HALIFAX – It is a gleaming monument intended to shed light on one of the darkest chapters of Canadian history.
The Wheel of Conscience, designed by renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, will be unveiled Thursday at Pier 21, Canada’s immigration museum in Halifax.
The cylindrical steel sculpture memorializes Canada’s shameful decision in 1939 to turn away a steamship carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. The luxury liner, MS St. Louis, was forced to sail back to Europe, where about 250 of its passengers later died in the Holocaust.
Libeskind has said the central elements of the imposing mechanical sculpture are four spinning gears, symbolic of the guts of a ship’s engine and "a cynical bureaucracy."
The words hatred, racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism appear on the face of each gear, with an image of the St. Louis in the background. The shiny cylinder is surrounded by the map of the world showing the ship’s route.
"The gears … provide the mechanism to move the wheel in the vicious circle that brought tragedy to so many lives and shame to Canada," Libeskind says on his website.
The son of Holocaust survivors in Poland, Libeskind is best known as the master planner behind the ambitious 2003 proposal to create a row of cascading office towers to replace the World Trade Centre complex destroyed by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001.
The architect also designed Berlin’s Jewish Museum, the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England and the expansion of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, among other high-profile projects.
The Halifax sculpture was commissioned by the Canadian Jewish Congress after Citizenship and Immigration Canada set aside about $500,000 for the monument and an education program that includes a national, bilingual curriculum for high school students.
Bernie Farber, CEO of the congress, says the memorial brings the enormity of the Holocaust into sharp focus.
"Here we have an opportunity to take a small story out of a very large and tragic event – a story that people can relate to," Farber said in an interview. "On this boat were representatives of all walks of Jewish life: young children, teenagers, lovers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters."
Canada’s Jewish lobby had campaigned since the late 1980s to create a permanent reminder of a human rights tragedy that came to symbolize the world’s indifference to Nazi Germany’s escalating violence against Jews.
Farber says the story presents a poignant contrast to Canada’s enduring reputation as a country that has long welcomed immigrants to its shores.
"History is fluid that way. There are peaks and valleys. There were times when Canada was open and there were times when Canada was not just closed, it was closed because of shear and utter hatred. That’s what this story tells us."
The doomed voyage of the St. Louis started May 15, 1939, when the ship left its home port in Hamburg, Germany, destined for what the passengers thought was a safe haven in Cuba.
But when the Hamburg-America Line ship arrived at Havana on May 30, Cuban authorities denied entry to all but a few, prompting some desperate passengers to attempt suicide.
Two days later, after several failed attempts to secure safe passage to another Latin American port, the ship was forced to leave Cuba.
U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt dispatched a coast guard gunboat to ensure the St. Louis could not be purposely run aground on the American coast.
As the plight of the exiles started making headlines in Canada, a group of 40 academics and religious leaders sent a telegram to Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, requesting he grant the refugees sanctuary in Canada.
"They begged the government of the day to take heed on Jewish refugees fleeing for their lives," said Farber, whose predecessor at the congress, Samuel Bronfman, led the effort.
"And we weren’t the only ones. In United States, the New York Times wrote an incredible editorial begging for their lives. That, too, was ignored."
As for King, he was in Washington at the time, preoccupied with a visit to North America by King George. He left the matter to his under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, Oskar Douglas Skelton, then the acting prime minister.
According to archival records, Skelton consulted with Ernest Lapointe, the justice minister, and Frederick Charles Blair, the immigration director. Both men were opposed to letting the refugees enter Canada as the St. Louis waited at the approaches to Halifax harbour.
In a telegram to King, Skelton cites Canada’s strict immigration rules before mentioning that Lapointe was "emphatically opposed" to offering asylum to the Jews.
With nowhere else to go, the ship steamed back to Europe, where the governments of Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands offered temporary shelter. The following year, Hitler’s invading troops would soon track down many of those remaining in continental Europe.
"Refuge Denied," a book published in 2006, painstakingly tracked the St. Louis passengers after they left the ship and found that about a third died in Western Europe at the hands of German occupiers.
The Canadian government’s historical attitude toward Jewish immigrants was exposed in 1982 by Irving Abella’s book, "None is Too Many."
Abella found correspondence in the archives from Blair that exposed the depth of official anti-Semitism at the time of the St. Louis incident.
"The attempt of Jews to get into Canada reminds me a good deal of what I have seen on the farm at hog-feeding time when they are all trying to get their feet into the trough at the same time," Blair wrote a fellow official at External Affairs in May 1941.
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