Latest news with #AustroHungarianEmpire
CTV News
18-07-2025
- Politics
- CTV News
New stamp draws attention to history of civilian internment in Canada
Canada Post unveils new stamps as a tribute to the civilian internment camps during the World Wars. (Canada Post) A new stamp unveiled by Canada Post on Thursday pays tribute to the history of civilian internment in Canada during both the First and Second World Wars. The Canadian government carried out large-scale internment drives during both wars when the War Measures Act was invoked, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. In their press release announcing the new stamp, Canada Post says thousands of people were interned in camps across Canada under the guise of national security. 'Canada Post hopes today's stamp issue will raise awareness about this history and the resilience of the people and communities whose lives were profoundly affected by this forced displacement, confinement and hardship,' the statement said. The stamp has vertical, bilingual text in red behind barbed wires, creating the visual of a fence, which Canada Post states 'captures the gloom and fear of Canada's internment camps.' Recounting camps during the wars The War Measures Act was invoked for the first time during the First World War on Aug. 22, 1914, ending on Jan. 10, 1920, according to the national encyclopedia states. This act empowered the federal cabinet to suspend any civil liberties and impose laws without the approval of Parliament. According to the news release, more than 8,500 men – including more than 5,000 Ukrainians, people from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Croats, Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenes, people from the Ottoman Empire, including Armenians and Turks, the German Empire and the Kingdom of Bulgaria, were held at these internment camps during this time. More than 200 women and children chose to voluntarily join their male relatives in internment. An additional 80,000 people, the majority of whom were from Ukraine, were made to register as 'enemy aliens,' the news release said. 'People experiencing homelessness and unemployment, conscientious objectors and members of outlawed political groups, especially socialists, were also interned,' the release said, adding that detainees were put to work on labour-intensive projects in harsh conditions, which made them vulnerable to disease, injuries and death. More than 100 people died during this time and many were buried in unmarked graves, the news release recounts. The War Measures Act was invoked a second time shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, on Aug. 25, 1939, and later replaced by similar legislation on Dec. 31, 1945, the online publication reads. More than 40 internment camps held over 20,000 people, out of which around 26 camps were in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and New Brunswick. People targeted during the Second World War included Germans, Italians, Jews, Japanese, members of the outlawed organizations in Canada and labour leaders. The War Measures Act was repealed in 1988 and replaced by the Emergencies Act, which does not allow the cabinet to act on its own during a national emergency. 'It also reminds us of our responsibility to learn from the past,' Canada Post said.
Yahoo
15-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Fathers Don't Just Protect—They Prepare
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. My grandfather was born in 1882 in the small Ukrainian town of Zawale, which was part of the vast, multiethnic Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1914, this mega-state, like so many European nations, threw itself into a world war with frenzied enthusiasm. My grandfather later told my father how puzzled he had been to watch thousands of happy young men—really still just boys—boarding trains in Vienna, cheering as they went off to what was almost certainly their death. He did not volunteer, he avoided conscription, and he survived. His son, my father, was born in Vienna in 1927. He was 6 years old when Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany. Austria still had a few years of freedom left, and my grandfather used them well: Because an archive had burned down, several of his family documents had to be reissued. Through skillful manipulation, he managed to turn himself from a Jew into what the Nazis would later classify as a 'half Jew.' And as Germany's annexation of Austria became inevitable, he came up with an especially daring idea: In a court proceeding, he had his wife, my grandmother, declared the illegitimate daughter of the janitor in her parents' building. He bribed witnesses who testified that her mother had had an affair with that janitor. It worked: My grandmother was officially declared the daughter of an Aryan. And as a result, my family survived. This Father's Day, I find myself reflecting not only on paternal love but on paternal foresight—the clarity and focus it takes to see what others might not, to act before the danger has a name. Raising children is always a challenge, but never more so than in times of deep insecurity about what the future will look like. To meet that challenge, it can help to look at the generations that came before. [Anne Applebaum: This is what Trump does when his revolution sputters] Despite my grandfather's efforts, life for my father quickly changed under the Nazis. In swimming school, two boys nearly drowned him while the lifeguard looked on, grinning. When my father finally emerged, gasping for breath, the lifeguard laughed and said, 'Can't swim, Jew?' Around the same time, the man who lived in the neighboring house began watching my father and his sister with dark, brooding looks. But only after Hitler's army had entered Austria did he begin shouting, each and every time they passed: 'Jewwws!' My father would recount these events with amused detachment. He had already learned as a teenager to recognize the profound absurdity of Nazism—the deep, grotesque nonsense of what Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch were turning into dark political comedies at the same time in Hollywood. A few months later, two men came to my grandparents and ordered them to leave their house with their children. They moved into a small apartment, and their home was 'bought'—at a tiny, symbolic price—by the 'Jewww'-shouting neighbor. Corruption is the most corrosive force in a democracy, but in a dictatorship it can save you. Once a month, a Gestapo officer would appear at my grandparents' apartment and take something valuable—a piece of furniture, a porcelain plate, a painting. In return, the file on my grandparents would sink a little lower in the stack on his desk. At my father's school, the boys had to line up, and all those tall enough were asked—in fact, ordered—to volunteer for the SS. My father raised his hand and said, 'Requesting permission to report—I'm one-quarter Jewish!' To which the SS man shouted in disgust, 'Step back!' And so my father was spared from becoming a war criminal in Hitler's service. In almost every situation, having Jewish ancestry was a mortal danger. But in this one instance, it became his salvation. In the final months of the war, my father was arrested after all and spent three months in a concentration camp close to Vienna, constantly at risk of death. But after the war had ended, there was still a striking atmosphere of leniency toward the perpetrators. When he went to the local police station to give a statement about his time in the camp, he was met with scornful dismissiveness. 'It wasn't really that bad, was it?' the officer asked. 'Aren't we exaggerating a little?' It was then that my father decided to move from Austria to Germany, paradoxically—because there, under pressure from the occupying powers, some reckoning with the past was taking place. Austria, meanwhile, had successfully cast itself as the war's first victim. [Timothy W. Ryback: Hitler used a bogus crisis of 'public order' to make himself dictator] I tell my son, who never met his grandfather (as I never met mine), that my father was obsessed throughout his life with the idea that what had happened once could happen again—not just to Jews, but to anyone. Of course, my son, raised in a seemingly stable world, feels profoundly safe. And that's a good thing. But we are currently living in the United States, a country that for my grandfather was a refuge impossible to reach, but that is currently in the throes of what some serious scholars now describe as an authoritarian power grab. And even in Germany, where we could easily return, a right-wing extremist party is now so strong that it might come in first in the next election. So I think about the responsibility of raising a child in a time when the future is impossible to predict. I think, more and more, of my grandfather, who in 1914 watched people plunge into war hysteria and decided to resist their excitement, and who would later take very unconventional steps—steps that would, after history took a turn for the worse, ensure his family's survival. My grandfather understood the psychology of fanaticism very early; my father understood the stupidity and mediocrity of the people whom the dictatorship empowered, without mistaking them for harmless clowns. Now, as we watch society once again take a dangerous turn—as books are banned, people are sent to foreign prisons without even a court order, and soldiers are deployed against protesters—I wonder what stories my future grandchildren will one day need to remember. Memory is not a picture book; it's a tool. And fatherhood, especially in times like these, is not just about protection. It is about preparation. Article originally published at The Atlantic
