It was well into Boxing Day in 1949 as the Canadian Pacific Railways passenger train clinked and clanged across half of Canada to its destination in Northern Ontario, carrying DPs who had arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax aboard a converted troop carrier.
My mother, Velta, my younger sister, Māra, and I were among the displaced persons who arrived in the new land in December 1949. The Second World War had forced us to escape our own native Latvia to Poland aboard a small tug, then live aboard freight trains—even coming under fire in the dying days of the war—until we arrived in Germany to be placed in refugee camps.
I was almost 8 years old, my sister was 3, my mother, 28. We were ready for a new life in Canada, in Rolphton, 50 kilometres west of Petawawa on the Ottawa River, where my father, Romans, had arrived six months earlier, hired by Ontario Hydro as many DPs were to help build hydro-electric plants.
It was the middle of the night when our train stopped in the middle of nowhere, at a siding called Moor Lake Station. There was my father, grinning ear to ear, as happy to see us as we were to be reunited with him.
It was cold and the snow was deep. The trapper hat my father wore looked huge, and warm.
Our first home in Canada was a small one-room cabin, on a hill overlooking the Ottawa River, with the French-Canadian settlement of Des Joachims—pronounced Da Swisha—in the distance. The cabin had no electricity and no running water.
I was bundled up against the cold to walk down to the well with Opa on that first morning in our new home. (A few months later we moved into an apartment in a proper house with electricity and running water.)
My first day at school did not end well. I couldn’t speak English, I couldn’t speak French. Reason enough for my new classmates to roll me down the hill after school: “Go home and stay home. You don’t belong here.”
I came home in tears. The next day, my father stayed home from work and took me back up the hill to school. I vaguely recall a meeting with a teacher, possibly even a principal, but I’m fairly sure I didn’t snitch on my tormentors. For that reason, perhaps, I wasn’t picked on again and soon learned to speak the language of the new land.
My mother also faced challenges, not the least of which was shopping during the day while my father was at work. At first she spoke no English either.
It was already a warm day in spring when I recall her rushing home from the small grocery/hardware store about a kilometre distant from our cabin. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it before the double-stick Popsicle she was carrying almost entirely melted.
I recall the devastated look on her face as the final ice pops melted in a cup, leaving only wooden sticks to be licked by my little sister and me.
SITE SEE