John Chisling, a resident of Prince Edward County, Ontario arranged for the memorial stone in honour of the downed Canadian Jewish airman who was killed in action over Germany in March 1945.
Hidden Heroes: Canadian Jewish Airmen in WWll Join journalist Ellin Bessner via ZOOM on Thursday June 10, 2021 as she…
When I spoke in Edmonton in November 2019 for Holocaust Education Week, I was touched to have the opportunity to meet the family of Harry Uretzky. He was a young Edmonton student who enlisted in the RCAF in 1941, went overseas in 1942, and, after training to be a bomb aimer/navigator, was killed in action in 1943.
At my talk that night, his niece Karen Hering revealed that her uncle’s war time diary was a treasure: it contained his personal musings as well as a series of poems that he wrote in November 1942, while he was training to fly heavy bombers over German-occupied Europe.
As the world marks the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain in WWII, author and journalist Ellin Bessner visits the Air Crew Association of Ontario meeting in Toronto, via ZOOM, to share a little known story about how the Allies won the air war.Among the Canadians who volunteered, were 6,000 Jewish personnel who served in the RCAF and RAF. They served at great personal risk, should they be captured, and their faith be discovered by the Nazis. Yet they volunteered, for King and Country, and to save their own people from Hitler’s Final Solution. They served despite facing widespread antisemitism at home, from the government of Mackenzie King, and in the very military they signed up to serve.
Medal for George Nashen, 97, a Canadian Jewish WWII RCAF veteran Lieut.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire, one of Canada’s most famous soldiers…
You don’t have to be a licensed private investigator to find the military records of your ancestors. If you’ve always wanted to learn more about their service during the Second World War, or the First, it’s never been easier to find their official government service records, at least if your relative served in a Canadian military uniform.
“He wanted to take them all: How Canadian soldiers in WWII Rescued the Survivors of the Holocaust” As Canada, and…
As the world commemorates the 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two, author and journalist Ellin Bessner brings her new book “Double Threat” to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton. As Hamilton and indeed, the world marked the end of the fighting, hundreds of Canadian airmen and soldiers were still hard at work overseas with a new humanitarian mission: rescuing the survivors of the Holocaust, including in Germany at the site of the notorious Nazi death camp Bergen-Belsen.
And, as many Canadian airmen said after they liberated concentration camps, they never forgot what they saw. But Montreal electrician Ben Delson of the RCAF went one step further; he had a camera, and his black and white photos from Belsen show the mass graves, while others show bodies in shrouds before burial, and one shows a sign indicating the location of mass grave #7.
The nearly 280 Canadian Jewish women who volunteered, put on a uniform, and served in WWII lived their own important wartime experiences, and contributed to help Canada and the Allies win the war, defeat Hitler, and stop the Holocaust. Most of the women also had their own #Time’sUp moments.