Born in the Holocaust — Miriam Rosenthal & Her Miracle Baby

It's easy to miss the shop if you're not looking for it. It blends into the other storefronts, one of many Jewish businesses along that stretch of Bathurst Street. It's been standing there for more than 50 years, just two blocks south of Lawrence Avenue, on the corner of Caribou Road. A plain blue sign lists the wares inside — books, sephorim, gifts — and displays the name of the store itself: Miriam's Judaica. 

At a glance there doesn't seem to be anything particularly remarkable about it. It's a store like any other store. But the story behind that little Jewish shop on Bathurst Street is one of the most extraordinary stories you'll find in Toronto — or anywhere else for that matter.

~~~

Miriam & Bela on their wedding day

The Miriam in Miriam's Judaica is Miriam Rosenthal. Her story begins in the town of Komárno, where she was born. It stands on the banks of the Danube River, in what's now Slovakia, right on the border with Hungary. She had a good childhood, the youngest of more than a dozen children in an Orthodox Jewish family. "I was spoiled," she once remembered. "I had a beautiful life."

When she was 22 years old, her family allowed her to get married — something she'd long been looking forward to. She went to a matchmaker and picked her husband out of a catalogue: Bela Rosenthal was the handsome son of a cattle broker; he lived on the Hungarian side of the border. Before long, they were engaged to be married.

But this was April 1944. Darkness had descended on Europe. The Slovaks had been allied with the Nazis since the early days of the Second World War; the persecution of the country's Jewish population began immediately. Two years before Miriam and Bela got engaged, the first trainload of Jews had left Slovakia for Auschwitz. Komárno had been turned into a major military hub for the Germans; as the young couple planned their wedding, all of the Jews in Miriam's hometown — nearly three thousand of them — were being deported. Some of her brothers had already been sent off to labour camps.

Still, she was determined to go through with the wedding. She used false papers and wore a cross as she slipped across the border, taking a train to meet her fiance in Hungary. They were married just a few hours after she arrived. As the rabbi performed the ceremony, German bombs began to fall; the wedding party rushed underground, finishing the ceremony in the basement. "The rabbi insisted," Miriam explained years later, "bombs or no bombs." The young bride wore a red rose pinned to her lapel to cover her yellow star.

The newlyweds barely had any time to build their new life together. Just two weeks after the wedding, they were rounded up into a ghetto and separated. A few weeks after that, the Nazis came for them again. Bela was sent to a slave labour camp. Miriam was sent to Auschwitz.

More people would die at Auschwitz than at any other Nazi concentration camp: more than a million were killed in the four years the gas chambers and the ovens were in operation. As Rosenthal and the other new arrivals were herded off their trains, Dr. Joseph Mengele — "The Angel of Death" — was waiting for them. By then, they were already weakened by their journey: untold hours spent crammed together in cattle cars without room to sit or food to eat. Many died along the way. Now, Dr. Mengele scrutinized them, his eyes coldly assessing them from beneath the brim of his black cap, the skull and crossbones of the SS emblazoned on the front. He divided them into two groups, their fate determined by a wave of his gloved hand or a flick of his cane: left or right. Those he deemed unfit for work — more than 80% of them — were sent to the left: straight to the gas chambers. The others, to the right: to a life of slavery inside the concentration camp. Rosenthal watched as her mother, her sister, and her one year-old niece were all sent to the left, to death. But she made it through.

And it was there, just a few weeks later, trapped within the horrors of Auschwitz, that Miriam Rosenthal realized she was pregnant.

~~~

Children at Auschwitz, 1945

The Nazis didn't spare Jewish children. They killed more than a million of them during the Holocaust. The leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, repeatedly justified and defended the slaughter in chilling speeches to his fellow party members.

"I believe, gentlemen," he once told a group of generals, "that you know me well enough to know that I am not a bloodthirsty person... on the other hand, I have such good nerves and such a developed sense of duty... that when I recognise something as necessary I can implement it without compromise. I have not considered myself entitled... to allow the children to grow into the avengers who will then murder our children and our grandchildren. That would have been cowardly."

At Auschwitz, many children were immediately gassed, but a few were allowed to live. Some were kept as fodder for horrifying medical experiments carried out by Dr. Mengele and his staff. When he was done performing his bizarre tortures, he would kill some of them himself, injecting chloroform into their hearts and then dissecting them to study their organs. On other occasions, death came more casually: Mengele is said to have once drawn a line along the wall of the children's barracks about five feet from the ground; any child shorter than that line was promptly sent to the gas chambers. Sometimes children were thrown straight into the ovens, burned alive.

Pregnant women weren't given the chance to give birth. They, just like young mothers, were usually declared unfit for work and quickly murdered.

There was no question: Rosenthal would hide her pregnancy for as long as she could. "Not a word," one of her fellow prisoners advised her. "Not a single word. If not, you'll end up at the crematorium."

One day, the SS called for all the pregnant women to step forward. They were, the officers told them, going to be given double their usual ration of bread. But it was a lie: a trap.

"Can you imagine?" Rosenthal asked a reporter from the National Post just a few years ago. "Even women who were not pregnant stepped forward." But she stayed put. "Two hundred women stepped forward and 200 women went to the gas chamber. And I don’t know why I didn’t step forward... I have asked rabbis. I have asked some big people and no one can give me an answer... I have asked myself this question so many times as I lay in bed upstairs."

Declared fit for work, she was soon transferred out of Auschwitz and eventually sent to a factory in Augsberg where she was forced to make airplane parts for the Luftwaffe. Things there were slightly easier: the prisoners were given clean clothes and a little more food, allowed to grow their hair long for the first time since they'd arrived in the camps.

But all the while, Rosenthal's pregnancy was progressing. She was beginning to show. It was only a matter of time before the SS would notice.

The dreaded day came during the winter of 1944. Two SS officers arrived at the factory with angry German shepherds; they demanded that any woman who was pregnant immediately identify herself. This time, there was no hidding.

"I had to raise my hand," she explained. "I was showing, and if I didn’t put up my hand all those other women would be killed. How could I not put up my hand?"

The SS officers were furious. "You bitch!" they barked. "You're coming with us — to Auschwitz."

"I said goodbye to my friends," she remembered, "who were crying, but it was a relief for me. The suffering would be over, as well as the fear of what would happen to my baby." Rosenthal resigned herself to death.

She was taken out into the snow with nothing to protect her from the bitter cold but the dress she'd been wearing in the factory. The SS loaded her onto a train. This time, strangely, it wasn't a freight train packed full of prisoners, but a regular passenger train. There were civilians on board, seemingly oblivious to the genocide taking place all around them. One woman was shocked to see Rosenthal in her emaciated state. "Frau, what is with you?" she asked the prisoner. "You don’t have hair. The clothes you are wearing. What are you, from a mental hospital?"

"She didn’t have a dream, this German woman," Rosenthal remembered, "of all the horrible things the Germans were doing. I told her I am not from a mental hospital, I am going to Auschwitz — I am going to the gas. She looked at me like I was crazy, opened her purse and gave me some bread. I ate it so fast. I was so hungry."

She was 22 years old and seven months pregnant.

~~~

Mass grave, Kaufering III, 1945

Now that the Nazis knew Rosenthal was carrying a child, Auschwitz would mean almost certain death. But that's not where the SS took her. The Russians, they told her, had just bombed Auschwitz, so instead they were headed toward another one of the most notorious concentration camps: Dachau.

By then, the war was going very poorly for the Nazis. The Allies had landed at Normandy six months earlier and begun their push across Europe. That year, the British and the Americans dropped more bombs on Germany than in the entire rest of the war combined — hundreds of thousands of tons of them. In response, the Nazis were moving their facilities underground. Near Dachau, in a town called Kaufering, they established eleven smaller sub-camps and used the slave labour of the prisoners to build giant subterranean airplane factories. There, they were put to work making Hitler's new "miracle weapon": the Messerschmitt, the world's first fighter jet. 

Rosenthal was taken to one of those sub-camps: Kaufering I. It held thousands of prisoners, the vast majority of them Jewish, half of them doomed to die. The guards took her below ground and left her there in a dark room. It was hard to see. Only a single bulb cast dim light in the subterranean prison. But there were voices: other women, speaking Hungarian. "Where are you from?" they asked. "What happened to you?" There were six of them, they told her. And they were all pregnant.

"We started to cry and we just cried and cried," Rosenthal remembered. "It was like we were all sisters. We had no one else in the world. We hugged each other. We kissed each other."

With the end of the war approaching, it seemed as if some of the Nazis were beginning to realize there would be consequences for their war crimes. They were starting to worry. The killing was far from over, but it seemed as if some things were beginning, ever so slightly, to change — if only so the Nazis could save their own skins.

The seven pregnant women were eventually taken above ground, to a small wooden hut that would serve as meagre shelter against the most terrible winter Europe had seen in the last fifteen years. What little heat they had came from a stove smuggled in for them by a fellow prisoner — one of the "kapos" who agreed to help oversee the camps in return for special treatment. She had taken a great risk by getting it for them. When the guards discovered the stove, they took it away and beat the kapo bloody. The next day, she brought it right back. 

The SS officers brought them a doctor, too: one of the prisoners in the camp had been a gynecologist in Hungary before the war. But there was only so much Dr. Vadasz could do for them. He broke down in tears when he first saw the seven women, all of them now very far along in their pregnancies. He begged the Nazis to give him the equipment he would need for the deliveries. "I have no instruments! I need hot water! Towels! Soap!" But he would have to make do.

Within days, the first of the women went into labour. And in the weeks to come, the others would follow, one after another, suffering terribly as they gave birth on a hard, wooden bunk without anesthetic or the necessary medical equipment. Dr. Vadasz, terribly weakened himself, was given nothing but a bucket of hot water to use.

Still, one by one, the first six mothers did what seemed to be impossible: they gave birth in a concentration camp. Six new babies were brought into the world. Six new lives in the middle of all that death.

Eventually, it was just Miriam Rosenthal who had yet to give birth to her child. She finally went into labour during the last week of February. But as she struggled through the contractions, it was clear that her delivery wasn't going as smoothly as the others had. There were complications. She became frightened that she couldn't hear the baby's heartbeat. And she was growing weak.

Dr. Vadasz urged her on. "Miriam push, push, you must help me. I can't do it on my own. He's going to die." Her strength was failing her. "Miriam please try, try try try..."

"I couldn't keep going any longer," she later remembered, "but all of a sudden the baby is out... And what a beauty. With blond, beautiful hair; big, blue eyes. The other women were crying. Dr. Vadasz was crying. Everyone was crying."

On February 28, 1945, Leslie Rosenthal was born. 

~~~

The seven mothers & their babies, Dachau, 1945

It was a miracle. But they weren't safe yet. The Allies were still fighting their slow, bloody way across the continent. The war against Germany wouldn't end for another ten weeks.

And those ten weeks would be hard weeks. An outbreak of typhoid tore through the camp. Prisoners were still dying everywhere. And even as they recovered from the strain of childbirth, the new mothers were forced to keep working, washing prisoners' clothing and unloading dead bodies.

Rosenthal was in especially poor shape. After the delivery, her placenta had never emerged. It was another life-threatening complication. "After a week I started to bleed," she remembered. "The blood was flowing like water from a tap. Terrible. So much blood." Dr. Vadasz warned the others that Rosenthal wasn't going to make it. "If you die," one of them promised her, "I will take Leslie."

Rosenthal kept fighting, and eventually recovered. But death was still a constant threat. When Leslie was still just two weeks old, the camp's head physician signed an order to have all of the new mothers and their babies sent to Bergen-Belsen to be gassed. His order, for some unknown reason, was never carried out.

Meanwhile, the Allies were getting closer: by the end of March, they were across the Rhine, marching through Germany itself, pushing on toward victory. Soon, the Soviets were on the outskirts of Berlin, shelling the capital. Hitler had retreated into his bunker, never to emerge again. In just a few days, he would put his gun to his head and end his own life.

As the Third Reich collapsed, the SS officers at the Kaufering camps were debating what to do with their prisoners. Some were determined to kill as many Jews and destroy as much evidence as they could before the end. As the Americans approached, the Nazis set fire to some of the barracks. Hundreds of prisoners were too weak to escape the flames. They were burned alive.

Thousands of others — including the seven mothers and their babies — were evacuated, forced into a death march from the sub-camps of Kaufering toward Dachau itself, nearly sixty kilometers away. "Anyone who was unable to keep walking was shot on the spot," one of the other mothers remembered. "People were sick, weak and malnourished. We had to march without shoes."

Rosenthal could barely keep moving, but if she stopped she knew she would be killed — and Leslie with her. At one point, as she struggled to carry on, one of the Nazi officers offered to help. More than sixty years later, she was still moved to tears by the memory of that small, unexpected act of humanity. "I couldn't believe it: an SS man says, 'Let me carry your child.' You see, there are good people in this life. They were SS but this man had a heart. He took the child. I could hardly keep walking and he said, 'I'll carry him.'"

"Some Germans helped," she once told the Toronto Star, "maybe not enough, but there were some."

Rosenthal kept going, struggling on long enough to get loaded onto yet another train. But even the train wasn't safe. The American air force didn't realize it was filled with the people they had come to save — so they bombed it. As prisoners fled the wreckage into the surrounding woods, the SS opened fire. The forest was filled with bodies.

"I kept saying, 'Leslie, we're going home. God will help us... Please God, please God. Help me, help me.'"

In the end, it took two days for the prisoners and their guards to make the journey from Kaufering to the main camp. Thousands of prisoners died in death marches around Dachau in the final few days of the war. But Rosenthal, the six other mothers, and all seven of their babies survived.

The morning after they arrived, they were lined up for one last roll call. A few hours later, the Americans arrived.

It was over. They were free.

~~~

Bela, Leslie and Miriam

He was there, in the distance, running toward her. Somehow they had both survived — and they had both made their way back home to find each other. Bela was stunned to see Leslie in Miriam's arms. He couldn't believe she'd gotten pregnant so quickly, in those two brief weeks before the Nazis tore them apart. He was overjoyed. "I can’t describe that feeling of when he saw our baby," she remembered, "when he saw Leslie for the first time. We cried and cried and cried."

With the war over, they decided to leave Hungary behind and to set out in search of a new life: they travelled through Bratislava, Prague, Paris and Cuba before they finally reached Canada. For a while, Bela worked at a mattress factory. And then as a rabbi in Timmins and Sudbury. But in the end, they settled in Toronto, where they would spend the rest of their lives.

In 1965, they opened a shop on Bathurst Street at the corner of Caribou Road. They called it Miriam's Fine Judaica. They ran the store for more than 40 years, and raised their growing family: three children, and then grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They would both live into their 90s.

At first, Rosenthal didn't tell her story to very many people outside her own family. She was still haunted by nightmares of SS officers coming to steal her newborn child. But in her later years, she began to share her extraordinary tale. "I believe," she told the Star in 1997, "as I get older I think more and more about the Holocaust and my family... I feel my memories more, but still I am not bitter."

In 2010, she was interviewed for an award-winning German documentary about the seven mothers and their children called Born In A Concentration Camp. A couple of years after that, a journalist from the National Post interviewed her for an article about her remarkable life.

Leslie was there, too. By then, he was nearly 70 years old. As he arrived, Miriam proudly introduced her son: "Here is my miracle baby now."

"And here," Leslie answered, "is my miracle mother."

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You can watch the documentary, Born In A Concentration Camp, online here. And you can read the National Post interview here. And if you've got a Toronto Public Library card, I think you should be able to read the Toronto Star article here (Page E1, April 21, 1997). The website for Miriam's Fine Judaica shares Bela (William) Rosenthal's obituary from the Canadian Jewish News here.

Haaretz wrote about the mothers and their babies here. The Canadian Jewish News wrote about the Rosenthals here. 

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shares more information about the Kaufering camps here and Auschwitz here. The Guardian has some more information about Auschwitz here, as does the London Jewish Cultural Centre has some more information about Auschwitz on their "The Holocaust Explained" site for students here. 

You can learn more about the Jewish history of Komárno from the Slovak Jewish Heritage Center here. 

PHOTOS: Miram and Bela's wedding photo comes from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here, which also shares their story. The photo of the children in Auschwitz comes via the Globe and Mail, which shares the story of one of those children here. The photo of the mass grave at Kaufering III — and the German prisoners being forced to uncover it at the end of the war — comes from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here. The same site has the photo of the seven mothers and their babies here.  

The Tragic Final Days of Lucy Maud Montgomery

This is where Lucy Maud Montgomery died: the house she called Journey's End. It's on Riverside Drive in Swansea: the west end of Toronto. Montgomery spent her last decade living here, perched high above the Humber Valley as she grew old and wrote the last few sequels to Anne of Green Gables.

Those were dark years for the beloved Canadian writer. "There has never been any happiness in this house — there never will be,” she confessed in her journal. "The present is unbearable. The past is spoiled. There is no future."

She had been suffering from depression for years — and it deepened near the end of her life. She was plagued by mood swings and waves of crippling anxiety, haunted by nightmares and painful memories, beset by headaches, vomiting, shooting pains, and trembling hands. She had difficulty sleeping. At times, she couldn’t concentrate well enough to write. The pills the doctors prescribed only made things worse, and before long she was hooked on them.

Meanwhile, her literary legacy was under attack. Once upon a time, Montgomery's stories had been enjoyed by men, women, boys and girls of all ages — even the Prime Minister of Great Britain sang her praises. But now her work was being dismissed by a new generation of male, modernist critics who claimed her books were too "sugary" to be enjoyed by anyone but little girls, and that her stories were too regional — too Canadian — to have any appeal for a worldwide audience. "Canadian fiction," according to one of Montgomery's harshest and most influential critics, "was to go no lower."

And yet she still kept fighting. Even as her depression deepened, her family life crumbled, and the Second World War broke out, Montgomery acted as a passionate advocate for Canadian authors: giving speeches and readings, imparting advice to young writers, insisting that Canadian stories were worth telling and that Canadian voices were worth hearing. 

It was on a spring day in 1942 that it all finally caught up with her. On the very same day the manuscript of her final sequel to Anne of Green Gables was dropped off at her publisher's office, her maid found Montgomery dead in bed. There were pill bottles on the table next to her along with a sheet of paper that read:

"I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best."

Her family kept Montgomery's depression and her apparent suicide a secret for more than sixty years, until her granddaughter finally revealed the truth in 2008, hoping to contribute to a more honest conversation about mental illness.

“I have come to feel very strongly,” she wrote in the Globe, “that the stigma surrounding mental illness will be forever upon us as a society until we sweep away the misconception that depression happens to other people, not us — and most certainly not to our heroes and icons.”

Depression — far being from being a sign of weakness or of failure — plagued even one of the most celebrated Canadian authors of all-time.

-----

A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

The Globe and Mail has more about Lucy Maud Montgomery's depression in articles by Irene Gammel here and James Adams here. There's also lots more in Mary Henley Rubio's biography of the author, "Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings," which you can borrow from the Toronto Public Library here. 

The Night Neil Young Was Conceived

It was the last winter of the Second World War. 1945. The first week of February. Far away in Europe, the Nazis were crumbling: the Soviets were closing in on Berlin; the Americans would soon be crossing the Rhine. The war would be over in just a few months. The Big Three — Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin — were already at Yalta, meeting to decide what the world would look like when the fighting was finally done.

Neil Young's dad was one of the people doing that fighting. Scott Young was a writer by trade: a young reporter who would eventually write dozens of books and even co-host Hockey Night in Canada for a while. He first went to Europe to cover the war for the Canadian Press. His dispatches were published in newspapers all over our country. But he soon joined the Royal Canadian Navy instead, serving as a communications officer in the invasion of southern France, among other places.

The war was taking a toll, though; Young was suffering from chronic fatigue and losing weight at an alarming rate. So he was sent back to Canada for tests. That meant he would get to make a brief visit home to Toronto, where he could spend a little time with his wife Rassy and their toddler, Bob.

When he got here, he found the city covered in snow. That winter was a terrible winter — one of the worst in the entire recorded history of Toronto. One infamous blizzard in December killed 21 people. And the temperature barely ever climbed above freezing, so the snow just kept piling up as the blizzards kept coming. By the time Young came home at the beginning of February, Toronto had already seen five feet of snow that winter.

361 Soudan Avenue

And there was yet another big storm coming. As the city braced itself for the blizzard, the Youngs spent the day visiting with friends who lived in a little house near Eglinton & Mount Pleasant. (361 Soudan Avenue; it's still there today.) It was far on the outskirts of the city back then; a long way from downtown in the days before the subway. And so, as the storm descended, they all decided it was best if the Youngs stayed put. They dragged a mattress downstairs and set it up on the dining room floor.

Scott Young wrote about that night in his memoir, Neil and Me. "I remember the street in Toronto, the wild February blizzard through which only the hardiest moved, on skis, sliding downtown through otherwise empty streets to otherwise empty offices."

The Youngs' love story wouldn't last forever. In the coming years, they would often fight; she drank, he had affairs. In the end, they divorced. But on that stormy winter night in 1945, they were happy. A young wife and her new husband home on leave from the war.

"We were just past our middle twenties," Young remembered, "and had been apart for most of the previous year... We were healthy young people, much in love, apart too much. It was a small house and when we made love that night we tried to be fairly quiet, and perhaps were."

Nine months later, the war was over; peace had finally come. Scott Young was back home again. When Rassy went into labour, a neighbour drove them down to the fancy new wing of the Toronto General Hospital. It was early in the morning of a warm November day when the baby came. They named him Neil Percival Young. He would grow up to become one of the greatest rock stars in the world.

-----

Main image: the winter of 1944-45 via the Toronto Archives; other image: 361 Soudan by me, Adam Bunch.

You can find Scott Young's memoir, "Neil and Me", on Amazon here. Or borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here. You can read more about Neil Young's early life in "Young Neil: The Sugar Mountain Years" by Sharry Wilson which is on Amazon here and in the Toronto Public Library here. I first heard about this night in a review of "Rock and Roll Toronto: From Alanis to Zeppelin" by Richard Crouse and John Goddard, which is on Amazon here and in the Toronto Public Library here.

Toronto's Most Deadly Disaster: The Nightmare on the SS Noronic

It was late. The Noronic was quiet. The ship was docked at the foot of Yonge Street, gently rocking in the dark waves. Almost everyone on board was already fast asleep. It was two-thirty in the morning; most of those who had enjoyed a night out in the city had come back to their rooms and gone to bed. Hundreds of passengers were tucked beneath their sheets.

Don Church was still up, though, heading back to his room from the lounge. He worked as an appraiser for a fire insurance company, so he knew what it meant when he found a strange haze in one of the corridors. He followed it back to its source: smoke billowed out from under the closed door of a linen closet. The most deadly fire in Toronto's history was just getting started.

The Noronic had first set sail all the way back in 1913: in the glory days of Great Lakes cruise ships. In the late-1800s and early-1900s, the Great Lakes were filled with luxury liners. The ships carried hundreds of passengers from ports on both sides of the border, steaming across the lakes in style. It was a major industry for nearly a century. As a member of the Toronto Marine Historical Society put it: "At one time there were more people asleep on boats on the Great Lakes than on any ocean in the world."

The SS Noronic was one of the biggest and most decadent of them all. They called her "The Queen of the Lakes." She had a ballroom, a dining hall, a barber shop and a beauty salon, music rooms and writing rooms, a library, a playroom for children, even her own newspaper printed on board for the passengers.

But as fancy as it all was, taking a cruise was also very risky. The Noronic was christened just a year after the unsinkable Titanic sank. And even on the Great Lakes, where there weren't any icebergs lurking in the dark, there was still plenty of danger.

The SS Noronic in 1930ish

In fact, the Noronic's own maiden voyage had almost been a disaster. She was scheduled to set sail for the first time in November of 1913, just as the biggest storm in the history of the Great Lakes rolled into the region. For three straight days, it lashed the lakes with hurricane-force winds, waves fifteen meters high, and torrents of rain and snow. The Noronic was lucky: she stayed in port where it was safe. But more than two hundred and fifty people would die in the storm. So many ships were destroyed that there's an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to listing them.

Storms were far from the only danger. Ships capsized or collided with each other. They sank. Many — like one of the Noronic's own sister ships, the Hamonic — burst into flame. In the early days of the industry, there were essentially no meaningfully-enforced safety regulations at all. And even when the first new laws were introduced, there were loopholes for existing ships. The Noronic was shockingly unprepared for an emergency. But no one seemed to think that was a big deal: for 36 years, she sailed without incident.

Right up until 1949. That September, the Noronic left Detroit for a week-long trip to the Thousand Islands. The cruise brought her to Toronto on a cool Friday night, docked at Pier 9 (right near where the ferry terminal is today). Her passengers and crew streamed ashore to enjoy the city. And when they came back at the end of the night, all was quiet and calm. For a while.

By the time Don Church discovered the source of the smoke, it was already too late. And when he finally found a bellboy to help him, the bellboy didn't pull the fire alarm; instead, he got the keys to open the closet door. A hellish backdraft burst into the corridor. The flames spread quickly. When Church and the bellboy tried to use a fire hose, the hose didn't work. Neither did any of the others. Even worse, the ship's hallways were lined with wood paneling: for decades now, the wood had been carefully polished with lemon oil. It was the perfect fuel for the flames. Meanwhile, stairwells acted like chimneys, funneling oxygen to the blaze.

Eight minutes later, the ship's whistle jammed while issuing a distress signal and let loose with one endless, piercing shriek. By then, half the ship was already on fire. In a few more minutes, the rest of the Noronic was in flames, too. Survivors later said the whole thing went up like the head of a match.

Firefighters fighting the fire

On board, there was chaos and panic. The safety equipment didn't work. There weren't enough emergency exits. Only a few crew members were on duty and they had no training in case of an emergency like this one. Most of them fled the ship immediately, leaving the sleeping passengers behind. People were burned alive in their beds. They were suffocated in their rooms. They rushed along the decks and hallways in flames. A few were trampled to death. Some smashed through windows in their bid to escape, leaving blood pouring down their faces. The most desperate started to jump over the sides of the ship, the lucky ones hitting the water where rescuers — police, firemen and passers-by — were pulling people from the lake. One person drowned. Another hit the pier and died from the impact. Other jumpers didn't make it clear of the ship; they smashed into the decks below, making them slippery with their blood. When the first ladder was finally hoisted up against the burning ship, passengers pushed forward in such a rush that the ladder snapped, tossing people into the water. They say the screams of the victims were even louder than the whistles and sirens. It was one of the most horrifying scenes Toronto has ever witnessed.

At about five in the morning, just as the first light began to appear on the horizon, the blaze finally died out. Two hours after that, the Noronic had cooled off enough for people to begin the grizzly search though the wreckage. Bodies were everywhere: skeletons found embracing in the hallways, others still in bed, some turned entirely to ash by a heat so intense it could incinerate bone.

At first, the dead were pulled from the wreckage and piled up on the pier, but there were so many that eventually the Horticultural Building at the CNE was turned into a makeshift morgue. (Today, that same building is home to the Muzik nightclub.) For the next few weeks, the authorities struggled to identify the bodies. It was next to impossible. No one even knew how many people had been on board the ship. Some of them were unregistered: guests from Toronto visiting friends. Some had registered under fake names: taking a romantic cruise with someone who wasn't their spouse. Most of the passengers were American, so their families would have to make the grim journey north to see if they could identify any of the charred remains. Even then, many of the bodies were burnt so badly they were unrecognizable. Entirely new techniques of x-ray identification had to be developed. It was one of the very first times that dental records were ever used forensically. Eventually, the death toll was pegged at 119 lives. To this day, no one is entirely sure that number is quite right. But if it's anywhere close, it's the most people ever killed by a single disaster in the history of Toronto.

In the wake of the fire, Canada Steamship Lines paid more than $2 million to the victims and their families. And it didn't take long for safety laws to be overhauled. For the first time ever, all ships sailing on the Great Lakes would have to meet real, enforced safety regulations. But it wouldn't be cheap. It cost a lot to sail a big ship that wasn't a death trap; it was expensive to keep a luxury liner afloat if it wasn't allowed to burst into flames every once in a while. In the wake of the tragedy in Toronto, the industry collapsed. The golden age of cruising on the Great Lakes in style had come to a bloody end.

-----

WARNING: THE LAST TWO PHOTOS IN THIS GALLERY INCLUDE COVERED BODIES

The Noronic (via blogTO)

The Noronic in Sault Ste-Marie, 1940 (via the Vancouver Archives)

Dining in style on the Noronic (via Torontoist)

On board the Noronic in 1941ish (via the Vancouver Archives)

The Noronic burns (via Cities In Time)

The Noronic burns (via the Toronto Star)

The Noronic burns (via the Toronto Archives)

The skyline watches over the wreckage (via the Toronto Archives)

The wreckage of the Noronic (via the Cleveland Plain-Dealer)

The Royal York, in the distance, took in survivors (via the Toronto Archives)

The wreckage of the Noronic (via the Toronto Archives)

The Noronic sank in the shallows (via Citizen Freak)

A diver searches the wreckage (via the Toronto Star)

The wreckage (via Wikipedia)

The wreckage (via the Toronto Archives)

A body gets pulled from the wreckage (via the Cleveland Plain-Dealer)

The makeshift morgue at the Horticultural Building (via the Toronto Star)

-----

A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

A version of this post was originally published on September 23, 2010. It has since been updated to be more awesome, with a bit more detail and some structural changes. 

There's a memorial to the victims in Mount Pleasant Cemetery and a plaque has been erected near where it happened. You can also see the ship's whistle on display at the Marine Museum on the waterfront near Ontario Place.

Ellis McGrath wrote a song about it, which you can stream here.  

The top image comes via Urban Toronto (thanks to this post by user Goldie). The second comes from via the Toronto Archives. And the third via the Toronto Star, which has an article about the fire by Valerie Hauch here.

The story of the Noronic has also been told by Chris Bateman on blogTo here, by Kevin Plummer on Torontoist here, and by Michael J. Varhola and Paul G. Hoffman in their book "Shipwrecks and Lost Treasures, Great Lakes: Legends and Lore, Pirate and More!" which you can find on Google Books here. The Maritime History of the Great Lakes shares a Toronto Daily Star article from the week of the fire here. The CBC Archives shared a radio clip about the fire here. The "What Went Wrong" blog discusses the issue of the (lack of) safety regulations in detail here. You can read more about the Noronic disaster in a couple of interesting articles from the Walkerville Times and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. And Library and Archives Canada has a whole online exhibit about the SS Noronic fire here. 

One Last Victory for the Most Dangerous Woman in the World

The Most Dangerous Woman in the World was playing a quiet game of cards. It was a snowy Toronto evening in the winter of 1940, that first terrible winter of the Second World War. She was staying with friends at their home on Vaughan Road, waiting for a meeting to begin. That's when she slumped over in her chair. It was a stroke. One of the greatest orators of the twentieth century couldn't speak a word.

This wasn't the end most people would have expected for Emma Goldman. For decades now, she'd been the most notorious anarchist on earth. Her ideas made nations tremble: thoughts about freedom and free speech and free love; about feminism and marriage and birth control; about violence and pacifism and war. She'd been thrown out of the United States for those ideas, forced to flee Soviet Russia, driven out of Latvia, Sweden, Germany... Canada was one of the very few places where she was still relatively welcome. She spent decades in exile. And everywhere she went, she refused to be intimidated: giving fiery speeches, sparking riots, inspiring assassins, visiting war zones. Nothing could silence her. Not exile, not prison, not threats of violence. Nothing, that is, until that quiet game of cards.

The first stroke didn't kill her. She still had a few weeks left to live, weakened and afraid, half-paralyzed, robbed of the powerful voice that had made her famous. But even on her deathbed, she had one more fight to win. There was one last life to save.

~~~

Young Attilio Bortolotti

His name was Attilio Bortolotti. Some people knew him as Art Bartell. He was a leader of the Toronto anarchists.

Bortolotti was born in Italy in the very early 1900s — which meant that he was still just a boy when the First World War swept into his hometown. He saw terrible things: death and destruction raining down from the sky; dead bodies dumped in ditches; drunken soldiers killing their own men. But he also saw an act of kindness that would change his life.

One day, during an air raid, his young nephew was in danger of being crushed by falling debris. Bortolotti watched in amazement as a German officer — the enemy — threw himself over the young boy and saved his life. It was a shock. This wasn't the image of the Germans the Italian newspapers were painting: of the inhuman, savage "Hun."

"Young man," the German officer explained to the confused teenager, "I want you to listen to what I have to say to you. I am a professor; I was teaching at the University of Berlin when I was called to serve in the army. I don't feel that I have the right to kill you because you were born here; nor should you feel you can kill me because I was born in Berlin. I want you to remember three words: Freiheit über alles." Freedom above all.

"A revolution," Bortolotti later remembered, "began in my head."

Once the war was over, he left Italy for Canada. Here, he wouldn't be forced into compulsory military service and could lead a more peaceful life. He was just sixteen years old when he sailed across the Atlantic, checking in at Ellis Island on his way north to join his brother in Windsor.

He spent the next few years working for a blacksmith and on construction sites and in auto factories — both in Windsor and just across the river in Detroit. But the life he found there wasn't entirely peaceful: the early 1900s were times of turmoil in North America, too — especially for the working class. These were the days of bloody union battles. Of police officers and soldiers killing striking workers in the streets. Of robber barons building private armies to crack down on dissent.

In Windsor, the young Bortolotti was exposed to new ideas. He spent long hours reading in the public library, talked about politics with his fellow workers, went to meetings, marched in protests and clashed with police. The more he learned, the more he saw, the more he became attracted to one idea in particular.

By then, anarchism was already an old idea: that government is inherently bad; that people should be completely free; that society should have no hierarchy at all. But in the last few decades, that old idea had been growing in popularity. Anarchists had played leading roles in some of the world's most important events. In France, they helped to establish the Paris Commune. In Russia, they fought alongside the Bolsheviks as they overthrew the Tsar. In Canada and in the United States, they were on the front lines of the fight for labour rights: demanding reforms like an eight-hour workday.

But they were also growing ever-more notorious. While some anarchists didn't believe in violence at all, those who did were giving the philosophy a reputation for bomb-throwing and assassinations. All over the Western World, anarchists were answering the violence against workers by trying to kill those in power.

Anarchist theatre bombing, 1893

They'd been doing it for decades. In Italy, King Umberto was shot three times in the chest as he climbed into his carriage. In Switzerland, Empress Elizabeth was stabbed to death with a file. In Spain, one Prime Minster was killed while relaxing at a spa and another while window-shopping at a bookstore in Madrid. In Kiev, the Russian Prime Minister was murdered during an opera. In Greece, King George was shot in the back while taking a walk. In the United States, President McKinley took two bullets to the stomach at point blank range while visiting the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. Bombs blew up weddings and carriages and crowds, all in the name of anarchy.

Governments responded with arrests and executions and even more violence. Sometimes, it didn't seem to matter who they were putting to death — guilty or not — just as long as they were anarchists.

One of the most infamous examples was the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. After a deadly armed robbery in Massachusetts, two Italian immigrants were arrested. They were both anarchists, they were both found guilty, and they were both sentenced to death. But they were also both innocent. The evidence in the case was so flimsy that it sparked international outrage, with major protests held in cities all over the world. In the end, Sacco and Vanzetti were both electrocuted anyway. It wasn't until the 1980s that Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis finally cleared their names.

In Windsor, Attilio Bortolotti took up their cause. He organized meetings, raised money, and printed pamphlets. Even after the executions had been carried out, Bortolotti and his fellow anarchists continued to raise awareness of the case. Every year on the anniversary of the executions, you could find Bortolotti on the streets of Windsor and Detroit, handing out thousands of leaflets.

By now, his politics were starting to get him into trouble. His tireless opposition to fascism — which plenty of Canadians and Americans still supported back then, even as Mussolini marched on Rome and seized power in Italy — had gotten him blacklisted from jobs in the auto industry. His support for Sacco and Vanzetti earned him a meeting with Windsor's chief of police, who told him he was no longer welcome in the city. He was ordered to leave town. At first, Bortolotti just moved across the river, but it quickly became clear that things were getting dangerous. He was arrested in Detroit for handing out pamphlets; the police, he said, beat him unconscious. When he made bail, he slipped back across the border into Windsor, and then kept right on running.

That's how Attilio Bortolotti ended up in Toronto.

He got off the train at Union Station in the fall of 1929 — just a few weeks before the stock market crashed. At first, he didn't know anyone in the city. But when he took his leaflets to an Italian neighbourhood on the anniversary of the Sacco and Vanzetti executions, he met a few Italian socialists and Communists who introduced him to a fellow anarchist.

Before long they'd created their own Torontonian anarchist group: Il Gruppo Libertario. They published their own newspaper, organized meetings and events. They became familiar faces at the Labour Lyceum on Spadina Avenue: today, it's a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown (on the corner of St. Andrew Street), but back then it was the political hub for textile workers in the heart of Toronto's Jewish community. The Italians began to meet the city's other anarchists: mostly Jewish and Eastern European immigrants. The community grew. Bortolotti had finally found his home.

It was only a matter of time before he met another anarchist who had been staying in Toronto: the most infamous anarchist in the world.

~~~

Emma Goldman, 1901 mugshot

Emma Goldman was born in Russia in the late 1800s, back in the days of the Tsars. She grew up in what one of her biographers called "low-grade Tolstoyan unhappiness." Her father beat her, sometimes with a whip, and when she turned twelve, he forced her to leave school and go work in a factory instead. "All a Jewish girl need know," he told her, "is how to make gefilte fish, cut noodles fine, and give her husband babies."

Still, even as a child she was strong-willed and defiant. She had no patience for injustice. Decades before Bortolotti was shaped by the horrors of the First World War, Goldman was shaped by the horrors of Tsarist Russia.

"I was born a rebel," she would later explain to the Toronto Daily Star, "but my first feeling of hatred for the present system came when I was six years old. At that time I saw a Russian peasant flogged and this sight of a human being degraded and tortured by his fiendish masters taught me that something was radically wrong somewhere. An indelible picture of the poor, suffering wretch has ever haunted my life."

When she turned sixteen, her father demanded that she get married, so Goldman left home instead. Just like Bortolotti did at that very same age many years later, she sailed across the Atlantic, checked in at Ellis Island, and then headed north. She settled in Rochester, on the American shore of Lake Ontario, where her sister lived.

There, she fell in love with America: with its people and its relative freedoms. But that didn't blind her to its flaws. Rochester was a city filled with sweatshops and slums. Workers toiled away over long hours in dangerous conditions for little pay. Goldman was still just a teenager, but she was bent over a sewing machine in a miserable factory for ten hours every day. It only got worse when her parents arrived from Russia. And when she did eventually get married, she discovered that her husband was impotent and depressed. She left him after only a few months.

Meanwhile, her political ideas were becoming ever-more radical. It was the Haymarket affair that finally turned her into an anarchist. The case had a lot in common with the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. After a deadly bombing during a labour march in Chicago, the police arrested eight anarchists. All of them were convicted. Four of them were hanged. A fifth committed suicide. But the trial was a farce: there was no real evidence, the jury was biased, and not even the prosecutor claimed that any of the suspects had actually thrown the bomb. People all over the world were appalled. Today, it's remembered as one of the darkest chapters in American labour history; it even served as the inspiration for International Workers Day, which we still celebrate on May Day every year.

Outraged, Goldman headed south to New York City to take up the cause. She arrived on a summer's day in 1889, just twenty years old, with nothing but five dollars and a sewing machine. It didn't take long for her to settle in, though. That very first afternoon, she headed straight for an anarchist café. That night, she went to see her first anarchist speech. Before long, she was giving her own speeches, earning a reputation as one of the most riveting lecturers in the country, passionately speaking about issues like labour rights, feminism, and political philosophy.

Today, many of her ideas seem pretty obvious — an eight-hour workday, legal birth control, gay rights — but in the late 1800s and early 1900s, even those ideas were deeply radical. She quickly attracted the attention not only of the press, but also the police. Once, she was arrested for giving a talk about methods of birth control. Another time, it was for inciting a riot. ("Ask for work," she told a crowd of the starving and unemployed, "If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.") She got so used to spending time in prison that she started to carry a book with her wherever she went, just in case she suddenly found herself in a jail cell without anything to read.

By the end of the 1800s, Goldman had become one of the biggest celebrities in the country. She was a front page staple. Red Emma, they called her. The Queen of Anarchism. The Most Dangerous Woman in the World.

And she could be dangerous. At least to some people. In those days, it felt like radical change could come at any moment. To many, the revolution didn't just seem possible, it seemed inevitable. The young Goldman was willing to do whatever she could to help. If violence was necessary, that was okay with her. Even murder.

Just a few years after she arrived in New York, Goldman planned an assassination of her own. She and her lover, Alexander Berkman — who she met at that anarchist café on her very first afternoon in the city — plotted to kill Henry Ford Frick, the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Corporation. He was responsible for a bloody crack-down on a strike at a steel mill in Pennsylvania, hiring hundreds of Pinkerton detectives — private mercenary soldiers — to attack the striking workers, killing nine of them. In retaliation, Berkman burst into Frick's office with a revolver, shot him twice and then stabbed him with a steel file. But the attack failed: Frick survived and Berkman spent the next fourteen years in prison.

Emma Goldman's deportation

Goldman, though, walked free. No one knew she'd been involved. And in time, her views on violence seemed to change. In later years, whenever asked, she would always distance herself from the use of force. "The only remedy for the people is anarchy... the form of revolution I want is bloodless... Anarchism does not believe in violence... Ideas are the greatest of bombs."

But even then she wasn't willing to condemn those who did resort to violence. When President McKinley was shot, the assassin claimed that he was inspired to do it by Goldman's lectures. "Her words set me on fire," he said. Goldman was arrested and questioned, but she refused to denounce the killer. "I have never been an advocate of violence," she told the papers, but "I have always felt that when an individual resorts to violence it is the fault of the conditions above him that bring him to it."

It was a theme she often repeated. For her, the real blame for any assassination always lay with systemic oppression. "As an anarchist, I am opposed to violence. But if people want to do away with assassins, they must first do away with the conditions which produce murderers."

In the end, though, it wasn't Goldman's violence that got her kicked out of the United States. It was her pacifism.

When the First World War broke out, Goldman firmly opposed it. It was, she argued, a war to protect the interests of the rich: not a cause worth dying — or killing — for. For the first three years of the war, her opinion was widely shared in the United States. President Woodrow Wilson even won re-election on a promise to stay out of the fight. But once the Americans did join the war, speaking out against it was no longer allowed. Opinions that had been widely shared suddenly became illegal.

Goldman, as always, refused to back down, giving speeches denouncing the draft. That gave the American authorities the opportunity they'd been waiting for: an excuse to get rid of her.

She was rounded up with a bunch of other anarchists and deported — all loaded onto a ship and sent to Russia. If they believed in revolution, the government told them, then the brand new Soviet state was the perfect place for them.

It wasn't. At first, Goldman was actually pretty happy to be going back to Russia. As someone who had personally witnessed the horrors of life under the Tsars, she had high hopes for the Russian Revolution. But when she saw it with her own eyes, she realized it had gone terribly wrong. A meeting with Lenin confirmed her fears. They had replaced one totalitarian system with another. She fled the country. Goldman would spent the rest of her life angrily denouncing the Communists.

After that, she never really found another permanent home. She spent the rest of her life living out of her suitcase, forced out of one country after another. Finally, she arranged a marriage to a Welsh miner so that she could get a British passport. That gave her the right to live in Canada, where she would spend much of the rest of her life.

She would never again be allowed to live in her beloved United States, so she settled for the next best thing: she would stay in Toronto, just across the lake from Rochester, as close as she could get to her family and to the country she loved.

~~~

The Heliconian Club, Yorkville

This was 1926. Toronto was still a deeply conservative city: a provincial town, deathly quiet on Sundays, staunchly British; not the kind of place you'd expect to find the world's most notorious anarchist. And not the kind of place the world's most notorious anarchist expected to find herself.

"I am so terribly cut off from intellectual contact," Goldman once wrote while she was staying in Toronto. "I grow so depressed and unhappy at times it seems I could not stand it another day." When the old anarchist criticized the lack of modern books in the library, the librarian gave her a blunt reply: "We do not buy books we consider immoral." Toronto was, Goldman complained, "deadly dull."

Still, it wasn't all bad. The authorities in Toronto were more tolerant of her ideas than those in the United States had been — even if they did still screen all her mail. And there was a small, dedicated community of anarchists, artists and other progressive thinkers who were thrilled to have her in the city. They put her up in their homes, helped her to organize meetings and lectures, donated money to the causes she championed.

Plus, every time the Toronto Daily Star wrote about her — and they wrote about her a lot — it was in positively glowing terms. They called her "the world's greatest feminine apostle of free speech." "Brilliant." "[A] speaker of notable excellence." "You were impressed not only by her knowledge but also by her wisdom. She was a feminine Socrates conducting a brilliant dialogue on high and grave questions of human destiny and human conduct..."

"No woman of her generation," the Star would remember after she died, "was more widely known or lived more fully than Emma Goldman. None clung more staunchly, through adversity, to her ideals..."

Goldman became a familiar name in the local papers and in lecture halls across the city. She spoke at the Labour Lyceum on Spadina, the Heliconian Club in Yorkville, the Hygea Hall on Elm Street, the Oddfellows Temple on College — always after a stiff drink of whisky to calm her nerves. Crowds of hundreds came to see her talk about feminism, free love, politics, literature... She thundered on about Sacco and Vanzetti, denounced Toronto schools for forcing all their boys to have military training, and railed against the dangers of Stalin with such passion that local Communists would attend her lectures just so they could shout her down. She warned of a coming war before Hitler had even taken power and gave speeches condemning him when many in Toronto still thought fascism was a perfectly acceptable idea.

She became a role model in a city starved for radical thought, inspiring those who were determined to make Toronto a more progressive place, and pressuring them to do better when she thought they were falling short. It was Emma Goldman who dared to speak about birth control back when it was still illegal, giving a lecture to a packed house at the Hygea Hall, earning a roar of applause when she declared contraception to be a right. (She was careful not to mention any specific methods — that would have been blatantly illegal and landed her in the clutches of the Toronto Police Morality Squad — but she did hand out cards directing women to doctors who could help.) And it was Emma Goldman who launched the movement to ban Toronto teachers from using physical violence as a method of disciplining their students.

She would never fully settle in Toronto; she kept living out of her suitcase, like she always did. She had three long stays in the city, but would spend long periods away from it: writing her autobiography in France, visiting the anarchists fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, going on speaking tours across Canada — she was even allowed to make one last trip to the United States.

But in the end, she always came back to Toronto. And that meant she was bound to run into Attilio Bortolotti eventually.

"I went to hear her," he said, "and was flabbergasted by the way she spoke, with her energy, with the beauty of her sentences." They were introduced after her speech, and eventually became close friends. Bortolotti volunteered as her unofficial chauffeur, happy to drive the old anarchist around the city as she gave lectures and attended meetings. Once, he even took her to Windsor, so she could gaze longingly across the river at the country she adored. ("She looked at Belle Isle and Detroit," he said, "as though through the eyes of a lover. It was then that I understood how much America meant to her.")

But this was 1939. All of Goldman's dire warnings were about to come true: Hitler invaded Poland that September; the Second World War was underway.

Toronto's Balmy Beach Swastika Club

That meant trouble for Toronto's anarchists. With tensions rising, Bortolotti found his fascist enemies even more dangerous than before. "I was threatened with being 'taken for a ride,'" he later remembered, "and for the only time in my life — I detest firearms and killing — I carried a pistol for a few months." 

Meanwhile, the authorities were cracking down too. As the paranoia of the war years set in, anyone with unusual ideas became a target for suspicion. Italians, even more than most; Mussolini didn't enter the war immediately, but he had long been one of Hitler's closest allies. It didn't matter that Bortolotti was one of the city's most ardent anti-fascists, or that he had been warning Canadians about the dangers of Hitler and Mussolini for years, or that Toronto's own Nazi supporters were trying to silence him. In fact, many have suggested that the police were working with the fascists, who gave them tips about the anarchists they both despised.

"We organized demonstrations and street meetings at which I... spoke, and were attacked by mounted police," Bortolotti remembered. "The authorities kept me under constant surveillance, and now they tried in earnest to deport me."

It was the war that finally gave them their chance. When the country was at peace, the police had to respect civil rights. But when war was declared, the War Measures Act came into effect. Suddenly, the authorities had what one historian has called "quasi-totalitarian powers." They were, according to another, "the most serious restrictions upon the civil liberties of Canadians since Confederation." Habeas corpus was suspended. So was the right to a trial. Political groups could be banned by the government. So could entire religions. Eventually, they would use the War Measures Act to round up Canadians of Japanese descent and imprison them in internment camps — one of the most horrifying abuses of power in the history of our country.

By the end of the first month of the war, the government had expanded the Act to give themselves the power to censor any literature they didn't like — and to arrest anyone found with this "dangerous" material. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines were shut down. Bookstores were raided, their owners arrested. Private homes were targeted too. Word began to spread among the Toronto anarchists: the police were raiding their homes one by one. Some rushed to burn their papers before it was too late.

They came for Bortolotti just a few days after the new rules came into effect. Before dawn one morning in early October, police on horseback surrounded his home on Gladstone Avenue (at the very top of the street, near Dupont). It was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Toronto's notoriously brutal anti-Communist unit: the Red Squad. They burst into the house, grabbing all five anarchists who were staying there. "Get up," they told Bortolotti, "and put on your Sunday best. You won't be going to work for quite a while." They searched the house, finding two guns with the triggers removed (the anarchists used them as props in plays) and seized all of Bortolotti's books, magazines and newspapers: a library of 1,500 volumes. The police would burn them all.

Bortolotti was arrested. He would spend months in the Don Jail while the government worked to deport him. The original charges were dropped, and most of the other anarchists were released. But Bortolotti wasn't a Canadian citizen and, having been threatened by Windsor's chief of police, he hadn't checked in at customs the last time he came across the border from Detroit. So the government was planning on sending him back to Italy anyway, where Mussolini's fascist government would be waiting for him. If he was lucky, he would be thrown into a fascist prison. Otherwise, he would simply be killed.

But not if Emma Goldman had anything to say about it. She was an old woman now, but she was still as defiant as ever. She leapt into action, asking her friends and allies to support Bortolotti's defence. She organized meetings, raised money, hired a lawyer.

It wasn't easy. For the first few months, it was hard to find anyone to support the cause. The newspapers refused to cover the case. And even liberal Canadians were reluctant to challenge the government during a time of war. 

"Unfortunately," Goldman complained, "there exists a conspiracy of silence among the daily journals... More sad is the complete absence of individual animation of civic sense, disposed to defend civil rights from the invasion of authority... no journal, no magazine socialist, liberal, unionist or other, in the US or Canada, said one word in defence of the arrested of Toronto."

Meanwhile, Bortolotti was falling ill, suffering in the cold, damp conditions of the Don Jail. He came down with bronchitis, lost twelve pounds, ran a fever of 103ºF, and finally had to be transferred into the prison's hospital ward. 

Goldman refused to give up, but the campaign was taking a toll. It was, she admitted, "the hardest thing I have done in many years... [I am] frightfully weary of the struggle, and tired, tired beyond words."

That's when she suffered her first stroke.

~~~

295 Vaughan Road

She was playing a quiet game of bridge with friends, passing the time on a snowy evening before yet another meeting about Bortolotti's case. "God damn it," she complained at the beginning of a new hand, "why did you lead with that?"

Then, the Most Dangerous Woman in the World slumped over sideways in her chair. At first, her friends thought she'd dropped a card and was bending over to pick it up. But she'd actually suffered a massive stroke.

Bortolotti was out on bail when he got the phone call. "I don’t know how I drove without causing accidents," he remembered, "because I was out of my mind. And I arrived on Vaughan Road there, and saw Emma, moaning—she couldn’t talk any more. Just to think that here was Emma, the greatest orator in America, unable to utter one word." She was half-paralyzed. There was fear in her eyes. Embarrassed that her bare knee was showing, she pulled her skirt down with one hand. Moments later, the ambulance arrived.

She spent the next six weeks at Toronto General Hospital, where they did what they could for her. She was in tears for much of that time. When she was finally well enough to go home, her speech still hadn't recovered; she struggled to say even a few words. Still, she kept working. She could understand conversations and read her letters, getting friends to write her replies.

Slowly but surely, her persistence had begun to pay off. People had started contributing to Bortolotti's defence. First, it was an Italian-American anarchist newspaper. Then, a Yiddish-language paper in New York. There was a spaghetti dinner to raise money in Chicago. A play performed in Brooklyn. Another benefit in Massachusetts. Goldman had her letters to the editor published in The Nation, The New Republic and The Canadian Forum. Eventually, some leading progressive Canadians — like the leader of the federal CCF party (the forerunner of the NDP) — were convinced to join the fight. More letters were written. There were meetings with MPs. The Star published an editorial asking the government to halt the deportation. The tide was finally turning.

Goldman lived long enough to hear the good news: Bortolotti was free to stay. They'd won. He would eventually get his Canadian citizenship, start his own successful business, and play a leading role in Toronto's anarchist community for decades to come. Thirty years later, the Globe and Mail would write about him fondly, calling him "the grand old man of Toronto anarchism."

A few months after Goldman's first stroke, she suffered a second. This time, she wouldn't recover at all. She died in the middle of May at that same house on Vaughan Road.

A service was held at the Labour Lyceum, the same hall where Goldman's resounding voice had once filled the air. For three hours people shared their stories and remembered her. The crowd was so big there wasn't enough room inside the hall; the mourners spilled out onto Spadina. A full funeral in Chicago followed, where she was laid to rest next to the martyrs of the Haymarket affair who had inspired her to become an anarchist all those years ago.

She had gone down fighting, working hard for a cause she believed in right to the very end. It's all she ever wanted.

Once, years earlier, the Star asked her if she had any regrets. "Whatever will happen will happen," she said. "I hope to die on deck, true to my ideals with my eyes towards the east — the rising star."

That's exactly what she did.

-----

A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

Emma Goldman's lonnnng autobiography is called "Living My Life". You can borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here. Or buy if from Amazon here. Vivian Gornick's biography of Goldman was a big help with this piece. You'll find it through the Toronto Public Library here or from Amazon here. And so was Kathy E. Ferguson's "Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets", especially when it came to wrapping my mind around Goldman's attitude toward violence, which you can find through the Toronto Public Library here and from Amazon here. I also checked out C. Brid Nicholson's "Emma Goldman: Still Dangerous" which you can likewise find here and here.

There's whole documentary about Emma Goldman's time in Toronto called "The Anarchist Guest', which you can borrow from the Toronto Public Library here. Kevin Plummer wrote about her for Torontoist here (which was especially great for details about her final days). Mike Filey did the same in his book, "Toronto Sketches 6", which you can find on Google Books here. And Kaitlin Wainwright wrote a little bit about Goldman and her time in Toronto for Heritage Toronto here. You can see what the front page of the Toronto Star Weekly looked like on the day they welcomed her to Toronto here.

The University of California at Berkeley is home to the Emma Goldman Papers, which you can find online here. PBS' "American Experience" dedicated an episode to Goldman, which you can find online with lots of other information about here, or watch on YouTube beginning with part one here. The Past Tense blog talks about a Goldman visit to Vancouver here. 

The Toronto Public Library has an amazing online archive of old articles from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. There are more articles about Emma Goldman than it's reasonable to list here, but if you search her name in the archival, you'll find lots and lots of pieces about her and her time in Toronto. You'll find that here.

Toronto's anarchists shared their memories of Goldman — and of the city's anarchist community in general — in the book "Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America", which you'll find on Google Books here or you can read it at the Toronto Reference Library (which lists it online here). There's also a whole chapter about Attilio Bortolotti.

Attilio Bortolotti tells his story on the "Between Canada and the USA: a tale of immigrants and anarchists" page of the Kate Sharpley Library website here and in the book "Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America", which you can find on Google Books here, through the Toronto Public Library here, and on Amazon here. His story is also featured is in the book "Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the U.S., 1915-1940", which you can find on Google Books here, through the Toronto Public Library here, and on Amazon here. There's a "short multilingual bibliography" sharing more sources of information related to him here.

You can learn more about the case of Sacco and Vanzetti on Wikipedia here. The historian Reg Whitaker writes about the "Official Repression of Communism During WWII" in Canada, including a bit about the Bortolotti case, in a PDF here.

Emma Goldman's mugshot at the top of this post comes via the Women Who Kicks Ass Tumblr here. Her second mugshot, further down, was taken in Chicago in 1901. It's from Wikipedia here. The photo of Attilio Bortolotti come via estelnegre.org — which is, as far as I can guess, the website of a nationalist Catalonian libertarian group — here. The Petit Journal cover featured the anarchist bombing of the Liceo theatre in Spain (in Catalonia, actually) covers via the Spanish-language version of Wikipedia here.  Her deportation photo comes via the Jewish Women's Archive here. The Nazi images of the Balmy Beach Swastika Club are from the Toronto Telegram via Chris Bateman's article about them for blogTO here.

The photos of the Heliconian Club and 295 Vaughan Road are by me, Adam Bunch.

This post is related to dream 41 The Most Dangerous Woman in the World Emma Goldman, 1940