Watson Kirkconnell , OC FRSC (16 May 1895 – 26 February 1977) was a Canadian literary scholar , poet , playwright , linguist , satirist , and translator .
155-601: Kirkconnell was born in Port Hope, Ontario into a proudly Scottish-Canadian family descended from United Empire Loyalists , who, after losing the American Revolution , had arrived as refugees in what remained of British North America , and other immigrants from Wales , Northern England, Germany , and Spain . After his university studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I , Captain Watson Kirkconnell
310-563: A German colonial empire overseas, leading to the Herero and Nama genocide and subsequent racial apartheid regime in South West Africa . World War I (1914–1918) intensified nationalist and racist sentiments in Germany and other European countries. Jews in eastern Europe were targeted by widespread pogroms . Germany had two million war dead and lost a substantial territory ; opposition to
465-621: A double medallist in Latin and Greek. He received a Master of Arts degree in 1916. On 4 August 1914, Kirkconnell was attending Queen's University at the outbreak of World War I . Although he enthusiastically hoped to see combat in France, Kirkconnell chose, similarly to J.R.R. Tolkien , to delay enlistment until after his graduation. His brother, Walter Kirkconnell, enlisted in the Royal Montreal Regiment on 5 August 1914. After training in
620-492: A humid continental climate ( Dfb ) with warm summers and cold winters. In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada , Port Hope had a population of 17,294 living in 7,318 of its 7,607 total private dwellings, a change of 3.2% from its 2016 population of 16,753 . With a land area of 278.8 km (107.6 sq mi), it had a population density of 62.0/km (160.7/sq mi) in 2021. Mother tongue (2021): Downtown Port Hope offers shopping and
775-792: A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada . During the Second World War , Kirkconnell used his many contacts among Canadians of Eastern European descent to mobilize them in favor of the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany , Fascist Italy , and Imperial Japan . These same contacts, however, had made Kirkconnell well aware of the sufferings of the relatives of his immigrant friends under both Soviet rule and occupation and he accordingly continued to write articles and to give public lectures attacking both human rights abuses under Marxist-Leninism and Stalinism . In his memoirs, Kirkconnell recalled about
930-655: A child in Port Hope, Kirkconnell's interest in geology was sparked by attending a lecture about local prehistory, Ice Age glaciers , and the Glacial Lake Iroquois by Arthur Philemon Coleman , who was visiting from the University of Toronto . Afterwards, Kirkconnell recalls, "walking and cycling through the countryside now took on a new meaning", and after the family moved to Lindsay, Ontario in 1908, Kirkconnell continued to research local prehistory and how it had shaped
1085-527: A concentration camp. Despite many deaths, as many as 200,000 Jews survived the war inside the concentration camps. Although most Holocaust victims were never imprisoned in a concentration camp, the image of these camps is a popular symbol of the Holocaust. Including the Soviet prisoners of war, 13 million people were brought to Germany for forced labor. The largest nationalities were Soviet and Polish and they were
1240-462: A destination for heritage tourism and people interested in architecture. In 1978, eight members of the Satan's Choice Motorcycle Club were charged with a murder that occurred at Port Hope's Queen's Hotel. The trial and conviction of some members—the Port Hope 8 case —has been described as a miscarriage of justice. On January 1, 2001, the original town amalgamated with Hope Township to form
1395-463: A few kilometers from a town. Victims were rounded up and marched to the execution site, forced to undress, and shot into previously dug pits. The favored technique was a shot in the back of the neck with a single bullet. In the chaos, many victims were not killed by the gunfire but instead buried alive . Typically, the pits would be guarded after the execution but sometimes a few victims managed to escape afterwards. Executions were public spectacles and
1550-544: A food shortfall and planned the mass starvation of Soviet cities and some rural areas. Although the starvation policy was less successful than planners hoped, the residents of some cities, particularly in Ukraine, and besieged Leningrad , as well as the Jewish ghettos, endured human-made famine, during which millions of people died of starvation. By mid-June 1941, about 30,000 Jews had died, 20,000 of whom had starved to death in
1705-614: A grin, to keep my unholy hands off the Ark ." Despite Brown's cautions, the same poem, "Rain on the Waste Land . (With apologies to Mr. T.S. Eliot)" , was eventually published anyway. After the 1944 publication of Seven Pillars of Freedom , a book which, similarly to Eugene Lyons 's 1941 volume The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America , warned about dangers posed by the Pro-Soviet sympathies among many Canadian intellectuals, Kirkconnell
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#17328510846991860-791: A growing sense of the profound age of the Craft... There are elements in Masonry that are nearly as much older than Solomon as Solomon is older than Winston Churchill ." In 1922, Kirkconnell accepted the offer of a faculty position in the English Department at Wesley College . Kirkconnell taught English there for the eleven years, before switching to the Department of Classics for the next seven years. The experience for him proved life changing. Like many other English-speaking Canadians of his class and generation, Kirkconnell had been brought up to believe in
2015-552: A higher chance of survival. Although conditions varied widely between camps, Jewish forced laborers were typically treated worse than non-Jewish prisoners and suffered much higher mortality rates. In mid-1943, Himmler sought to bring surviving Jewish forced laborers under the control of the SS in the concentration camp system. Some of the forced-labor camps for Jews and some ghettos, such as Kovno, were designated concentration camps, while others were dissolved and surviving prisoners sent to
2170-663: A historic main street. Port Hope is served by a Via Rail station. It has a medical center, and a community health centre. It has had a daily newspaper since 1878, the Port Hope Evening Guide . Until 2007, this was part of the Osprey Media chain and subsequently a part of the Sun Media organization. In 2009 the newspaper was amalgamated with the Cobourg Daily Star and renamed as Northumberland Today.com . In November 2017
2325-430: A hundred Turks, a few Bulgars, a Magyar or two, and a handful of genuine Austrians. Ignorant, sullen, inert, the mass of these interns were the very incarnation of passive resistance ... there prevailed among all these hundreds of thick heads a strange belief that for every day of their captivity they would receive at the close of the war an indemnity of five dollars wrung from Canada by a victorious Austria ... guarding them
2480-792: A nationwide pogrom in November 1938. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, occupation authorities began to establish ghettos to segregate Jews. Following the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union , 1.5 to 2 million Jews were shot by German forces and local collaborators. Later in 1941 or early 1942, the highest levels of the German government decided to murder all Jews in Europe . Victims were deported by rail to extermination camps where, if they survived
2635-654: A plan to remove and store contaminated soil that had been used as landfill. Over one billion dollars is expected to be spent on the soil remediation project, the largest such cleanup in Canadian history. Besides the town proper of Port Hope, the municipality of Port Hope comprises a number of villages and hamlets, including Campbellcroft, Canton , Dale , Davidson's Corners (partially), Decker Hollow (ghost town), Elizabethville, Garden Hill, Knoxville, Morrish, Osaca, Perrytown, Port Britain, Rossmount (partially), Tinkerville, Thomstown, Welcome , Wesleyville, and Zion . Port Hope has
2790-646: A professor in the multiethnic and multilingual Manitoba city of Winnipeg exposed him to world literature , which caused him to begin questioning his views and making radical teaching innovations. For example, Kirkconnell believed that, not only the Icelandic sagas and the Elder Edda , but also the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge and the Old Low German Heliand , "threw light on Beowulf ,
2945-655: A result of local and popular pressure, many small towns became entirely free of Jews and as many as a third of Jewish businesses may have been forced to close. Anti-Jewish violence was even worse in areas annexed by Nazi Germany . On 9–10 November 1938, the Nazis organized Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), a nationwide pogrom . Over 7,500 Jewish shops (out of 9,000) were looted, more than 1,000 synagogues were damaged or destroyed, at least 90 Jews were murdered, and as many as 30,000 Jewish men were arrested , although many were released within weeks. German Jews were levied
3100-761: A schoolmaster in York, later renamed Toronto . Christopher's youngest son, Thomas Watson, had adopted his father's profession and taught at the schools in Allanburg , Beachwood , Lundy's Lane , Stamford , and Port Hope, Ontario . In 1851, Thomas Watson had married Margaret Elma Green of Lundy's Lane, a woman descended from Welsh-American United Empire Loyalists , as well as more recent British immigrants to Canada with both German and Spanish roots. Kirkconnell's parents, Thomas Kirkconnell (1862–1934) and Bertha (née Watson) Kirkconnell (1867–1957), were living in Port Hope, Ontario when their earliest children were born. Watson Kirkconnell
3255-525: A significant number of other European countries abandoned democracy for some kind of authoritarian or fascist rule. Many countries, including Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, passed antisemitic legislation in the 1930s and 1940s. In October 1938, Germany deported many Polish Jews in response to a Polish law that enabled the revocation of citizenship for Polish Jews living abroad. The German Wehrmacht (armed forces) invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, triggering declarations of war from
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#17328510846993410-438: A similar or larger number of non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of these other groups . The Nazis developed their ideology based on racism and pursuit of "living space" , and seized power in early 1933. Meant to force all German Jews to emigrate , regardless of means, the regime passed anti-Jewish laws, encouraged harassment, and orchestrated
3565-538: A slight increase in rations to non-Jewish Poles, and combat the black market . In March 1942, killings began in Belzec, targeting Jews from Lublin who were not capable of work. This action reportedly reduced the black market and was deemed a success to be replicated elsewhere. By mid-1942, Nazi leaders decided to allow only 300,000 Jews to survive in the General Governorate by the end of the year for forced labor; for
3720-684: A special tax that raised more than 1 billion Reichsmarks (RM). The Nazi government wanted to force all Jews to leave Germany . By the end of 1939, most Jews who could emigrate had already done so; those who remained behind were disproportionately elderly, poor, or female and could not obtain a visa. The plurality, around 110,000, left for the United States, while smaller numbers emigrated to South America, Shanghai , Mandatory Palestine , and South Africa. Germany collected emigration taxes of nearly 1 billion RM, mostly from Jews. The policy of forced emigration continued into 1940. Besides Germany,
3875-502: A symbol of the ultimate human evil. The term Holocaust , derived from a Greek word meaning ' burnt offering ', has become the most common word used to describe the Nazi extermination of Jews in English and many other languages. The term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of other groups that the Nazis targeted, especially those targeted on a biological basis, in particular
4030-455: A variety of measures, including imprisonment in concentration camps . The Nazis forcibly sterilized 400,000 people and subjected others to forced abortions for real or supposed hereditary illnesses. Although the Nazis sought to control every aspect of public and private life, Nazi repression was directed almost entirely against groups perceived as outside the national community. Most Germans had little to fear provided they did not oppose
4185-587: A view to their ultimate disappearance from the country. Jewish students were gradually forced out of the school system. Some municipalities enacted restrictions governing where Jews were allowed to live or conduct business. In 1938 and 1939, Jews were barred from additional occupations, and their businesses were expropriated to force them out of the economy. Anti-Jewish violence, largely locally organized by members of Nazi Party institutions, took primarily non-lethal forms from 1933 to 1939. Jewish stores, especially in rural areas, were often boycotted or vandalized. As
4340-408: A young man, and as an older man was far more ecumenical and critical in his approach to Evangical Christianity than many of his Baptist peers were comfortable with. For example, writing in his memoirs that Evangelicals who "ignorantly or deliberately disregard Zoroastrian elements in early Hebrew thinking ... are noisy without knowledge" and expressing "more love for poetry than theology." Also as
4495-572: Is a municipality in Southern Ontario , Canada, approximately 109 km (68 mi) east of Toronto and about 159 km (99 mi) west of Kingston . It is located at the mouth of the Ganaraska River on the north shore of Lake Ontario , in the west end of Northumberland County . The private Trinity College School opened here in 1868. The Cayuga people , one of the Six Nations of
4650-724: Is controversial. Romanian soldiers killed tens of thousands of Jews from Odessa by April 1942. Prior to the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen were reorganized in preparation for mass killings and instructed to shoot Soviet officials and Jewish state and party employees. The shootings were justified on the basis of Jews' supposed central role in supporting the communist system, but it was not initially envisioned to kill all Soviet Jews. The occupiers relied on locals to identify Jews to be targeted. The first German mass killings targeted adult male Jews who had worked as civil servants or in jobs requiring education. Tens of thousands were shot by
4805-607: Is here; the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence." It took the Nazis several months after this to organize a continent-wide genocide. Reinhard Heydrich , head of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), convened the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942. This high-level meeting was intended to coordinate anti-Jewish policy. The majority of Holocaust killings were carried out in 1942, with it being
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4960-514: Is known for having the largest volume of historic low-level radioactive wastes in Canada. These wastes were initially created by Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited and its private sector predecessors, resulting from the refining of radium from pitchblende . Radium was used in radioluminescent paint (such as aircraft dials), and in early treatments for cancer. During the Second World War,
5115-602: Is of János Arany 's The Bards of Wales , an 1864 ballad criticizing the conquest of Wales by King Edward Longshanks , but which was intended as a covert denunciation of Emperor Franz Joseph over the defeat of the Hungarian revolution of 1848 , and which Kirkconnell translated into the same idiom as the Child ballads . Furthermore, Watson Kirkconnell's 1933 translation of World War I soldier-poet Géza Gyóni 's iconic anti-war poem, Csak egy éjszakára ("For Just One Night"), which
5270-975: Is under the management of the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board , and Catholic education is by the Peterborough Victoria Northumberland and Clarington Catholic District School Board . The Holocaust The Holocaust ( / ˈ h ɑː l ə k ɔː ˈ s t / , HAW -lə-kawst ) was the genocide of European Jews during World War II . Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe , around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out primarily through mass shootings and poison gas in extermination camps , chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau , Treblinka , Belzec , Sobibor , and Chełmno in occupied Poland . Separate Nazi persecutions killed
5425-571: The Battle of Maldon , and the Caedmonian Genesis ", and advocated teaching all of those texts together. While seeking background literature for teaching a course on Geoffrey Chaucer , Kirkconnell discovered and fell in love with the Middle Welsh poetry in strict metre by Dafydd ap Gwilym , whom he called, "a great contemporary of Chaucer, with a feeling for nature that was beyond the reach of
5580-410: The 16th-century practice of exclusive and unaccompanied Gaelic psalm singing in a form known as precenting the line . In her old age, Mary (née McCallum) Kirkconnell, despite having gone blind, could still sing all 154 Scottish Gaelic Metrical Psalms from memory. Kirkconnell's maternal great-grandfather, Christopher Watson, emigrated from Alston, Cumberland to Upper Canada in 1819 and became
5735-770: The Clan Douglas tartan , and farmed near Kirkcudbright , in Dumfries and Galloway . Due to what Kirkconnell later dubbed, "the almost universal holocaust of Scottish archives during the Reformation ", his genealogy could not be traced with complete accuracy or linked, as he strongly suspected was the case, to a cadet branch of the Clan Douglas or Clan Maxwell lairds of Kirkconnel. Kirkconnell's own visit to his ancestral village inspired his original poem "Kirkconnell, Galloway, A.D. 600. Visited A.D. 1953" . The poet pondered how much
5890-572: The Communist Party of Canada . According to Gordon L. Heath, however, Kirkconnell's motivations were based, "on lofty ideas of democracy" and he accordingly never advocated, "a policy of suppression", but preferred instead to see the real loyalties of Soviet spies, crypto-communists , and fellow travellers laid bare before the Canadian people . Also at the beginning of the Cold War , Kirkconnell went on
6045-613: The German occupation of Italy in September 1943, there were no serious attempt to deport Italian Jews, and Italy refused to allow the deportation of Jews in many Italian-occupied areas . Nazi Germany did not attempt the destruction of the Finnish Jews and the North African Jews living under French or Italian rule . An estimated 200,000 to 250,000 Germans were directly involved in killing Jews, and if one includes all those involved in
6200-497: The German–Soviet pact . The Soviet Union deported hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens to the Soviet interior, including as many as 260,000 Jews who largely survived the war. Although most Jews were not communists, some accepted positions in the Soviet administration, contributing to a pre-existing perception among many non-Jews that Soviet rule was a Jewish conspiracy. In 1940, Germany invaded much of western Europe including
6355-556: The Holodomor , and other human rights abuses , and what he saw as the domestic threat posed by both the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Canada and the covert operationss of Soviet foreign intelligence services on Canadian soil. During the Second World War , Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King seriously considered acting to protect the military alliance with the USSR by silencing Kirkconnell with an order in council . Only after
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6510-649: The Iroquois Confederacy , migrated as United Empire Loyalists to the Port Hope area from New York state in 1779. They had been forced from their ancestral homeland in the Finger Lakes region, south of the Great Lakes , after having fought for King George III as Loyalists during the American Revolution . Great Britain had ceded their lands, along with all other territory in the Thirteen Colonies east of
6665-692: The Jewish people and keen distress over our Government's attitude towards the refugee situation", and first appeared in the Canadian Jewish Review on 11 June 1943. The Soviet newspaper Trud also attacked Kirkconnell for being both an anti-communist and a Ukrainophile , and even dubbed him, "the Führer of Canadian Fascism ". Meanwhile, so vocal were Kirkconnell's continuing criticisms of Stalinism and of Soviet war crimes that Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King seriously considered acting to protect
6820-808: The Lublin District of the General Governorate. 45,000 Jews were deported by November and left to fend for themselves, causing many deaths. Deportations stopped in early 1940 due to the opposition of Hans Frank , the leader of the General Governorate, who did not want his fiefdom to become a dumping ground for unwanted Jews. After the conquest of France, the Nazis considered deporting Jews to French Madagascar , but this proved impossible. The Nazis planned that harsh conditions in these areas would kill many Jews. In September 1939, around 7,000 Jews were killed, alongside thousands of Poles, however, they were not systematically targeted as they would be later, and open mass killings would subside until June of 1941. During
6975-510: The Mississippi River , after the United States won independence. In 1793, other Loyalists from the northern colonies became the first permanent settlers of European heritage in Port Hope, as the Crown granted them land as compensation for being forced to leave the colonies (much of their property was confiscated by rebel governments) and as payment for military service. The new colonists called
7130-600: The Port Hope railway station along the Toronto-Montreal corridor. The station was built in 1856 for the Grand Trunk Railway and later CN Rail . It was restored in 1985. Pleasure boats dock at the foot of John Street at Hayward Street and share the facilities with Cameco, which has berths for freighters servicing their manufacturing facilities at the mouth of the Ganaraska River. Public education in Port Hope
7285-546: The Province of Quebec . The post office dates from 1820. In 1834 Port Hope was incorporated as a town. Relatively slow growth from 1881 to 1951 resulted in much of the town's 19th century architecture surviving. In the early 21st century, Port Hope's downtown is celebrated as the best-preserved 19th-century streetscape in the province of Ontario. The town's local chapter of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario and
7440-488: The Roma and Sinti , as well as Soviet prisoners of war and Polish and Soviet civilians . All of these groups, however, were targeted for different reasons. By the 1970s, the adjective Jewish was dropped as redundant and Holocaust, now capitalized, became the default term for the destruction of European Jews. The Hebrew word Shoah ('catastrophic destruction') exclusively refers to Jewish victims. The perpetrators used
7595-561: The Soviet threat. Hitler believed that Jews controlled the Soviet Union , as well as the Western powers, and were plotting to destroy Germany . Amidst a worldwide economic depression and political fragmentation , the Nazi Party rapidly increased its support, reaching a high of 37 percent in mid-1932 elections , by campaigning on issues such as anticommunism and economic recovery. Hitler
7750-625: The Weimar Republic . Kirkconnell later recalled, after surrendering his prisoners to the neutral Dutch armed forces , "That they bore me no ill will for my performance at Fort Henry and Kapuskasing seemed clear when on the wharf my former prisoners called for, 'Three cheers for Captain Kirkconnell', and gave them lustily." Despite years of grief over the combat death of his brother, Watson Kirkconnell later wrote, "Generally speaking, I could feel little animus against our German prisoners. Guarding them
7905-509: The Wola Massacre , or deported to extermination camps for fear of additional Jewish resistance developing. Nevertheless, in early 1944, more than 70,000 Jews were performing forced labor in the General Governorate. Unlike the killing areas in the east, the deportation from elsewhere in Europe was centrally organized from Berlin, although it depended on the outcome of negotiations with allied governments and popular responses to deportation. Beginning in late 1941, local administrators responded to
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#17328510846998060-491: The ghettos . Soviet prisoners of war in the custody of the German Army were intended to die in large numbers. Sixty percent—3.3 million people—died, primarily of starvation, making them the second largest group of victims of Nazi mass killing after European Jews. Jewish prisoners of war and commissars were systematically executed. About a million civilians were killed by the Nazis during anti-partisan warfare , including more than 300,000 in Belarus. From 1942 onwards,
8215-399: The postwar settlement united Germans across the political spectrum. The military promoted the untrue but compelling idea that, rather than being defeated on the battlefield, Germany had been stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews. The Nazi Party was founded in the wake of the war, and its ideology is often cited as the main factor explaining the Holocaust. From the beginning,
8370-404: The rise of nationalism in Europe and industrialization that increased economic conflicts between Jews and non-Jews. Some scientists began to categorize humans into different races and argued that there was a life or death struggle between them . Many racists argued that Jews were a separate racial group alien to Europe . The turn of the twentieth century saw a major effort to establish
8525-502: The 1945 defection of Soviet military intelligence officer Igor Gouzenko did the Canadian government and it's counterintelligence services begin taking Kirkconnell's claims seriously and decide to recruit him as a covert informant. Even so, Kirkconnell was also a very harsh critic of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy , whom he accused of having discredited anti-communism by acting in, "an offensive and blundering fashion." Even though Kirkconnell's pioneering vision for multiculturalism
8680-514: The Craft itself, and found that most of its ritual lecture material was composed in England in the 18th century by Dr. James Anderson , Dr. J.T. Desaguliers, George Payne , and William Preston . I had grave reasons for suspecting that the Free and Accepted Masons were not much more 'ancient' than the establishment of Grand Lodge Masonry in London in 1717." However, Kirkconnell subsequently changed his mind about what he had formerly considered pseudohistory and, "passed from my early skepticism into
8835-423: The Eldorado plant produced exponentially more uranium oxides , which the United States used in the Manhattan Project that created the first nuclear weapons. This plant, now under the ownership of Cameco , continues to produce uranium fuel for nuclear power plants. In 2002, a large amount of contaminated soil was removed from beachfront areas. More recently, a testing program began of over 5,000 properties, with
8990-476: The French but we know Quebec now. Colonel Date calls them ‘the cockroaches of Canada’ and he is not far out.” He even urged his mother and sister "to take advantage of the Wartime Election Act to vote in the ... Union election 'against Frenchmen, Catholicism, and the abandonment of all national honour.'" Kirkconnell was first sworn into Freemasonry in Canada in December 1920 at the "Faithful Brethren" Lodge No. 77 in Lindsay, Ontario . He remained in "The Craft" for
9145-530: The German Jews out of public life by the end of 1934, the regime passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. The laws reserved full citizenship rights for those of "German or related blood", restricted Jews' economic activity, and criminalized new marriages and sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jewish Germans . Jews were defined as those with three or four Jewish grandparents; many of those with partial Jewish descent were classified as Mischlinge , with varying rights. The regime also sought to segregate Jews with
9300-538: The German occupiers and other non-Jews. Although the majority of Holocaust victims died in 1942, the killing continued at a lower rate until the end of the war in May 1945. Many Jewish survivors emigrated outside of Europe after the war. A few Holocaust perpetrators faced criminal trials. Billions of dollars in reparations have been paid, although falling short of the Jews' losses. The Holocaust has also been commemorated in museums, memorials , and culture . It has become central to Western historical consciousness as
9455-492: The Germans and their allies targeted villages suspected of supporting the partisans, burning them and killing or expelling their inhabitants. During these operations, nearby small ghettos were liquidated and their inhabitants shot. By 1943, anti-partisan operations aimed for the depopulation of large areas of Belarus. Jews and those unfit for work were typically shot on the spot with others deported. Although most of those killed were not Jews, anti-partisan warfare often led to
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#17328510846999610-465: The Heritage Port Hope Advisory Committee are very active and advise on the restoration and preservation of architecturally or historically significant buildings. With over 270 heritage-designated buildings throughout the municipality, Port Hope has a higher per capita rate of preservation than any other town or city in Canada. Downtown businesses are regulated by the municipality to maintain the town's unique character. This special character makes Port Hope
9765-850: The Holocaust, as well as profiting from unclaimed deposits made by Holocaust victims. Beginning in 1938—especially in Germany and its annexed territories—many Jews were drafted into forced-labor camps and segregated work details. These camps were often of a temporary nature and typically overseen by civilian authorities. Initially, mortality did not increase dramatically. After mid-1941, conditions for Jewish forced laborers drastically worsened and death rates increased; even private companies deliberately subjected workers to murderous conditions. Beginning in 1941 and increasingly as time went on, Jews capable of employment were separated from others—who were usually killed. They were typically employed in non-skilled jobs and could be replaced easily if non-Jewish workers were available, but those in skilled positions had
9920-432: The Jews killed in the Holocaust died by poison gas. Thousands of Romani people were also murdered in the extermination camps. Prisoner uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor meant that these camps were shut down earlier than envisioned. Plans to kill most of the Jews in the General Governorate were affected by various goals of the SS, military, and civil administration to reduce the amount of food consumed by Jews, enable
10075-530: The London vintner 's son." Kirkconnell felt similarly when he discovered the Medieval Latin poetry of the Wandering Scholars and the Medieval Hebrew poetry of Solomon ibn Gabirol and Yehuda Halevi . As a result, Kirkconnell grew to believe that Prehistoric intermarriage among the ancestors of European peoples had not been detrimental, but positive. Therefore, Kirkconnell concluded, as all Europeans are of genetically mixed ancestry, further White ethnic immigration and intermarriage would actually strengthen
10230-419: The Municipality of Port Hope and Hope , which was renamed to its current name in November of that same year. At the time of amalgamation, the town's census population was listed as 11,718, while the township's was 3,887. The 2017 horror movie It , its 2019 sequel It Chapter Two , and It: Welcome to Derry were all filmed in Port Hope, which portrayed the fictional town of Derry, Maine. Port Hope
10385-654: The Nazis—not unlike other nation-states in Europe—dreamed of a world without Jews , whom they identified as "the embodiment of everything that was wrong with modernity ". The Nazis defined the German nation as a racial community unbounded by Germany's physical borders and sought to purge it of racially foreign and socially deficient elements. The Nazi Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler , were also obsessed with reversing Germany's territorial losses and acquiring additional Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe for colonization. These ideas appealed to many Germans. The Nazis promised to protect European civilization from
10540-571: The Netherlands , Belgium , Luxembourg , France , and Denmark and Norway . In 1941, Germany invaded Yugoslavia and Greece . Some of these new holdings were fully or partially annexed into Germany while others were placed under civilian or military rule . The war provided cover for " Aktion T4 ", the murder of around 70,000 institutionalized Germans with mental or physical disabilities at specialized killing centers using poison gas. The victims included all 4,000 to 5,000 institutionalized Jews. Despite efforts to maintain secrecy, knowledge of
10695-476: The Netherlands was higher than neighboring countries, which scholars have attributed to difficulty in hiding or increased collaboration of the Dutch police. The German government sought the deportation of Jews from allied countries. The first to hand over its Jewish population was Slovakia , which arrested and deported about 58,000 Jews to Poland from March to October 1942. The Independent State of Croatia had already shot or killed in concentration camps
10850-401: The Port Hope Baptist Church. According to J.M.R. Beveridge, "Thus began his commitment to Christianity which, although subjected to periods of doubt, sometimes perhaps even approaching despair, survived and matured. Throughout his adult life he played an active and on many occasions leading role in the Baptist denomination." Kirkconnell, however, seriously considered leaving the Baptist faith as
11005-572: The Soviet-Canadian military alliance against Nazi Germany by silencing Kirkconnell with an Order-in-Council . Provincial Provincial After the September 1945 defection and revelations of GRU Lt. Igor Gouzenko launched both the Cold War in Canada and the PROFUNC counterintelligence operation, Kirkconnell was recruited as a secret informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service regarding politicians, fellow university professors, and students who were suspected of links to Soviet Bloc foreign intelligence services or
11160-502: The United Kingdom and France . During the five weeks of fighting, as many as 16,000 civilians, hostages, and prisoners of war may have been shot by the German invaders; there was also a great deal of looting. Special units known as Einsatzgruppen followed the army to eliminate any possible resistance. Around 50,000 Polish and Polish Jewish leaders and intellectuals were arrested or executed . The Auschwitz concentration camp
11315-594: The Wartheland and General Governorate in 1939 and 1940 on the initiative of local German administrators. The largest ghettos, such as Warsaw and Łódź , were established in existing residential neighborhoods and closed by fences or walls. In many smaller ghettos, Jews were forced into poor neighborhoods but with no fence. Forced labor programs provided subsistence to many ghetto inhabitants, and in some cases protected them from deportation. Workshops and factories were operated inside some ghettos, while in other cases Jews left
11470-510: The assistance of local collaborators and rewards offered for their denunciation. The death penalty was sometimes enforced on people hiding them, especially in eastern Europe. Rescuers' motivations varied on a spectrum from altruism to expecting sex or material gain; it was not uncommon for helpers to betray or murder Jews if their money ran out. Gerlach argues that hundreds of thousands of Jews may have died because of rumors or denunciations, and many others never attempted to escape because of
11625-549: The beginning of September, all German Jews were required to wear a yellow star, and in October, Hitler decided to deport them to the east and ban emigration. Between mid-October and the end of 1941, 42,000 Jews from Germany and its annexed territories and 5,000 Romani people from Austria were deported to Łódź, Kovno, Riga, and Minsk . In late November, 5,000 German Jews were shot outside of Kovno and another 1,000 near Riga, but Himmler ordered an end to such massacres and some in
11780-873: The book, which included his translations in chronological order from Jan Kochanowski to Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska , to the memory of Marshal Józef Piłsudski , about whom Kirkconnell also composed a funeral ode. The title page describes Kirkconnell as having been made a knight of the Order of Polonia Restituta by the government of the Second Polish Republic . Beginning with the poetry composed by Manitoba Icelandic-Canadians such as Stephan G. Stephansson and Guttormur J. Guttormsson , Kirkconnell also translated and publicized verse by recent immigrants to Canada and their descendants, whom he sometimes termed, "New Canadians", from Icelandic , Italian , Polish , Ukrainian , and Canadian Gaelic . By 1916 , disinterest in
11935-409: The country's population in 1933. They were wealthier on average than other Germans and largely assimilated, although a minority were recent immigrants from eastern Europe. Various German government agencies, Nazi Party organizations, and local authorities instituted about 1,500 anti-Jewish laws . In 1933, Jews were banned or restricted from several professions and the civil service . After hounding
12090-476: The culture of the region and the celebration of Christmas Day had changed since Kirkconnell Abbey was founded by St. Conal , a Culdee monk and missionary of the Celtic Church . The landscape, he commented, remained largely unchanged and called upon his readers to embrace the awe that their ancestors had once felt before the incarnation and birth of Jesus Christ . In, "an almost imperceptible little ripple in
12245-639: The deaths of Jews. The systematic murder of Jews began in the Soviet Union in 1941. During the invasion, many Jews were conscripted into the Red Army . Out of 10 or 15 million Soviet civilians who fled eastwards to the Soviet interior , 1.6 million were Jews. Local inhabitants killed as many as 50,000 Jews in pogroms in Latvia, Lithuania , eastern Poland , Ukraine, and the Romanian borderlands. Although German forces tried to incite pogroms, their role in causing violence
12400-487: The decision to switch to other methods of killing. Most historians agree that Hitler issued an explicit order to kill all Jews across Europe, but there is disagreement as to when. Some historians cite inflammatory statements by Hitler and other Nazi leaders as well as the concurrent mass shootings of Serbian Jews , plans for extermination camps in Poland, and the beginning of the deportation of German Jews as indicative of
12555-571: The decline of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority in Canada and always believed in lesser forms of scientific racism and the racial inferiority of non-Whites, Kirkconnell continued publicizing and making translations of the national poetry of European immigrants for the rest of his life. For example, his collection A Golden Treasury of Polish Lyrics was published by The Polish Press, Ltd, in Winnipeg in 1936. Kirkconnell dedicated
12710-690: The deportation of Jews to their area by massacring local Jews in order to free up space in ghettos for the deportees. If the deported Jews did not die of harsh conditions, they were killed later in extermination camps. Jews deported to Auschwitz were initially entered into the camp; the practice of conducting selections and murdering many prisoners upon arrival began in July 1942. In May and June, German and Slovak Jews deported to Lublin began to be sent directly to extermination camps. In Western Europe, almost all Jewish deaths occurred after deportation. The occupiers often relied on local policemen to arrest Jews, limiting
12865-459: The development of Canada as a nation. It was finally the 1925 death of his wife while giving birth to twin sons that brought Kirkconnell to a more tolerant position. As both a tribute and a memorial to his late wife, Kirkconnell decided to select and translate poetry from forty different languages. He worked in close collaboration with distinguished literary scholars, such as Albert Verwey , Douglas Hyde , and Pavle Popović . He eventually published
13020-440: The early twentieth century, most Jews in central and western Europe were well integrated into society, while in eastern Europe, where emancipation had arrived later, many Jews continued to live in small towns , spoke Yiddish , and practiced Orthodox Judaism . Political antisemitism positing the existence of a Jewish question and usually an international Jewish conspiracy emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century due to
13175-404: The end of 1941, more than 80 percent of the Jews in central Ukraine, eastern Belarus, Russia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been shot, but less than 25 percent of those living farther west where 900,000 remained alive. By the end of the war, around 1.5 to 2 million Jews were shot and as many as 225,000 Roma. The murderers found the executions distressing and logistically inconvenient, which influenced
13330-689: The end of July. The vast majority of civilian victims were Jews. In July and August Heinrich Himmler , the leader of the SS ( Schutzstaffel ), made several visits to the death squads ' zones of operation, relaying orders to kill more Jews. At this time, the killers began to murder Jewish women and children too. Executions peaked at 40,000 a month in Lithuania in August and September and in October and November reached their height in Belarus . The executions often took place
13485-417: The extermination camps later dug up human remains in search of valuables. The property of deported Jews was also appropriated by Germany's allies and collaborating governments. Even puppet states such as Vichy France and Norway were able to successfully lay claim to Jewish property. In the decades after the war, Swiss banks became notorious for harboring gold deposited by Nazis who had stolen it during
13640-435: The father of multiculturalism in Canada by his successor at Acadia University , J.R.C. Perkin. He was also, paradoxically, a life-long adherent to varying degrees of the pseudosciences of eugenics and scientific racism . Even more paradoxically, Kirkconnell was an anti-Semite as a young man and again as an old man, when he embraced Holocaust denial under the influence of conspiracy theorist William Guy Carr , but in
13795-454: The final decision having been made before December 1941. Others argue that these policies were initiatives by local leaders and that the final decision was made later. On 5 December 1941, the Soviet Union launched its first major counteroffensive . On 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor . The next day, he told leading Nazi party officials , referring to his 1939 prophecy , "The world war
13950-529: The fine Latin hymns of the Polish Jesuit Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595-1640)." Kirkconnell further recalled that his "first awareness of small town journalism came" after his "second Christmas-time promotion". The Port Hope Guide reported that "a local lawyer" had angrily protested during a school board meeting that his son has not been similarly promoted and accused Watson Kirkconnell of having been "shoved", solely because his father
14105-469: The finish line." Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was cancelled in 2020 and 2021, the first time in its history for such action. The Capitol Theatre is Canada's last functioning atmospheric theatre . The theatre's main auditorium is styled after an outdoor medieval courtyard and rolling clouds are projected onto the ceiling. The town spent in excess of three million dollars renovating and upgrading
14260-463: The ghetto after a final selection, and around 20,000 or 25,000 managed to hide in the ghetto. Misdirection efforts convinced many Jews that they could avoid deportation until it was too late. During a six-week period beginning in August, 300,000 Jews from the Radom District were sent to Treblinka. At the same time as the mass killing of Jews in the General Governorate, Jews who were in ghettos to
14415-550: The ghetto to work outside it. Because the ghettos were not segregated by sex some family life continued. A Jewish community leadership ( Judenrat ) exercised some authority and tried to sustain the Jewish community while following German demands. As a survival strategy, many tried to make the ghettos useful to the occupiers as a labor reserve. Jews in western Europe were not forced into ghettos but faced discriminatory laws and confiscation of property. Rape and sexual exploitation of Jewish and non-Jewish women in eastern Europe
14570-598: The ghetto would be raided without warning, usually in the early morning, and the extent of the operation would be concealed as long as possible. Trawniki men would cordon off the ghetto while the Order Police and Security Police carried out the action. In addition to local non-Jewish collaborators, the Jewish councils and Jewish ghetto police were often ordered to assist with liquidation actions, although these Jews were in most cases murdered later. Chaotic, capriciously executed selections determined who would be loaded onto
14725-585: The ghetto, and set it on fire. These ghetto uprisings were only undertaken when the inhabitants began to believe that their death was certain. In 1943, larger uprisings in Warsaw , Białystok , and Glubokoje necessitated the use of heavy weapons. The uprising in Warsaw prompted the Nazi leadership to liquidate additional ghettos and labor camps in German-occupied Poland with their inhabitants massacred, such as
14880-579: The imminent demise of the " Nordic race " in Ontario due to the increasing immigration of French-Canadians , Jews , and Slavic peoples . Although his racist writings remain largely unpublished, his eugenicist views were expounded in The International Aspects of Unemployment (1923), which called for the internment in labour camps and wholesale sterilization of disabled Canadians and all others deemed "unfit." Kirkconnell's experiences, however, as
15035-537: The influence of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Watson, who he later described as a, "grey-bearded... pillar of the local Methodist church". Thomas Watson used to reward his grandson by giving him one cent for every stanza he memorized from Divine and Moral Songs by Isaac Watts . Kirkconnell later recalled, "From an entire volume thus committed to memory, I gained considerable cash, indelible recollections of many edifying verses, and an indelible love of prosody . Neither of us dreamt that back of several of Watts' poems lay
15190-523: The intervening period he regularly made and published literary translations of verse he admired by Jewish poets. Furthermore, while Kirkconnell was hesitant to condemn Nazism in May 1939, he changed his mind and used his many literary contacts to help mobilize Canadian immigrant communities in favour of the Allied war effort and in 1943 he eulogized the victims of the Holocaust in a poem entitled "Agony of Israel" . At
15345-535: The invasion, synagogues were burned and thousands of Jews fled or were expelled into the Soviet occupation zone. Various anti-Jewish regulations were soon issued. In October 1939, adult Jews in the General Governorate were required to perform forced labor. In November 1939 they were ordered to wear white armbands. Laws decreed the seizure of most Jewish property and the takeover of Jewish-owned businesses. When Jews were forced into ghettos, they lost their homes and belongings. The first Nazi ghettos were established in
15500-457: The journey, most were killed with poison gas. Other Jews continued to be employed in forced labor camps where many died from starvation, abuse, exhaustion, or being used as test subjects in deadly medical experiments . Although many Jews tried to escape, surviving in hiding was difficult due to factors such as the lack of money to pay helpers and the risk of denunciation. The property, homes, and jobs belonging to murdered Jews were redistributed to
15655-431: The killings leaked out and Hitler ordered a halt to the centralized killing program in August 1941. Decentralized killings via denial of medical care, starvation, and poisoning caused an additional 120,000 deaths by the end of the war. Many of the same personnel and technologies were later used for the mass murder of Jews. Germany gained control of 1.7 million Jews in Poland. The Nazis tried to concentrate Jews in
15810-600: The landscape. By the time he graduated high school, Kirkconnell had learned Latin, French, German , and Greek , and had been exposed to works of comparative philology . He later wrote, "The labours of my lifetime have been more in the field of language study than in any other." In 1913, at the urging of his father, Kirkconnell began studies at his father's alma mater of Queen's University at Kingston . Even though mathematics had been his best subject in high school, Kirkconnell proceeded to honours in Classics and graduated as
15965-455: The largest number of Jews . Romania deported about 154,000–170,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to ghettos in Transnistria from 1941 to 1943. Jews from Transnistria were also imprisoned in these ghettos, where the total death toll may have reached 160,000. Hungary expelled thousands of Carpathian Ruthenian and foreign Jews in 1941, who were shortly thereafter shot in Ukraine . At
16120-439: The majority of its Jewish population (along with a larger number of Serbs ), and later deported several thousand Jews in 1942 and 1943. Bulgaria deported 11,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Greece and Yugoslavia , who were murdered at Treblinka, but declined to allow the deportation of Jews from its prewar territory . Romania and Hungary did not send any Jews, which were the largest surviving populations after 1942. Prior to
16275-437: The most part, only those working in armaments production were spared. The majority of ghettos were liquidated in mass executions nearby, especially if they were not near a train station. Larger ghettos were more commonly liquidated during multiple deportations to extermination camps. During this campaign, 1.5 million Polish Jews were murdered in the largest killing operation of the Holocaust. In order to reduce resistance,
16430-463: The most recent having occurred on March 21–22, 1980. Every April since until 2020, Port Hope has commemorated the flood with "Float Your Fanny Down the Ganny" ten kilometre boat race. "Participants range from serious paddlers navigating the cold, fast-moving water in kayaks and canoes, to the very entertaining 'crazy craft' paddlers, floating any combination of materials down the river in an attempt to reach
16585-617: The mud of Salisbury Plain , Lt. Walter Kirkconnell was killed in action during the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918, when the Canadian Corps platoon under his command ran into a German machine gun nest in a grain field near Villers-Bretonneux . In August 1916, Kirkconnell volunteered for active service on the Western Front . In November 1916, however, despite having been personally requested by Major P.G.C. Campbell and shortly before he
16740-457: The new regime. The new regime built popular support through economic growth, which partly occurred through state-led measures such as rearmament . The annexations of Austria (1938), Sudetenland (1938), and Bohemia and Moravia (1939) also increased the Nazis' popular support. Germans were inundated with propaganda both against Jews and other groups targeted by the Nazis. The roughly 500,000 German Jews made up less than 1 percent of
16895-443: The newspaper was included in the large-scale closing of many local community newspapers throughout the province of Ontario. Port Hope's Economic Development Strategic Plan aims to increase job growth at least as fast as population growth. The town has a variety of industries. The Ganaraska River (affectionately known as "The Ganny"), is well known to area anglers for annual salmon and trout runs. It has caused many historic floods,
17050-536: The number who were deported. In 1942, nearly 100,000 Jews were deported from Belgium , France , and the Netherlands . Only 25 percent of the Jews in France were killed; most of them were either non-citizens or recent immigrants. Si Kaddour Benghabrit and Abdelkader Mesli saved hundreds of Jews by hiding them in the basements of the Grand Mosque of Paris and other resistance efforts in France. The death rate in
17205-442: The organization of extermination, the number rises to 500,000. Genocide required the active and tacit consent of millions of Germans and non-Germans. The motivation of Holocaust perpetrators varied and has led to historiographical debate. Studies of the SS officials who organized the Holocaust have found that most had strong ideological commitment to Nazism. In addition to ideological factors, many perpetrators were motivated by
17360-426: The peak of the genocide, as over 3 million Jews were murdered, with 20 or 25 percent of Holocaust victims dying before early 1942 and the same number surviving by the end of the year. Gas vans developed from those used to kill mental patients since 1939 were assigned to the Einsatzgruppen and first used in November 1941; victims were forced into the van and killed with engine exhaust. The first extermination camp
17515-474: The phrase " Final Solution " as a euphemism for their genocide of Jews. Jews have lived in Europe for more than two thousand years. Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were subjected to antisemitism based on Christian theology , which blamed them for killing Jesus . In the nineteenth century many European countries granted full citizenship rights to Jews in hopes that they would assimilate . By
17670-402: The poet's many sources of inspiration from World literature in many other languages. His blank verse translations of the neo-Classical but Biblically centered plays of Dutch national poet Joost van den Vondel , which Kirkconnell strongly believed to have been a major influence on Milton's Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes date from this period. In 1936, Watson Kirkconnell was made
17825-604: The poetry of John Milton based on distaste for his Puritanism had reached a new low. Due in large part to the efforts of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot , the Puritan poet was even declared deposed, with little or no fanfare, in favor of John Donne and Andrew Marvell , as the Anglosphere 's greatest composer of Christian poetry . In response, Kirkconnell sought during the interwar period to return John Milton to his pedestal by translating and publishing what had long been believed to been
17980-406: The possibility of better treatment from the occupiers, or ideological motivations such as nationalism and anti-communism. According to historian Christian Gerlach , non-Germans "not under German command" caused 5 to 6 percent of the Jewish deaths, and their involvement was crucial in other ways. Millions of Germans and others benefited from the genocide. Corruption was rampant in the SS despite
18135-815: The previous Aktion T4 programme —amid increasing talk among German administrators in Poland of large-scale murder of Jews in the General Governorate. In late 1941 in East Upper Silesia , Jews in forced-labor camps operated by the Schmelt Organization deemed "unfit for work" began to be sent in groups to Auschwitz where they were murdered. In early 1942, Zyklon B became the preferred killing method in extermination camps after gassing experiments were conducted on Russian POWs in late August 1941. The camps were located on rail lines to make it easier to transport Jews to their deaths, but in remote places to avoid notice. The stench caused by mass killing operations
18290-440: The proceeds of the Holocaust being designated as state property. Different German state agencies vied to receive property stolen from Jews murdered at the death camps. Many workers were able to obtain better jobs vacated by murdered Jews. Businessmen benefitted from eliminating their Jewish competitors or taking over Jewish-owned businesses. Others took over housing and possessions that had belonged to Jews. Some Poles living near
18445-439: The prohibition of relationships, including fraternization, between German and foreign workers, which imposed the penalty of imprisonment and death. Gerlach estimates that 200,000 Jews survived in hiding across Europe. Knowledge of German intentions was essential to take action, but many struggled to believe the news. Many attempted to jump from trains or flee ghettos and camps, but successfully escaping and living in hiding
18600-542: The prospect of material gain and social advancement. German SS, police, and regular army units rarely had trouble finding enough men to shoot Jewish civilians, even though punishment for refusal was absent or light. Non-German perpetrators and collaborators included Dutch, French, and Polish policemen , Romanian soldiers, foreign SS and police auxiliaries , Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans, and some civilians. Some were coerced into committing violence against Jews, but others killed for entertainment, material rewards,
18755-403: The racial superiority of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants . After he grew to adulthood, he accordingly opposed allowing any further non-British immigration into Canada. He also became passionately interested in the now discredited pseudosciences of scientific racism , Social Darwinism , and Eugenics . Kirkconnell read widely in all three subjects, and composed his own Nordicist tract predicting
18910-611: The record as an extremely harsh critic of the Western Allies ' policy of forced repatriations of anti-communist refugees to the USSR during Operation Keelhaul , of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt for handing Eastern Europe over to Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference , and of the pervasive totalitarianism and human rights abuses in the new Soviet Bloc . Port Hope, Ontario Port Hope
19065-565: The rest of his life and even served as Grand Master of St. George's Lodge No. 20 of the York Rite in Wolfville, Nova Scotia , Kirkconnell later experienced some doubt about the organization, as his subsequent research made him realize that Freemasonry 's legend of the murder of Hiram Abif is contradicted by the Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus . Kirkconnell later wrote, "I turned to books on
19220-707: The same surname still lived in Scotland . At the time, Chatham Township was largely being settled by Gaelic-speaking evictees and voluntary immigrants from Perthshire ( Scottish Gaelic : Siorrachd Pheairt ). Walter Kirkconnell accordingly married one of them; Mary McCallum, the daughter of John and Janet (née McDiarmid) McCallum, from the farmhouse known as "Carnban" in what is now a ruined and completely depopulated village in Glen Lyon ( Scottish Gaelic : Gleann Lìomhann ). Reformed worship in Chatham Township continued
19375-580: The same time, similarly to American and Canadian veterans of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War , who were often vilified for being "premature anti-Fascists" after returning home, Kirkconnell was similarly vilified, not only by Soviet journalists and politicians, but even by Canadian ones, for being a "premature anti-Stalinist". Even so, he continued to write and speak publicly about Soviet war crimes , religious persecution ,
19530-493: The senior Nazi leadership voiced doubts about killing German Jews. Executions of German Jews in the Baltics resumed in early 1942. After the expansion of killings to target the entire Soviet Jewish population, the 3,000 men of the Einsatzgruppen proved insufficient and Himmler mobilized 21 battalions of Order Police to assist them. In addition, Wehrmacht soldiers, Waffen-SS brigades, and local auxiliaries shot many Jews. By
19685-540: The settlement Smith's Creek after a former fur trader . They developed mills and a town plot by the turn of the century. After the War of 1812 , the Crown tried to recruit more British settlers, and townspeople wanted a new name. After a brief fling with the name Toronto, the village was renamed in 1817 as Port Hope, after the Township of Hope of which it was a part. That was the namesake of Colonel Henry Hope , lieutenant governor of
19840-489: The tapestry and mosaic metaphors in favor of embracing a multiethnic and multilingual Canadian culture , Kirkconnell has been credited by his Ukrainian Canadian friend, collaborator in translating Old East Slavic and Ukrainian literature , and university colleague C.H. Andrusyshen with almost singlehandedly ending widespread discrimination against Canadians of White ethnic (meaning non- White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ) ancestry and cultural identity. He has also been dubbed
19995-432: The theatre in 2004–2005. It is also used for live events by Port Hope Festival Theatre. The Municipality of Port Hope is home to many heritage and cultural attractions, and events, including: Highway 401 runs through the north end of Port Hope, with exits at County Road 2/Toronto Road (461) and Highway 28/Ontario Street (464). Port Hope Transit provides local bus service, and VIA Rail provides passenger service from
20150-428: The trains. Many Jews were shot during the action, often leaving ghettos strewn with corpses. Jewish forced laborers had to clean it up and collect any valuables from the victims. The Warsaw Ghetto was cleared between 22 July and 12 September. Of the original population of 350,000 Jews, 250,000 were killed at Treblinka, 11,000 were deported to labor camps, 10,000 were shot in the ghetto, 35,000 were allowed to remain in
20305-590: The vast tide of Scottish immigration that flowed into Canada", Walter Kirkconnell (1795–1860), the poet's great-grandfather, sailed for the New World in 1819 and settled as a pioneer in Chatham Township, Argenteuil County , Quebec . As a result of a 1953 search made at Kirkconnell's request by the Scottish Council, he learned that everyone named Kirkconnell had similarly joined the Scottish diaspora and that no one with
20460-401: The victims were robbed of their remaining possessions, forced to undress, had their hair cut, and were chased into the gas chamber. Death from the gas was agonizing and could take as long as 30 minutes. The gas chambers were primitive and sometimes malfunctioned. Some prisoners were shot because the gas chambers were not functioning. At other extermination camps, nearly everyone on a transport
20615-454: The victims' property was looted both by the occupiers and local inhabitants. Around 200 ghettos were established in the occupied Soviet Union, with many existing only briefly before their inhabitants were executed. A few large ghettos such as Vilna, Kovno , Riga , Białystok , and Lwów lasted into 1943 because they became centers of production. Victims of mass shootings included Jews deported from elsewhere. Besides Germany, Romania killed
20770-440: The volume European Elegies in 1928 . In the process, Kirkconnell came to believe that treating the languages, cultures, and literatures of White ethnic immigrants to Canada with respect would instill in them a sense of loyalty and gratitude to their adopted country. In later years, he often used the metaphor of a tapestry to express his vision for the nation's future. For the rest of his life, Kirkconnell continued to fret about
20925-454: The war years, "I even wrote a parody of T.S. Eliot and his learned appendices, in which almost my entire poem was a patchwork, from my own library shelves, of some forty score high-sounding phrases from all literatures and all periods, including Chinese , Japanese , Ancient Egyptian , Hebrew , Hindi , Hungarian , Basque , Polish , Breton , and Arabic , each with its appropriate footnote. E.K. Brown, to whom I showed it, warned me, with
21080-665: The west and east were targeted. Tens of thousands of Jews were deported from ghettos in the Warthegau and East Upper Silesia to Chełmno and Auschwitz. 300,000 Jews—largely skilled laborers—were shot in Volhynia , Podolia , and southwestern Belarus. Deportations and mass executions in the Bialystok District and Galicia killed many Jews. Although there was practically no resistance in the General Governorate in 1942, some Soviet Jews improvised weapons, attacked those attempting to liquidate
21235-576: The worst-treated groups except for Roma and Jews. Soviet and Polish forced laborers endured inadequate food and medical treatment, long hours, and abuse by employers. Hundreds of thousands died. Many others were forced to work for the occupiers without leaving their country of residence. Some of Germany's allies, including Slovakia and Hungary, agreed to deport Jews to protect non-Jews from German demands for forced labor. East European women were also kidnapped, via lapanka , to serve as sex slaves of German soldiers in military and camp brothels despite
21390-517: Was Chełmno in the Wartheland, established on the initiative of the local civil administrator Arthur Greiser with Himmler's approval; it began operations in December 1941 using gas vans. In October 1941, Higher SS and Police Leader of Lublin Odilo Globocnik began work planning Belzec —the first purpose-built extermination camp to feature stationary gas chambers using carbon monoxide based on
21545-464: Was a highly sophisticated multilingual poet who drew upon both Canadian and world history and while emulating other poets and playwrights from throughout World Literature . He was also a highly skilled satirist , as may be seen in his verse parodies of Robert Burns and, in his poem "Rain on the Waste Land" , of T.S. Eliot . Due to his arguments against what he came to see as the excessive Anglocentrism of his country and its culture and his use of
21700-535: Was appointed chancellor in January 1933 in a backroom deal supported by right-wing politicians. Within months, all other political parties were banned, the regime seized control of the media, tens of thousands of political opponents—especially communists—were arrested, and a system of camps for extrajudicial imprisonment was set up. The Nazi regime cracked down on crime and social outsiders—such as Roma and Sinti , homosexual men , and those perceived as workshy—through
21855-456: Was born on 16 May 1895 in Port Hope, Ontario , where his father, Thomas Kirkconnell, was headmaster of Port Hope High School . Kirkconnell was a sickly child and was accordingly delayed entry for two years into Port Hope Public School and only began taking classes at the age of seven. Despite the delays, Kirkconnell proved to be very academically gifted pupil and was twice allowed to skip a grade. Kirkconnell later credited his love of poetry to
22010-411: Was common . Germany and its allies Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Italy invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Although the war was launched more for strategic than ideological reasons, what Hitler saw as an apocalyptic battle against the forces of Jewish Bolshevism was to be carried out as a war of extermination with complete disregard for the laws and customs of war . A quick victory
22165-561: Was composed during the Siege of Przemyśl in 1915 and flown out of the besieged city by aeroplane for publication in Budapest , which Kirkconnell rendered into the same idiom as English war poets Siegfried Sassoon , Wilfred Owen , and Isaac Rosenberg , remains just as popular. Watson Kirkconnell's paternal ancestors derived their surname from the village and ruined monastery of Kirkconnel . They were Presbyterians , spoke Galwegian Gaelic , wore
22320-523: Was denounced by two Communist Party of Canada representatives in the Canadian House of Commons , as well as savaged by the Canadian communist press. One Canadian Communist publication called Kirkconnell a, " fascist , mad dog, and a traitor." Kirkconnell's poem "Agony of Israel" , which compares the perpetrators of the Holocaust to Haman from the Book of Esther , was written, "out of life-long sympathy for
22475-587: Was established to hold those members of the Polish intelligentsia not killed in the purges. Around 400,000 Poles were expelled from the Wartheland in western Poland to the General Governorate occupation zone from 1939 to 1941, and the area was resettled by ethnic Germans from eastern Europe . The rest of Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union , which invaded Poland from the east on 17 September pursuant to
22630-453: Was expected and was planned to be followed by a massive demographic engineering project to remove 31 million people and replace them with German settlers . To increase the speed of conquest the Germans planned to feed their army by looting, exporting additional food to Germany, and to terrorize the local inhabitants with preventative killings. The Germans foresaw that the invasion would cause
22785-517: Was extremely difficult and often unsuccessful. The support, or at least absence of active opposition, of the local population was essential but often lacking in Eastern Europe. Those in hiding depended on the assistance of non-Jews. Having money, social connections with non-Jews, a non-Jewish appearance, perfect command of the local language, determination, and luck played a major role in determining survival. Jews in hiding were hunted down with
22940-1132: Was extremely disappointed to be classified as medically unfit for active service when he was only days away from being shipped to the Western Front with the Canadian Corps . He instead spent the rest of the war guarding Central Powers POWs and civilian internees at Fort Henry and Kapuskasing internment camps in rural Ontario . Following the 1918 Armistice, he entered a university faculty career and became an internationally known poet, translator of poetry, and literary critic . After learning enormously from what he taught about world literature to his students, Kirkconnell made radical teaching innovations and also became an enormously influential public intellectual , who publicized and denounced human rights abuses under Fascism , Nazism , and Stalinism . For his many many translations of their national poetry and that by "New Canadian" poets who composed in immigrant languages , Kirkconnell remains very well known in Iceland , Poland , Hungary , and Ukraine . For his original poetry, verse dramas , and light operas , Kirkconnell
23095-559: Was intended to make his country less Anglocentric and more accepting only of Canadians who spoke immigrant languages and had ancestral roots in European nations other than Great Britain, the concept has been widened before and since his death to also acknowledge the cultural contributions of First Nation peoples and other non-Whites. The current revival effortss for minority languages in Canada are also part of his legacy. One of his most popular literary translations from Hungarian literature
23250-535: Was killed on arrival, but at Auschwitz around 20–25 percent were separated out for labor, although many of these prisoners died later on through starvation, mass shooting, torture, and medical experiments. Belzec, Sobibor , and Treblinka reported a combined revenue of RM 178.7 million from belongings stolen from their victims, far exceeding costs. Combined, the camps required the labor of less than 3,000 Jewish prisoners, 1,000 Trawniki men (largely Ukrainian auxiliaries), and very few German guards. About half of
23405-419: Was noticeable to anyone nearby. Except in the deportations from western and central Europe, people were typically deported to the camps in overcrowded cattle cars . As many as 150 people were forced into a single boxcar . Many died en route , partly because of the low priority accorded to these transports. Shortage of rail transport sometimes led to postponement or cancellation of deportations. Upon arrival,
23560-514: Was simply a job. It was their duty to try to get away and our duty to prevent it. The ingenuity that they displayed in their attempts to escape was being duplicated by our men in German captivity ." He did, however, feel deep animus to French Canadians during the War. Kirkconnell was adamant that no “French Catholic curs” be allowed into Prime Minister Robert Borden’s cabinet, adding “I used to think that Aunt Jane might be exaggerating in her denunciation of
23715-456: Was something of a sinecure." While serving as camp paymaster at Kapuskasing, Captain Watson Kirkconnell helped prevent a prisoner uprising and, on two occasions, he also discovered and foiled attempts to tunnel out of the camp. During the fall of 1919, Captain Kirkconnell accompanied 445 POWs and internees from Fort Henry and Kapuskasing internment camp aboard the S.S. Pretorian , from Quebec City to Rotterdam , pending their repatriation to
23870-508: Was the headmaster of Port Hope High School . For this reason, the Kirkconnell family felt both vindicated and overjoyed the following summer, after the same newspaper published the results of the Provincial "Entrance Examinations". These proved that the headmaster's controversial son had scored, "nearly fifty points higher than anyone else in town or county." At the age of twelve, Kirkconnell asked for and received both baptism and membership in
24025-439: Was to be shipped overseas with the 253rd Battalion, Captain Kirkconnell was ruled unfit for combat duty by three successive Medical Boards. A deeply disappointed Captain Watson Kirkconnell spent the rest of the war guarding POWs and civilian internees at Fort Henry and at Kapuskasing internment camp , both in rural Ontario . In his words, "The great majority of the prisoners were Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Poles. There were also
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