As we celebrate V-E Day, remember liberation did not come immediately for all

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Jan Burzlaff is a historian at Cornell University.

Each year on May 8, Canada commemorates the end of the Second World War in Europe – a moment of liberation, victory and, for some, return. But for many of the people who would later rebuild their lives in this country, liberation did not feel like an ending at all.

On that day 81 years ago, a young Russian soldier rode a horse into the courtyard at Theresienstadt, a ghetto and transit centre in the former Czechoslovakia, and told the survivors they were free. “No one made a sound.”

“We had lost the capacity to be loud or even to cry,” Bronia Sonnenschein later recalled. “We were free, but we had nowhere to go.”

She was 29 years old. Her father was dead, and so was her first husband. Four years in the Łódź ghetto, Auschwitz, a munitions factory in Dresden and a 12-day death march had brought her to this courtyard, to this silence. Two weeks prior, on the banks of the Elbe, she and her sister had decided to jump. Their mother asked them to wait one day – it was her sister’s birthday. The next morning they reached the gates of Theresienstadt. One day.

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Liberation, when it came, was not a moment of triumph but a long and precarious project of reconstruction. For some 40,000 Holocaust survivors who eventually made their way to Canada, that project unfolded here. Canada did not liberate them, but it made life possible.

Bronia did not come directly to Canada. First Vienna, where there was nothing left. Then Prague, where she learned Czech, found work, rebuilt something – until the Communists arrived and, as she put it, “they were just as bad as the Germans.” Then Israel, briefly, where a son was born. Finally, in June, 1950, Vancouver, with her husband and her baby – the far edge of a continent she had never imagined reaching.

Canada was not waiting for her. For most of the war, it maintained one of the most restrictive immigration policies in the Western world toward Jewish refugees. When asked how many Jewish refugees Canada should accept, a senior immigration official answered “none is too many" – words that became the title of a damning 1983 history of Canada’s wartime immigration policy. Survivors arrived here by accident, by telegram, by the exhaustion of having nowhere else to go. Bronia came because her husband’s brother had made it to Vancouver and arranged the papers.

Two years after arriving, her husband was killed in a car accident. She was thrown from the vehicle and spent months in hospital. When she was discharged, she had two small children, a modest insurance payout and a job offer from her late husband’s employer – on the condition that she not cry at her desk. She assured him she did all her “crying at home.” Keeping “a cheerful face,” she went back to work and bought a house, then a bigger one. Her daughter became a children’s librarian. Her grandchildren light candles for the dead.

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Public memory of May 8 concentrates on two things: victory (the parades, the crowds) and liberation, the opening of the camps, skeletal figures blinking in the light. But for most survivors, neither felt like an ending. Liberation came only later, slowly, in places like Vancouver, Montreal and Winnipeg, where life had to be reconstructed from almost nothing, in a country that had not wanted them and now had to absorb them.

After retiring in 1987, Bronia spent two decades speaking to students across British Columbia. She described the courtyard at Theresienstadt – the silence, the soldier, the horse – at every talk. “We had nowhere to go,” she always said. She wanted young people to understand that liberation is the long work of being allowed, finally, to begin.

What Canada offered was not warmth, let alone a dream. It was something more modest and durable: a floor. Work, schools, houses, the ordinary machinery of civic life. That was enough. On the 81st anniversary of V-E Day, that is worth remembering. Not a triumph, but a threshold. The place where, one day at a time, survival became life.