Dear Editor:
I am writing to you about the horrific humanitarian crisis unfolding in Europe.
In April of 1939 when I was nine, my elder brother and I stood on a platform in Frankfurt station and said goodbye to our parents. We were fleeing Nazi Germany. Our lives were saved by the Kindertransport program and the willingness of the United Kingdom to let us enter the country. The reason for our flight was because we were Jewish.
Our parents were not so lucky. They left for Cuba on the last ship to leave Europe, the St. Louis, but on arrival in Havana the 1,000 Jewish refugees on board were denied entry. The ship remained in the harbour for two weeks during which time Hitler’s army invaded France and the Netherlands.
All pleas for sanctuary were denied, including by the Canadian government. The ship had to return to Europe where immediate deportment to concentration camps loomed as a reality. If it had not been for the sponsorship by a Quaker family in the U.K., they too would have been killed.
The picture is somewhat different now, but the principle remains the same. Around two million people from Syria and other countries are fleeing for their lives. They are being held in camps under horrendous circumstances and all but Germany and Sweden are extending meaningful help.
I am sure you can understand that I am appalled by the way the refugee problem is being handled across Europe, and would call on Canada to act as a beacon of decency as the U.K. did in the past.
The situations that some are trying to escape are so desperate that they are willing to put their lives into the hands of callous criminal people-smuggling gangs, resulting in the tragic consequences that we are seeing.
Despite the scaremongering of some, I am sure that the actual cost to Canada of taking more humanitarian action is relatively small, particularly when human lives are at risk.
I understand and agree with the importance of vetting immigrants before admittance to Canada. It should not impede action.
Of course, there will be opposition from some sections of society to admitting more refugees as there was in 1939, but the argument for saving human lives needs to be made strongly and cogently.
Renate Griffiths
West Vancouver
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