The Holocaust loomed large in my childhood imagination, growing up in Edmonton in the 1970s. My father’s family was one of the very few in Alberta who succeeded in sponsoring some relatives who were able to escape Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, just weeks before Kristallnacht.
Mackenzie King was a polite anti-Semite and his government’s attitude towards Jewish refugees was “none is too many,” yet my father’s mother’s cousin Luba was somehow able to win the support of her MP from Vegreville, who, according to family lore, fought for a special order-in-council for visas to allow my grandmother’s first cousin Rosa, her husband Hans and their small children, George and Helen, to escape Vienna just in the nick of time.
