Hubert

When I was a little kid, the Second World War was still in the very recent past. My Dad and Mum and all of their friends were freshly returned veterans and for them and their parents, one of the pressing social issues of the day was what to do with “all the DPs.”

“DPs” were everywhere, and as youngsters we were warned to stay away from them. They ate funny garlicky food, they spoke stilted English, if at all, and mostly took jobs away from “our boys”. Many had weird religions, and had unsavory habits, we were told. While we weren’t expressly told that DPs were subhuman, it didn’t take much to connect the dots. As kids, we mocked them and kept our distance.

Sometimes on hot summer nights the DPs would leave their crowded city tenements and come out to to the shores of the Grand River, bonfires roaring until way past my bedtime, their “funny music” and laughter in strange languages disrupting the “night before Sunday School” peace of our rural community. Very foreign, very scary.

In the eyes of good red-blooded Canadians, “the Government” had not only permitted the DPs into our country, but had paid their way and supported them, “on our tax dollar”. An outrageous betrayal.

The DPs were “displaced persons”, in the argot of the day. Mostly eastern Europeans, they had been uprooted by the savagery of WW II. Homes, businesses, and futures destroyed in shelling, bombing and house-to-house fighting, they fled first before the Nazis and then before the Soviets. Most had lived in refugee camps for years on end, tents and shacks surrounded by barbed wire. Some were death camp survivors. Their once prosperous homes and jobs were distant memories, all they now knew was abject poverty and mourning loved ones lost to violence and disease.

The DPs, of course, took whatever dirty and thankless jobs they could find. One such couple worked for a while on our farm. But because they ate at our table, we didn’t call them DPs or treat them with disrespect. They were just Hubert and Milka — and to me, “Uncle Hubert and Auntie Milka”. Their courtly manners at our humble dinner table spoke of a more elegant and prosperous past.

Hubert had been a chemical engineer in Czechoslovakia, the head of a large laboratory, but was now glad to get food and lodging and a few dollars for pitching hay and mucking out the cow barn. Milka helped my mum in the garden and with her neverending farm chores.

Hubert hitchhiked into the city two nights a week to study at the university, and spent his every waking moment improving his English and restoring his professional designations. Ultimately he succeeded, and to nobody’s surprise, quickly rose to become the head chemical engineer at one of Hamilton’s industrial plants.

The children and grandchildren of the DPs of my childhood are mostly successful professionals, as had been generations before them in “the Old Country”. Universally this cohort have been massive net contributors to our economy and our society. The cost of helping out the DPs has been repaid a million times over.

But notwithstanding our meanness toward the Displaced Persons, we’ve actually done worse. Not that many years before, on the eve of the Holocaust, the ship St. Louis with 900 terrified Jews aboard sailed into a Canadian port. We turned them away, men, women and children, a stain upon our conscience forever. Most of the passengers ended up in the gas chambers. As a society, we committed the ugliest sin of all, looking the other way in the face of evil.

But there are good stories, too. Canada opened its arms and heart to the Vietnamese Boat People and to Syrian refugees by their tens of thousands. Wonderful stories of churches, synagogues, and communities opening homes and hearts to the desperate.

Our generation can commit the great evil of looking away, the wickedness of mocking and dehumanizing those in need, or we can acknowledge that those seeking refuge are our fellow humans. Grappling with the increasing refugee crises which are upon us is not easy, and it will become ever more difficult, costly, and divisive.

But when we lose the art of mercy, we lose our humanity.