Outside of Fredericton, overgrown by trees, lies the remains of what as once a secret Internment Camp run by the Canadian Government during the Second World War, guarded with barbed wire fences, towers, and machine guns. The hundreds of people imprisoned and so closely guarded in the camp, however, were Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi Germany.
Soon after the declaration of war, 450 veterans of the First World War who had volunteered to fight again but were deemed too old to fight, but still young enough to assist the war effort, were assembled and sent off into the woods of New Brunswick. They weren’t told where they were going or why.
They arrived at the remains of what had been a relief camp in the Great Depression. This was a time in Canada before our modern social safety net was created, and there was no Unemployment Insurance, and no Welfare. There was also no Medicare, meaning that you had to pay for a doctor or to go to the hospital. Meanwhile some 30% of the workforce was unemployed. A network of “relief camps” were created to put young single men to work doing hard manual labour (such as forestry work), for which they would receive remarkably basic room and board, food, and a pittance of a wage.
One such work camp was in Ripples, New Brunswick, between Fredericton and Minto, and it was here that the soldiers were sent. There they were instructed to build a series of bunk buildings, constructed out of rough boards and insulated only with tar paper. They built five separate high fences of barbed wire, six guard towers armed with machine guns, and massive spotlights which at night could be seen as far away as the St. John River.
One day the guards were told to go to the nearby Ripples train station to move the first future inhabitants of the camp from a train to the camp. Not told who was arriving and apprehensive, the guards arrived prepared for battle – fully armed with their bayonets fixed to their rifles, ready for anything.
When the doors to the train opened, out came not the Nazi prisoners of war as was rumoured among the guards, but rather civilians, in fact people who had been fleeing Nazi persecution. Many were doctors, lawyers, artists, musicians, chefs who had been middle class citizens in their home countries, and almost all of these people were Jewish. They were tying to escape the horrors inflicted upon them in their homes of Germany, Austria and Poland.
While the guards expected “prisoners of war,” and the Canadian and British governments called them “internees” the prisoners themselves were very clear and consistent in who they were, referring to themselves, signing their art and letters, and referring to each other simply “refugees from Nazi oppression.”
Some 70,000 Jewish refugees from Nazi oppression had fled to Britain before the beginning of the outbreak of the war, from Germany and countries which had recently been invaded by Germany, such as Austria and Poland. The British government under Winston Churchill was worried about Nazi sympathizers and spies among the former Germans, and so the decision was made to send them to Canada.
The British government separated these families, leaving women and children in Britain, in fact starting a public campaign to encourage Britons to take these families in and to house and feed them. The men, some as young as 16, however, were sent on ships overseas to a faraway land and an uncertain future. Awaiting them was a series of 26 camps across the country.
This would not have been Canada’s preference. Canada had a hard policy at the time of not admitting Jewish people fleeing the Nazis. Infamously, when one immigration official was asked how many Jewish refugees Canada should let in he replied “none is too many.” In the 12 years of Nazi rule, Canada in the end only allowed in under 5000 Jewish refugees. In the first six years of Hitler’s rule alone Canada rejected some 800,000 refugee applications from Jewish people attempting to flee persecution.
B-70 was outfitted with many quarters, which housed the 711 refugees in bunk beds, a mess hall, a hospital, a carpentry workshop, a reading room, a library, a trades building, a recreation hut, a sports equipment hut, a mess hall, and a large open cage in the middle of the camp to which people could be sent into for solitary confinement for periods of up to 28 days.
The internees worked four days a week, mostly cutting fire wood. Because the buildings were only made of wood and insulated with tar paper, there were 100 wood stoves in the camp, which took about 25 cords of wood a week to heat. For their wood chopping the internees were paid $0.20 a day – this was stipulated by the Geneva Convention, not something done out of the goodness of the Canadian government’s heart.
After their first meeting, armed to the teeth, the guards relationships with the internees gradually became more relaxed. In other camps across Canada anti-Semitism was a serious issue –notably Quebec, where the Premier openly espoused anti-Semitic conspiracies, and Ontario where the anti-Semitic riots had recently occurred– however it seems to not have been as great of a problem in New Brunswick.
The guards worked with the Fredericton Jewish community –which only numbered 50 people—to prepare kosher foods. Eventually though, the food issue was flipped around: there were several professional chefs interned in the camp, and the prisoners came to end up preparing meals that were considered much better than what the guards had, and so guards would often choose to eat with the internees.
There is even one story of a guard and a prisoner who were getting into a truck together. The guard struggled to get in, and handed his gun to the prisoner. After he got into the truck the prisoner duly handed him back his gun.
Inside the camp there was a spirit of solidarity amongst the refugees from Nazi oppression, with older people creating and delivering lectures to the younger ones, to help them in their education. There are stories of when these students did exams to go to university they were accused of cheating because they performed so well on the tests. Together the refugees wrote and performed plays, and made art and played music. There were numerous professional artists and musicians in the camp, people who had once made a good living from their work in Europe, now languishing in a camp in the woods of New Brunswick.
After 10 months, the British and Canadian governments decided that these men were not threats, and awarded them refugee status. The question was now, where to go?
Many chose to return to Britain, be reunited with their families, and in a lot of cases, join the Allied war effort.
For the tiny minority of camp B-70’s population who were Catholic or Protestant, the decision to stay in Canada was an easy one: they were free to walk out the gate and live in Canada if they so chose. That was not the case for the Jewish refugees.
For a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany stay in Canada in the middle of the Second World War, they would have to pay an astronomical tax: $1000 per person. In today’s money that would be about $18,000.
Recently, when the Canadian government decided to accept thousands of Syrian refugees, the reaction was not positive across the board. However, across the country Canadians reached out to help, providing resources, money and volunteering to help people in need.
In 1941, even though there was widespread anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiment in Canada, many Canadians from coast to coast reached out to help. Individuals, groups, organizations and churches pooled money to help pay for many of the Jewish refugees who decided to stay, ans support them as they built new lives.
Among those who chose to stay in Canada was John Newmark, a world famous classical pianist, and Fred Kaufman who became Chief Justice of the Quebec Court of Appeals.
Also among those interned in the woods of New Brunswick was Jerry Fry, the youngest internee in the New Brunswick internment camp, who was sent to B-70 at the age of 16. He is still alive and living in Ottawa, the last living person from this dark page in our history.
After the refugees from Nazi oppression departed the camp, the guards went to work. For the next three weeks they beefed up the security, expanded the camp and expanded the camp to accommodate new and completely different inmates – German and Italian prisoners of war.
L more about the second phase of Camp B-70, including how a circus performing cat managed to alert authorities to a Nazi prison break, on the Backyard History Podcast, or read more about it here.
