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."

-----

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.  

Toronto ♥s Stalingrad

It was the summer of 1942 and things were looking good for Hitler. The Nazis had already swept across Europe; now they were pushing on into Russia, marching toward Stalingrad. The Russians were in trouble. In just the first year of fighting, the Red Army had lost half of their men. And Stalin — a bloodthirsty lunatic of a dictator on his good days — was starting to get a little bit desperate.

The city that had been renamed in his honour was teeming with people. Stalingrad had been a major metropolis before the war; since then, refugees had doubled the population. But as the Germans prepared to attack, Stalin refused to organize an evacuation. While food and supplies were shipped away to safety, the people were left behind. His soldiers, he figured, would fight more passionately to defend a city full of innocent civilians. And in case that wasn't enough, he ordered that any officer found retreating should be tried or shot on the spot — "Not one step back!" — and that anyone who could carry a rifle should fight. And so, men, women and children would all be part of one of the bloodiest battles in history.

People in Toronto and all over the world watched as Stalingrad was turned into a living hell. The planes of the German Luftwaffe began by dropping more than 1000 tons of bombs, reducing most of the city to a burning pile of rubble. The fighting on the ground that followed was brutal, even by the horrifying standards of the Second World War. "The entire city became an inferno," the Toronto Daily Star reported, "but it put up the fiercest fight in modern warfare. The fight for each building lasted for days, even weeks, at a time. Each room, each floor, constituted a separate front within a front. Every structure became a fortress."

As two of the most powerful empires on earth brought their military fury down upon the city, corpses piled up in the streets. Civilians who tried to flee by foot or by ferry were bombed, massacred by the hundreds. Thousands of orphaned children were left on their own in the middle of the destruction; they lived in the rubble for months on end, starving and freezing to death, terrified, and easy targets for snipers. "Under constant bombardment, life went on;" the Star wrote, "the people clung to the ruins of the city, children were fed in the shadows of broken buildings, put to bed in dugouts, nursed in cellars when sick. Children were born in dugouts."

Children in Stalingrad, 1942

The bloodbath raged on for five straight months, through the autumn and on into the harsh Russian winter. At times, it seemed as if the Nazis were on the verge of winning, but they could never quite kill the last few Soviet soldiers. By February, the tide had turned. The Red Army retook the city and shifted the momentum of the entire war. Hitler's army was deeply wounded. The Nazis would never again win an important battle on the Eastern Front. And the following year, the Allies would land at Normandy.

But victory at Stalingrad took a terrible toll. Nearly two million people had been killed or wounded. Two million. And the suffering wasn't over yet. The city was a smouldering ruin. It would take years to rebuild. "Stalingrad, city of heroes, still shivers in the icy Russian winter," the Star told its readers in Toronto, half a world away. And there were orphans who needed help, the newspaper reported. "Many of them had been living for months during the siege in holes in the ground, and when they were found they were swollen with hunger and their limbs were frozen." They say 15 million Russian children lost their parents during the war. 

So Toronto decided to help.

Later that same year, Toronto City Council declared "Friendship With Russia Week" and then "Stalingrad Day". They followed that up by officially "adopting" Stalingrad. The next two winters in Toronto would see a massive outpouring of support for the Russians living in that ruined city more than 8,000 kilometers away.

The City of Toronto Stalingrad Committee was created. And a Stalingrad Fund, too. The Mayor, Robert Hood Saunders (the same guy who brought us Elmer the Safety Elephant), was made honourary chairman. "Citizens of Toronto could not support a more worthy cause than the noble people of Stalingrad," he declared. "These people have shown us the way to be real heroes. We must give thanks to the Soviet armies and the brave Russian people who gave us those armies. I sincerely hope that all Toronto will get behind this great cause in the name of humanity."

And they did. Millions of dollars were raised in donations. More than 150 different organizations came together to an organize an ambitious clothing drive, going door-to-door to collect whatever spare clothing and knitted goods they could find. They ended up collecting 30 tons of it, which was stored at a depot on Yonge Street and then shipped off to the Soviet Union.

Many of the most powerful people in Canada worked hard to improve our relationship with "our gallant allies" in Russia. A National Council for Canadian-Soviet Friendship was founded, with the active support of wealthy businessmen and Premiers and Lieutenant Governors and justices of the Supreme Court. The Prime Minster, William Lyon Mackenzie King, served as Chair.

Eaton's window display during WWII

In 1943, thanks in part to the Eaton family and the heir to the Maple Leaf Foods fortune, there was a three-day Congress of Canadian-Soviet Friendship at the swanky Royal York Hotel. In 1944, there was another one. The event ended with a rally at Maple Leaf Gardens and 17,000 people showed up. The Congress was billed as an exchange of information. Torontonians had the chance to learn all about Soviet advances in agriculture and science and education and art. Delegates urged that every university in Canada should start its own Russian Department. The free-flow and exchange of ideas with the Communists was hailed as a vital part of Canada's future. 

At Maple Leaf Gardens, a representative from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa thanked Torontonians for their support of Stalingrad: "your gifts are cementing the post-war relations of Canada and Russia," she said.

Of course, that's not exactly how things turned out.

In fact, some of the seeds of the Cold War could already be found at that rally. For one thing, there was still plenty of anti-Communist suspicion in Canada. Being a member of the Canadian Communist Party was still illegal. It had been for most of the 20th century — they had to run candidates as "Labour-Progressives" instead. Back in the 1920s, R.B. Bennett's Conservative government had arrested the party leader and then apparently tried to assassinate him while he was in jail. (I told that story here.) And even now, while Mackenzie King was heading up the Friendship Committee, his government was keeping tabs. The RCMP kept a close eye on the Friendship Congress and the rally at Maple Leaf Gardens, including a detailed assessment in their Monthly Intelligence Report, and taking care to note that 80% of the audience was "of foreign extraction."

But they did have some good reasons to be suspicious. Like, say, Colonel Nikolai Zabotin. He was one of the Soviet representatives who attended the Congress. He worked at the embassy in Ottawa. And he was a spy. He had been sent to Canada to collect secrets about the Allied attempts to build a nuclear bomb. And he was getting them. He used his position at the embassy to gain access to the Canadian government, charming officials into spilling the beans. One naive army officer even took him in a canoe down the Ottawa River, where Zabotin snapped photos of the construction of the Chalk River nuclear facility. Most importantly, he had an operative inside the British scientific team trying to build a bomb in Canada — who also slipped him secrets about the Manhattan Project in the United States.

It was only a month after the Americans dropped their bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Zabotin's spy ring was uncovered. Once the information became public, people were shocked. Those old anti-Communist feelings were stirred up once again. Some call the Zabotin episode "the spark that ignited the Cold War."

That spark caught fire quickly. Soon, the Communists were testing their own bomb and with Hitler defeated, people were remembering the true brutality of Stalin's regime: The Purges, The Gulag, The Great Famine. At Stalingrad, the Russians took 110,000 German prisoners. Only 6,000 survived Stalin's camps.

In North America, the attitude toward Russia swung hard the other way. And the hatred wasn't reserved just for Stalin and the Soviet leadership, but for every Communist or Communist sympathizer or supposed Communist sympathizer anywhere in the world. Some of the very same experts who had been asked to speak at the Friendship Congress were denounced as radicals and investigated as traitors after the war. At least one of them would be dragged in front of Joseph McCarthy's infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities. Just a few years earlier, the people of Stalingrad were being hailed by Canadian leaders as the saviours of democracy and the free world. Now they and their countrymen were being demonized by those very same leaders as the gravest threat to democracy the world had ever known.

And in Toronto, the city that had once adopted Stalingrad, where the people came together to help the Russians who had suffered at the hands of Hitler and of Stalin, the fact that it had ever happened was quickly and conveniently forgotten.

------

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

I first learned about Toronto having adopted Stalingrad as a fleeting mention in a book I'm reading at the moment: Warrior Nation. It's about Stephen Harper's attempts to remodel Canada as an aggressive military power. You can buy it here or borrow it here.

You can read about Toronto adopting Stalingrad in old archived newspaper articles from the Star here, here and here. And from the Ottawa Citizen here and here. The Hiroshima Day Coalition has a timeline of the history of "Making Peace in Toronto" in a PDF here.

There is an excellent video about the children who lived through the Battle of Stalingrad here.

Toppy Topham Crosses The Rhine

Operation Varsity above the Rhine River

 
The war was nearly over. It had already been nine months since the Allies landed in Normandy. The 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion had been there, students and shopkeepers and dentists from places like Calgary and Saskatoon and Toronto leaping out of planes into the air above France, dropping behind German lines to secure bridges and roads. Hundreds of them had died doing it. Then, the following winter, the battalion had patrolled the freezing snows of the Ardennes Forest, resisting the brutal German counter-attack at the Battle of the Bulge. Now it was March, and the Allies had pushed all the way across Western Europe into Germany itself. But hundreds of thousands of people were still dying. And the Allies still had one more mammoth task ahead them before they could fan out across the country and overrun it: they needed to cross the Rhine River. What was left of Hitler's army was waiting for them on the other side.

The morning of March 24, 1945 saw the biggest airborne operation in the history of anything ever. Thousands upon thousands of planes and gliders took off in England and soared across the skies of Europe toward the river. They stretched out for more than 300 kilometers — the distance from London to Paris — and took two and half hours to pass by. When they got to the Rhine, tens of thousands of men leapt out of the planes, white parachutes bursting open in the morning light. They were easy targets for the bullets and anti-aircraft shells that rose to meet them. Many men died before they'd even hit the ground. Hundreds of planes fell burning from the sky.

One of the lucky men who did survive the drop was Frederick George Topham. He'd been born in Toronto during the First World War, had gone to school at Runnymede Collegiate on Jane Street, and spent some time working as a miner at Kirkland Lake. His friends called him Toppy. He was in Europe as a medic with the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, stitching up men on the front lines. That morning on the banks of the Rhine, they needed it. Many of the men had been shot on their way down. Their commanding officer, a guy from Winnipeg who'd won the Grey Cup with the Blue Bombers in the '30s, had already been killed. So Topham got to work, rushing from one injured paratrooper to the next: performing first aid, tending to wounds, saving lives.

It was about 11 o'clock — an hour after his jump — when Topham heard a cry for help. An injured solider was lying out in the open, bullets whizzing around him. A medical orderly ran over to help, knelt down at the man's side, and was shot dead. A second medic died the same way. Topham saw it all happen — and then rushed out to help. 

Canadian paratroopers in the drop zone

They say the air was laced with machine gun and sniper fire, but he made it all the way through to the wounded soldier, and began tending to his patient among the dead bodies. That's how Topham got shot, too. In the face. Fighting the pain, blood pouring from his mangled nose and cheek, he stood his ground, gave the solider first aid and then picked him up and carried him through the hail of bullets into the woods to safety. Then he turned around and headed right back out again, to help more of the wounded men. For the next two hours, he refused to stop working, refused to let anyone take care of his bloodied face until the entire area had been cleared of casualties.

And his day wasn't over yet. On his way back to join his company, he came across an armoured machine gun carrier that had been hit by a shell. Mortars were still landing all around it. Flames leapt from it; there were explosions. An officer warned everyone to stand back.

Topham rushed in. He found three men inside and carried each of them to safety. One died of his wounds, but the other two made it. They wouldn't be the last lives he saved that day. The medic kept working for hours.

It would take the Allies a day and a half to win the battle. Then they pressed on deeper into Germany, until they ran into the Soviet army coming the other way. The war in Europe was over. The 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion was the very first unit sent home to Canada. They arrived in Halifax on June 21st, having completed every mission they'd ever been given, and having never given up an objective they'd won.

Back in Toronto, the city had been waiting to celebrate their new hero. They threw Toppy Topham a parade down Bay Street to Old City Hall, with a hundred members of his battalion serving as an honour guard. He was asked to lay the cornerstone for the new Sunnybrook Memorial Hospital for veterans of the war. Soon, an entire post-war neighbourhood on St. Clair East would bear his name: Topham Park. And King George V would award him the Victoria Cross — the highest military honour you can get in the Commonwealth. Nearly 60 years later, when the medal went up for auction in 2004, the members of his old battalion raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep it in Canada. They gave it to the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa; you can see it on display.

As for Topham himself, he went to work for Toronto Hydro when he got back. That, absurdly, is how he died: in an electrical accident in 1974. Today, you'll find him buried in Sanctuary Park Cemetery at Lawrence and Royal York Road.

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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

You can read more about Toppy Topham and the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion here and here and here and here. There's a plaque to his memory outside the old Etobicoke City Hall. I went to his old high school, Runnymede, for a couple of years and don't remember ever having heard about him while I was there, which seems like more than a shame.

Here are some more posts for Remembrance Day:

The story of Toronto's John McCrae writing "In Flanders Fields" amidst the muck and death of Western Belgium here.
What William Faulkner was doing drunk in the cockpit on a biplane in Toronto on the day the Great War ended in 1918 here. 
The story of bloodshirtsy fighter pilot hero Billy Bishop here. 
How Canadian troops held occupy Iceland during WWII here.
What it looked like in Toronto on the day the Great War ended here.
A great photo of a women working in a Toronto munitions factory during WWII here.
The story behind on the most famous photos of all-time, "Getting Napalmed As A Child In South Vietnam" here.

Photo: Factory Worker During WWII

Last week, blogTO posted a whole whack of old Toronto photographs from the 1850s to the 1990s. There are plenty of nice ones that I hadn't seen before, but the photo that's stuck with me the most is this one, of a woman who (like my grandmother) worked at an armaments factory in Toronto during the Second World War. 

Unfortunately, they don't give any more information than that. You can see the whole post here, which is a round-up of some of the best images they posted in a fifteen-part series covering one decade at a time.

Update: blogTo reposted the image again, this time with a link to a Wikipedia page with more information. It seems this is Veronica Foster, who worked at the John Inglis Co. factory in what's now Liberty Village. They called her "Ronnie, the Bren Gun Girl" because that's a Bren machine gun, which became one of the most common weapons on the front lines of the war. This photo was taken as "official government coverage" in May of 1941.

The Canadian Military Occupation of Iceland — A Strange Tale from World War II

Reykjavik, 1942

 
Iceland didn’t want any part of the Second World War. It was all tiny and defenseless and alone out there in the north Atlantic. Most of the hundred thousand people on the island were peaceful farming and fishing families. They had no army; only a few dozen hastily-trained police officers. For the most part, the Icelandic arsenal was limited to a few pistols and rifles and a couple of antique cannons. But that was the point: ever since the end of the First World War, when they had been granted their autonomy under Danish rule, Iceland had been an officially neutral country. They weren’t going to be doing any invading — and no one was supposed to invade them.

Winston Churchill, however, had other plans. At the beginning of the war, he was in charge of the British navy. And he was worried. In April of 1940, the Germans had invaded Denmark and Norway — both neutral, just like Iceland — giving the Nazis a strategic advantage. If Iceland were captured next, the Allies would be in serious trouble in the north Atlantic. “It has been said,” Churchill wrote, “‘Whoever possesses Iceland holds a pistol firmly pointed at England, America, and Canada.'” He tried to convince Iceland to join the Allied cause, but when his efforts failed, he turned to a new plan.

In early May, Churchill launched “Operation Fork”. A few hundred British soldiers set sail for Reykjavik to invade Iceland, occupy the island and defend it against the Nazis.

Things got off to a rocky start. The plan was thrown together in a rush; they were still figuring out the details en route. None of the invaders spoke Icelandic. They had only a few maps and even those were unreliable; one of them was drawn from memory. The soldiers — who weren’t supposed to know where they were going — figured it out anyway. And on the trip over, lots of them were getting seasick. One of them even committed suicide. Then, the element of surprise was ruined: the plane sent ahead to scout the island woke people up in the middle of the night. By the time the Allies got there, a crowd had gathered at the harbour in Reykjavik and the German consul was already burning documents in his bathtub.

But when you’re invading a country that has no army, you can afford to make a few more mistakes than usual. When the Allied destroyers arrived — on the very same day Churchill became Prime Minister back in England — they were met by throngs of curious onlookers, but no resistance (expect for one guy who took a gun away from an Allied solider, stuck a cigarette in the barrel and handed it back). The Allies quickly fanned out across the island, disabling communications, arresting all German citizens and sympathizers, seizing whatever Nazi documents hadn’t been burned, and taking over strategic positions.

The Icelandic government was understandably upset. They officially protested, pointing out that their sovereignty had been “flagrantly violated” and their “independence infringed” — but they also asked their citizens to treat the occupying forces as “guests”. For their part, the Allies promised to pay for everything they broke and leave just as soon as the war was over. Today, the Icelandic government remembers the “brave and gallant” Canadian occupiers “with great gratitude”. They even gave us the very last shell from those antique cannons.

And after the invasion, it was the Canadians who were left to do the actual occupying. Leading the way was the Royal Regiment of Canada — one of Toronto’s most storied forces, with roots going all the way back to the Battle of Lime Ridge in 1866. Young men from places like Forest Hill and Kensington and Sunnyside — many of whom had never even left the city before their training in Halifax — were living in drafty military huts in places like Reykjavik, Hvalfjörður and Sandskeið, expanding airfields, building defenses and getting drunk on the local moonshine, “Black Death”.

It didn’t last long. About a year after they arrived, the Canadian troops were needed elsewhere in the war; the Americans took over. The Royal Regiment of Canada soon found themselves in much more dangerous places. The very next summer, they stormed the beaches of Dieppe. More than half of them were captured; almost half of them were killed.

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Iceland, who declared independence from Denmark before the war was over, still doesn't have a standing army, but they are now apparently very happy that we occupied them back in the day. They even gave the very last cannon shell from those two antique cannons, inscribed thusly: “In honour of the brave and gallant Canadian soldiers who fought in the defence of a small nation. Iceland remembers them with great gratitude." Some Icelanders still live in the huts our troops built for shelter, and there's apparently a small graveyard of the Canadians who died while serving there.


Most of my information came from here and here and, of course, here. There are some neat wartime photos of the Icelandic police officers' training here and here. And another one of Reykjavik here.

The photo was found via a postcard on Ebay here.

Ooh and I also across this quote on Wikipedia. It's from the diary of Alexander Cadogan, one of the British military's civil servants during the war: "Home 8. Dined and worked. Planning conquest of Iceland for next week. Shall probably be too late! Saw several broods of ducklings."