Internment Educational Documents

Ukrainian Canadian Internment Educational documents

UCCLF Unveil Panel Commemorating "Enemy Aliens" in Calgary, New Pathway - Ukrainian News, July 19, 2023

Lest we forget. The Ukrainian Weekly, July 7, 2023

Lest We Forget

We don't know a lot. I'm guessing the three men never met in life. Two were buried in the summer of 1915. In February 1916 the third of them died. They might have known each other before they got to Kingston - but since we don't know where they came from, or when they arrived, there's no way of knowing. They weren't the only ones who died in captivity - twenty men succumbed after being confined in Kingston's Rockwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane, also known as the Rockwood Lunatic Asylum. Eight were mis-identified as "Austrians" while the other twelve were Germans. All were branded as "enemy aliens" during Canada's first national internment operations of 1914-1920. "Dozens" of those deemed "insane," collected from various asylums across Canada, were among the 2,000 or so "aliens" returned to Europe after the war. The first repatriates sailed in July 1919 aboard the SS Sicilian. The last batch were on the SS Melita, which steamed east from St John in March 1920. None of them had any choice. They were deported whence they came.

The Rockwood three we know something about were called Dezső Benscura, Walter Grooham and Andreas Moritsky. Whether those are accurate renderings of their names, recorded by immigration officials or jailers who had little knowledge or interest in the languages, nations, or faith groups of eastern Europe, I can't say. As noted on 30 September 1920, in a final report tabled by General Sir William Desmond Otter, the officer in charge of the Office of Internment Operations, 8,579 men along with 81 women and 156 children, were herded into 24 camps behind Canadian barbed wire. Of that number 106, a majority of them "Austrians," were deemed "insane" and placed in provincial institutions - at Ponoka, Alberta; Essondale, British Columbia; Brandon, Manitoba; Hamilton, Rockwood, and Mimico, Ontario; St Jean de Dieu, Quebec, with 3 other internees hospitalized in Nova Scotia. Only one man, an "Austrian," died of "insanity." What killed the other two at Rockwood is not preserved in the historical record.

General Otter claimed: "Great care was observed in having the cause of death established and recorded, the place of burial marked, due regard being paid to the latter ceremony, while the effects of the deceased were cared for and whenever possible their nearest of kin informed."

Records were kept about some deaths, like the names of the six men killed attempting to escape including the dates on which they were shot. And perhaps the possessions of some of the 107 deceased internees were, somehow, returned to their families. But the three buried in Kingston were laid to rest in unmarked graves, somewhere within the confines of St Mary's Roman Catholic Cemetery, no one knows exactly where. That they ended up in this burial ground is likely because they were Catholics, as many immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have been. Or perhaps it was because their mortal remains were not wanted at the Cataraqui Cemetery, a territory then reserved for this city's Anglo-Celtic and Protestant elites.

Were they buried close to each other? No one knows. Was a prayer said over each man before he was covered, as General Otter wrote? I hope so. But I doubt that any of their family members or friends left in the "old country" - somewhere in that multinational, multi-confessional, and multilingual Austro-Hungarian Empire that would itself disintegrate at the end of the First World War - would ever find out what happened. These men simply disappeared. Having left their homelands hoping for a better life they never suspected that arriving with an Austro-Hungarian passport would mark them, under the terms of the War Measures Act, as "enemy aliens," subject to detention and forced labour. Even more galling was that they knew they had done no wrong. They had immigrated legally. They were not criminals. And yet, following the outbreak of the Great War, they found themselves suddenly treated as prisoners-of-war, without just cause. Thousands of Ukrainians and other Europeans suffered various state-sanctioned indignities. For many the racism and xenophobia they endured would be debilitating. As Watson Kirkconnell, who served as a militia officer and would become a Queen's University professor and later a president of Acadia University, admitted privately:

Insanity was by no means uncommon among the prisoners, many being interned it was suspected to relieve municipalities of their care, while in others the disease possibly developed from a nervous condition brought about by the confinement and restrictions entailed.

Today, thanks to a grant from the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund, three markers bearing the names of these three internees are laid out beside each other in St Mary's Cemetery. They did not die together. They may never have known each other. Yet they will be remembered together because of what they suffered in a country where they hoped to find a better life. This much we can be certain of.

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Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada and a Fellow of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. His forthcoming book, Lest They Forget (Kingston: Kashtan Press, 2023), documents the Ukrainian Canadian redress movement.