Regional Synod of Canada - Reformed Church in America

Pioneer Christian Monthly

Date - Oct/90

Contributor - F Boersma

Title - Reflections

Topic - World War 2

The war was over in 1945 and life was starting to return to normal. Holland was a small country and the population was increasing rapidly. The housing situation was bad; young, married couples spent their first months, and for some even years, living in with parents. The idea of owning a home, starting a farm, or business was impossible.

In 1948, many young men, who had been in the Dutch army fighting in Indonesia, also came back to Holland which did not help improve the situation. Early in 1948, Canada and many other countries began opening their doors to immigrants. Canada, a neutral country, had farm land open spaces, and plenty of opportunities to offer immigrants.

And so we came, recently married couples, couples with young children, and also middle-aged couples with large families. Young as we were, we could see the enormous sacrifice those middle-aged couples were making for their children. In most cases, those parents were well established, with homes and businesses of their own, but they saw no opportunities for their children in a crowded country like Holland. "Older trees uprooted for the sake of the young ones."

In those early days, the only way of travelling was by boat, there was no such thing as boarding a plane and being at your destination in eight hours. The immigrant boats were converted troop carriers, with separate dormitories for the men and for the women and children. Especially in the women's quarters sea sickness was bad. Mothers, who had brought their babies aboard spotlessly clean, were too sick to even change their little ones' diapers, and were waiting for the hour when their husbands would come to change the babies. It does not take much imagination to realize the smell in the women's quarters. Also, since the kitchens were usually on the same part of the ship, cooking odours were combining to make matters worse. One member of our congregation will never in her life forget the odour of onions cooking combined with sea sickness. Often, it took only one visit of a husband and father to the women's dormitory to send him feeding the fish.

The usual centre of landing in the early days was Quebec. Entering the Gulf of St. Lawrence, things improved. Everybody started to feel better, and after ten days of sickness and ordeal, we could see the new land and hope came back in our hearts. This was Canada, the land where we were going to start a new life and everything was going to be good.

From Quebec, we would have to travel by train to our destinations wherever we were sponsored. For most it meant some place in Ontario, but for some of us in meant Winnipeg, or for some, even Saskatchewan. Before boarding the train, everybody was going to stock up on food, as we knew nothing was available on the trains. Full of courage, we ventured out in Quebec City to find a grocery store. We knew the words "bread" and "milk" and we thought that was enough. It did not take long for us to find out that in Quebec, people speak French and could not understand even the words bread or milk. However, we were immigrants full of determination, and we obtained what we wanted.

Old trains had been made available to the flow of immigrants. Boarding the train, everyone was going about to find a nice, cosy place for themselves and their families a little privacy. And since there are only a limited number of cosy places on a train, some near fights developed as to who had discovered a place first and who would take possession of it. Those of us who came during summer will all remember how dirty we were. We opened the windows to get fresh air, never expecting to get cinder dust instead. It wasn't until we looked at one another and saw how dirty this person looked that we realized we must look the same to them.

The hundreds of stops on the way to Winnipeg seemed never ending. We scrambled at each stop to fetch some drinking water, to buy some bread, and to gather some wood, as there were a few stoves on the trains to heat some water in order to make tea. And at every stop, the rows were thinning out as families got off at their destinations. Some in the middle of the night, some with small children, on some occasions nobody was waiting for them, some occasions when a farmer was waiting. Many of us will remember the kindness of some of the porters on the trains, men who with primitive means, tried to make us as comfortable as was possible.

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