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The ‘bittersweet’ legacy of Canada’s wartime Jewish and Italian internment camps
MONTREAL — In 1940, a Jewish student in the United Kingdom named Edgar Lion was sent to Canada against his will on a ship that carried both German and Austrian Jews and Nazi prisoners of war.
And when he first arrived at an internment camp in Trois-Rivieres, Que., the Austrian-born Lion quickly realized the local citizens gathered near the camp entrance didn’t know the difference between the two groups.
“People were cursing us and throwing stones at us. We had to cross a gauntlet of citizens who knew some of us were prisoners of war, but (didn’t know) some of us were just ordinary prisoners,” he said in a recent interview.
“We were in the wrong place. We weren’t supposed to be interned.”