Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

A Notable Personage

In her official photograph as the first female mayor of Ottawa, Charlotte Whitton looks, to put it rather uncharitably, formidable, grim, unmovable, lacking in humour and empathy. Well, that is what meets the eye, and not a particularly critical eye, prepared enough to give a little leeway to the formality of the likeness and the sobriety of the topic. After all, her time and place was not a particularly welcoming one for women in the public eye.

She was said to have been a very good mayor of the capital city of Canada, and she was reputed to have been energetically involved in a whole range of good-works projects. A responsible citizen of the day, one who had the eyes and ears of the public upon her public maneuverings. Her work on behalf of the welfare of children in Canadian society, in helping to launch through her directorship, the Canadian Council on Child Welfare, in which she was involved for two decades is remarkable in itself.

That was well over a half-century earlier. A time when ethnic minorities knew their place within Canada, for they were relatively few in number, geographically localized, and not held in particularly high esteem. The founding nations, English and French, were the dominant and the privileged in society. Looking askew at the presence of foreign elements, particularly racialist in their attitudes as visible minorities being of obviously lesser stock.

On the other hand, one needn't have been particularly 'visible' in the sense of looking all that different from the majority population. Jews might have been held to be Caucasian [close genetically to the Armenians], but they were still well, Jews. And virtually everyone knew what that meant. And Charlotte Whitton, being a person of her time, heartily subscribed to the inferiority and implied sinister presence of Jews mingling in polite society.

Now, celebrated as an individual of the greatest integrity, a person of great personal accomplishments to which the country owes much, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada has recommended that Parks Canada give designation of this remarkable woman as a 'person of national historical significance'. In fact, she has already been designated in that manner, having been cited in various publications as a rabid anti-Semite.

This is a label that once read, Jews never forget. But others do, since it hardly concerns them. Little wonder then that the nomination sponsors 'had no idea' of this dark aspect of her character.

Concerned with child welfare reforms, she was hugely instrumental in her bigoted insistence that Canada not accept a desperate boatload of Jewish refugee orphans, and in the end, thanks to her exceptionally vigorous denunciations and rigorous denials, the hundreds of orphans perished along with other Jewish refugees whom Canada would not deign to accept lest they perilously soil Canadian values by their presence.

After the war, when it became abundantly clear that Nazi Germany's success rate in extinguishing Jewish lives included many that could have been saved, inclusive of those thousand Jewish orphans, her singular role in sending them to their certain deaths rather than risk having them become Canadian citizens, never seemed to trouble her conscience. She was a creature of her times beyond extraordinary.

A million Jewish children died in fascist Germany's extermination camps, alongside five times that number of adult Jews. The Jews that Canada's then-Prime Minister Mackenzie King and his executive crew denied entry to Canada, alongside Charlotte Whitton's denied-entry Jewish orphans represented a fragment of those who perished. But they might have lived, had Canada's concerns of "none is too many" not overridden humanitarian need.

Ms. Whitton's sterling work on behalf of her city, her country and its institutions had been recognized and she was bemedalled by an Order of Canada and later elevated to Commander of the British Empire. Well done. Recognition of a life well lived. More or less. Far less than it might have been, impacting so hugely on the lives and the deaths of the world's abandoned.

Honour her memory further? Hardly.

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