude to a country which has made it possible for her children to have only one story – the joyful story, the Canadian story, the story that started at Pier 21.”

Every immigrant has their two stories, at least, from before and after coming to Canada. And countless many of these stories would have been lost to time, a bit more detail lost with each retelling, were it not for the efforts of Goldbloom.

Goldbloom was born Ruth Schwartz in New Waterford, N.S., on Dec. 5, 1923. She was known for her family’s hardware store and for her tap dancing.

“This sense of charity and giving back to the community – at all the community fundraisers and anything, she would always dance at those events, so the spirit was always in her,” said Carrie-Ann Smith, chief of audience engagement at Pier 21.

Smith was one of Pier 21’s first employees. She started working there in 1998, before the museum opened, and continued working with Goldbloom until Goldbloom passed away.

“She just stayed, she just kept volunteering. She was constantly here. She never had an office, we always moved her around,” said Smith of Goldbloom. “I miss her so much.”

The idea to turn Pier 21 into a national site started with J.P. LeBlanc, founding president of the Pier 21 Society. LeBlanc was a retired immigration officer with the modest goal of acquiring an Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada plaque to put on the outside of the old Pier 21 building. Before he could complete his goal, however, he developed bone cancer. Around that time, he attended a Dalhousie graduation ceremony where Goldbloom was giving the convocation address.

“This was the ’80s, when people really weren’t looking back and thinking of Canada as a country of immigrants,” said Smith. “And that was the theme of [Goldbloom’s] talk, that we as a country have never really thanked our immigrants. [LeBlanc] knew that he was going to get much sicker, and he was really taken with what she said and how passionate she was about honouring the immigrants that built Canada.”

LeBlanc asked Goldbloom if she would take over the Pier 21 Society, and she did. She began fundraising almost immediately, and decided that a simple plaque wasn’t enough. For years, she worked to create the museum. She traveled the country on her own money, raising awareness and funds about the project, and used her knowledge to lobby the government.

In 1995, Halifax hosted the G7 Summit. Traditionally, the summit’s host city receives a gift and, for Halifax, it was a promise from then-prime minister Jean Chrétien to help build a museum at Pier 21. The deal was, if Goldbloom could raise $4.5 million, then the municipal, provincial and federal levels of government would work together to match that donation.

“It sounds so modest now,” said Smith of the $9 million that brought the museum into being.

photo - The Wheel of Conscience commemorates the voyage of the St. Louis, whose 937 Jewish refugee passengers were refused entry into Canada and other countries in 1939 — The Wheel of Conscience commemorates the voyage of the St. Louis, whose 937 Jewish refugee passengers were refused entry into Canada and other countries in 1939. *(photo from CMI at Pier 21)*

When it opened, the museum contained exhibits about the history of immigration in Canada, as well as a database of more than one million immigration records. Smith remembers the very first person who ever asked for an immigration record.

“When I showed her the record, she started crying,” said Smith. “I just didn’t realize how profound the impact of that [immigration record] collection was going to be. Her husband had just died days before, and she wanted to make sure she had the original European spelling of his last name on his grave.”

Marianne Ferguson is another woman who received a surprise on the first day the museum opened. (See “Making Canada home.”) Ferguson had come through Pier 21 in March 1939, a Polish immigrant who had escaped Europe months before the start of the Second World War. While the pier was put to military use during the war, Ferguson volunteered there once it reopened, helping refugees get settled in Canada.

By 1999, Ferguson was an established member of the Halifax Jewish community. She would always ask Goldbloom to help her out at shul, but Goldbloom was too busy. To make it up to Ferguson, Goldbloom planned a surprise for her on the opening day.

“When I got to the pier, I didn’t know what to look for,” said Ferguson. “[Goldbloom] said, ‘I’m not going to tell you, you have to find it yourself.’ And I didn’t know, what am I looking for?… I had my son Randy with me that day, he says, ‘Oh, come here, here’s something from you.’”

It was a quote from an essay Ferguson had written in 1942 as a 16-year-old schoolgirl in Canada: “Everyone asked them to take us with them, but that, too, was impossible.” The essay can be found on Pier 21’s website. The “everyone” refers to Ferguson’s extended family, all of whom died in the Holocaust.

Ferguson only had kind words to say about Goldbloom, calling her “the heart of Pier 21.”

Goldbloom would prove that multiple times over the years.

“By about 2002, 2003, it was getting pretty rough to pay the bills,” said Smith. “It was just really a shed on the waterfront, one of the windiest spots in the country, and it was expensive to heat and light … when you’re a National Historic Site, we had that status by then, that just means they can’t tear down the building. That’s all it means, it didn’t come with any funding.”

So, Goldbloom decided to set up a foundation to raise money for the museum. Instead of going door-to-door and asking a million people for $7, she decided to ask seven people for $1 million. These people would be called “Nation Builders.”

“When she had the six Nation Builders, all of her friends chipped in and made her the seventh Nation Builder,” said Smith. “That allowed us to have an endowment. That’s what she wanted – that security for us.”

This year, to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary, the museum is putting on a special exhibit called Canada: Day 1, which looks at what the first day in Canada is like for arriving immigrants. Since Goldbloom was born in Canada, she never had that experience. But, as she would regularly point out, the only indigenous people in Nova Scotia are the Mi’kmaq – almost everyone living in Canada can connect their history to an immigrant at some point. She dedicated much of her life to commemorating immigrants’ contributions to this country and her story is inextricably entwined with that of Canadian immigration and Pier 21.

Alex Rose is a master’s student in journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax. He graduated from the same school in 2016 with a double major in creative writing and religious studies, and loves all things basketball. He wrote this article as part of an internship with the Jewish Independent.

Making Canada home

Marianne, left, with her father, Otto Echt, and sister Brigitte. (photo from Canadian Museum of Immigration [CMI] at Pier 21)

Marianne Ferguson’s family missed the train that was supposed to take them to Montreal from Halifax. Just 13 at the time, she and her sister were mostly excited at the prospect of something new, although they were sorry to leave friends and family behind in Europe. Their parents, however, were apprehensive, worried about starting a new life in a foreign country. And that was before they got stuck in Halifax – where, almost eight decades later, Ferguson, née Echt, still calls home.

In Europe, the Echts had lived in a little resort town called Brosen, just outside of the Free City of Danzig, which is today the Polish city of Gdansk. Ferguson’s father, Otto, was a pharmacist and a hobby farmer, and they lived well. Her mother, Meta, had multiple maids; the children – Marianne, Brigitte and Reni – had a nanny, and every spring and autumn a dressmaker would come into their home for a week to create new wardrobes for the upcoming season. When Adolf Hitler came to power, Ferguson’s family was relatively unaffected in the beginning. Even so, her parents saw what was coming and began making contingency plans.

Ferguson’s father kept homing pigeons on his farm. He would go to Poland to deposit money, and send the pigeons back home with coloured ribbons tied to them for Ferguson’s mother to decipher. A yellow ribbon meant he had arrived, for example, while a red ribbon meant he had deposited the money. He was able to get away with this scheme because the guards at the Polish border assumed he was entering his pigeons into competitions.

The Echts continued living in Brosen as the situation deteriorated for Jewish families. When the fair-haired Ferguson traveled to Hebrew school in Danzig with her sister, Hitler Youth would yell at her to ‘Stop walking with that Jew!’ When the Jewish children in the region were no longer allowed to attend school with their peers, the Jews of Brosen opened their own school on a local estate. The estate was at the end of a long street inhabited by Nazis, and it was understood the Jewish children all had to be in school and off the street by 8 a.m.

One day, when Ferguson was about 11 or 12, her streetcar to school was late. As she was walking alone down the long street to her school, a man sent his police dog after her. The dog attacked her, biting her on the elbow.

“And all of a sudden, somebody raised me up. Must have been an angel, really,” said Ferguson in a recent interview with the Independent from her nursing home in Halifax.

It was the milkman. He put Ferguson in his wagon, drove her to school and deposited her inside the gate. Ferguson said that man saved her life.

For her parents, it was the last straw. They decided they had to get out. A member of the Canadian consulate informed them that the country was not accepting pharmacists. Fortunately, though, the consulate worker saw their little farm and suggested sending them as farmers. And so it was that the Echts found themselves coming through Pier 21 in Halifax on March 7, 1939.

When they arrived at the pier, someone called their names and frightened Ferguson’s father. How did people here know who they were? But the woman calling them was Sadie Fineberg, from Jewish Immigrant Aid Services (JIAS). When the Echts missed their train, Fineberg put them up in a boarding house run by a Yiddish-speaking woman, and many Jewish families came to visit them.

photo - Marianne Ferguson — Marianne Ferguson *(photo from CMI at Pier 21)*

“My parents said, ‘The people were so nice to us, and how do we know what it’s going to be like in Montreal? Maybe we should stay in Nova Scotia.’ And then they helped us with finding the farm, they drove us out … and we moved over there,” said Ferguson.

The farm was in nearby Milford, about a 45-minute drive from downtown Halifax. The Echts had to stay and work the farm for seven years as a condition of their immigration and, after their term ended, they moved to Halifax. Fineberg became a close family friend, and her nephew Lawrence became Ferguson’s husband.

Ferguson’s extended family was not so lucky. Her parents had applied to bring 11 of them over to Canada, and they were supposed to arrive later in the year. Cutting through all the red tape took time, but the process seemed to be progressing. Ferguson’s 11 family members went to meet their boat in Hamburg – but it wasn’t there. That day was Sept. 1, 1939, and the Second World War had just broken out.

“My father had bought a second farm. We were so lucky, it was right next to our farm. We thought we would all be together in the two farms. But it wasn’t meant to be. They were all killed,” said Ferguson.

When the war ended, Ferguson began volunteering with JIAS, helping Jewish refugees find their way in Canada. Many of the displaced persons were children traveling alone. Ferguson remembers one 17-year-old boy in particular who came through Pier 21 in 1948 and needed money to get to Montreal. Ferguson and her mother gave him $20 and some food. They also told him that he would become a good citizen, and he should work hard and make something of himself. Meanwhile, Ferguson continued to volunteer at Pier 21 until it closed in 1971. She began volunteering there again when it reopened as a museum in 1999.

Unbeknownst to Ferguson, the boy listened to her. His name was Nathan Wasser, and he had survived multiple camps in the Holocaust, including Auschwitz. He was trained as an electrician in Munich after the war, so that’s the work he first did after arriving in Montreal. In 1952, he met his wife-to-be, Shirley, at a parade for Queen Elizabeth, who was still a princess at the time. Together, they started a family, having a daughter and a son, and he ventured into the business world. Wasser eventually came to own his own shopping centre.

photo - Marianne Ferguson volunteered at Pier 21 when it was an immigration facility and again when it reopened as a museum — Marianne Ferguson volunteered at Pier 21 when it was an immigration facility and again when it reopened as a museum. (photo from CMI at Pier 21)

Through it all, Wasser – who passed away in 2015 – kept in mind the two women who had helped him when he first came to Canada as a scared and overwhelmed teenager.

“So I said to him, ‘You know, you have this vision of two volunteers. Would you like to go back to Pier 21?’” said his wife Shirley Wasser in a phone interview with the Independent. “And he said, ‘Well, I’ll never find anything.’”

Despite his doubts, Wasser contacted the Atlantic Jewish Council in 2003. The council connected him to Ferguson (her mother had already passed away), and they arranged to meet when the Wassers visited Halifax later that year.

On the appointed day, Ferguson and her granddaughter waited in the lobby of Pier 21 for a man with a blue shirt. Unfortunately, it seemed as if every man was wearing a blue shirt that day. Finally, a couple entered. The man was wearing a blue shirt and carrying flowers.

“My granddaughter said, ‘I think that’s for you.’ And, you know, he recognized me,” Ferguson recounted as she started to tear up.

Ferguson and Wasser stayed in touch until Wasser’s death, and she is still in contact with his wife. Whenever the Wassers came to Halifax, the Fergusons would have them over for Shabbat dinner on the Friday, then the Wassers would take out the Fergusons for dinner on the Saturday. Every birthday and holiday, Nathan Wasser would send a bouquet of flowers to Ferguson.

“He had no words for her, how grateful and how appreciative he was to the pier and the volunteers,” said Shirley Wasser. “I think [Ferguson] was one of the finest ladies I’ve ever encountered.”

“He did save his money and he listened to what we were saying. He said he owed it to us to do well. He was so grateful,” said Ferguson, speaking of her late friend somewhere between laughter and tears.

The stories of nine orphans

The Open Hearts, Closed Doors exhibit combines placards of mixed visual and textual material. (photo from Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)

“One out of every 122 people alive currently is displaced. That means 60 million people,” says Phillipa Friedland, education coordinator at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

Friedland is explaining the idea behind the current exhibit at the VHEC, Open Hearts, Closed Doors: The War Orphans Project, which was originally mounted in 1997. According to the centre’s website, it is “being re-presented to provide opportunities for visitors to engage with Canadian immigration policies from a historical perspective, using case studies of Holocaust survivors from the local community.”

The exhibit – which runs to June 30 – serves as a testament and warning about the vulnerability of children in times of communal violence. It is also a memorial to the incredible resilience of so many of survivors. The words of survivor Regina Feldman are written above one of the displays: “People were saying that we were free. I didn’t know what freedom meant. Where do you go, what do you do, who will take you? I was 13 years old.”

photo - Beautifully done recreations of photo albums tell the stories of the survivors featured — Beautifully done recreations of photo albums tell the stories of the survivors featured. *(photo from Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)*

Open Hearts, Closed Doors reports the staggering statistic that of the 1.6 million Jewish children in Europe in 1938, only 100,000 survived. The exhibit combines general education about those who survived as orphans with a presentation of the experiences of nine war orphans – Esther Brandt, Marie Rozen Doduck, David Ehrlich, Regina Feldman, Bill Gluck, Celina Lieberman, Leo Lowy, Leslie Spiro and Robbie Waisman – who were among the 1,123 granted permission to enter Canada in 1947.

Permission for the orphans to come to Canada came through a special Order in Council, which bypassed Canada’s racist immigration policies of the time. These restrictive policies had been developed and enforced by then-director of Canada’s Immigration Branch Frederick Charles Blair. Canada had the worst record among destination countries for Jewish refugees: only 5,000 Jews were accepted as refugees between 1933 and 1939. Between 1945 and 1948, among the 65,000 refugees allowed into Canada, only 8,000 were Jews. Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, remarked in 1938, “The world seemed divided into two parts: those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.”

The 1,123 orphans of 1947 were allowed into the country on the condition that Canadian Jews take full responsibility for them. Most of the orphans came through the port of Halifax at Pier 21 and boarded trains for 38 communities across the country. The majority of the orphans, more than 790 of them, settled in Montreal and Toronto; 38 settled in British Columbia, four of whom are still alive.

Most foster families were hoping for young children, preferably girls, but the majority of those who had managed to survive were older boys: 70% were adolescent boys and only 37 of the children were under 10 years of age. The orphans came from 15 different European countries, 783 from concentration camps and 229 who survived in hiding. The resettlement project was a massive undertaking practically and psychologically, for both the orphans and their new families. The success of that undertaking can be seen in the amazing lives that so many of the refugees lived.

“This entire exhibit is about resilience,” said Friedland. In the 1950s, psychiatrists who interviewed the surviving orphans offered a bleak prognosis: these were damaged people, their ability to adapt would be limited and they would likely not live long lives. Yet, as they aged, juvenile delinquency was practically nonexistent among them. Multilingual, they quickly picked up English. As the VHEC exhibit states, “Many became not only productive members of the community but its pillars.”

Open Hearts, Closed Doors combines placards of visual and textual material with beautifully done recreations of photo albums telling the stories of the nine survivors featured. A lone glass case contains a single child’s shoe taken from an innocent sent to the gas chambers.

True to its inspiration, the exhibit does not limit its focus to the past but looks to the present and future as well. A map on one wall of the exhibit shows regions throughout the world most at risk of genocide according to the Early Warning Project. These include Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan and others.

Open Hearts, Closed Doors perfectly fulfils the mandate of a Holocaust exhibit: it remembers the horrors and heroism of the Shoah while pointing us towards the need to protect the vulnerable everywhere.

Matthew Gindin is a Vancouver freelance writer and journalist. He blogs on spirituality and social justice at seeking her voice (hashkata.com) and has been published in the Forward, Tikkun, Elephant Journal and elsewhere.