Ellin brings ‘Double Threat’ to the Men’s Probus Club of Lindsay, Ontario for Nov. 12, 2019

As the world prepares to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII, Canadian author and journalist Ellin Bessner says it is important to remember the victims, but also the liberators: the Canadian soldiers, airmen and sailors who volunteered to put on a uniform, and go overseas to fight to defeat Hitler, and rescue the Jews of Europe from the Holocaust.

About 17,000 Canadians of Jewish faith were among those who helped their comrades win WWII, as Bessner writes in her new book “Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military & WWII“, published by the University of Toronto Press. Yet these brave Jewish Canadian fighters also had to overcome widespread antisemitism both at home and on the battlefield, plus grave personal danger, should they fall into enemy hands and their Jewish religion be discovered.

Ellin will be the keynote speaker at Men’s Probus Club of Lindsay on Tuesday morning Nov. 12, 2019 as we commemorate Remembrance Day. Books will be available for signing and sale.

An interesting local note from the Lindsay Library archives: support for the rescue of Europe’s Jews came from an unlikely place. The Grand Master of the Oddfellows Grand Lodge of Ontario in Little Britain, Ontario, near Lindsay, Dr. George C. Hall, was very worried about the situation. He wrote to then prime minister Mackenzie King in 1938, without asking approval first from his Lodge members. The reply was a form letter from one of King’s staffers.

The Men’s Probus Club of Lindsay meets at the local Masonic lodge on Kent street East, directly behind the Academy theatre on Lindsay Street.