In this video, Helene Goldflus describes the difficulty of adapting to her new life in Toronto as a French-speaking refugee. Helene joined a Jewish club and made friends with other French and Belgian Jewish youth. Source: Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, 1992
[00:00-00:06]
Video begins with inter-title in white text on black screen while instrumental music plays and fades into the next frame: Helene Goldflus' family left Paris in 1948 to live with relatives in Toronto.
[00:07-00:43]
Cut to Holocaust survivor Helene Goldflus, sitting in front of a blue wall with a plant in the background, and looking to the right of the camera. The camera shows her face and shoulders as she speaks during an interview conducted in Toronto in 1992.
>> Helene Goldflus: We came to Canada and it was like, such a shock. Because 40 years ago, Toronto was like a village.
[00:14-00:21]
The name “Helene Goldflus” and the location of the filmed interview, “Toronto”, appear in white text above Helene's left shoulder.
>> And the people were very, very cold, including my uncle who really didn't want us, but out of duty— Really what happened was that – that's what my mother told me afterwards – my uncle in the States, in Baltimore, was the one who insisted that he wanted us there. And we were supposed to go there. But the thing is, in 1948, they didn't let any Jews in in the United States, so the only doors that were open were Canada. So we came here instead, otherwise we would have been in the United States.
[00:44-00:52]
Cut to yellow, aged, open passport containing the photographs of four children, including Helene Goldflus in the top-left corner of the right page. The photo caption appears in white text on the left-hand side of the frame, “Passport for Helene and her brothers, 1947”.
>> And this uncle here, my mother's brother, and his wife also, didn't want us. She was very upset with us. She told me one time when I understood English, she said…
[00:53-01:01]
Cut to black-and-white portrait photograph of a teenaged girl, smiling at the camera. The photo caption appears in white text on the left-hand side of the frame, “Helene Goldflus, 1947”.
>> “We didn't want you here. You're making our life what was hard enough without you, now it's even worse.”
[01:02-01:08]
Cut to second inter-title in white text on black screen while instrumental music plays and fades into the next frame: Helene and her family struggled to integrate as French-speaking refugees in Toronto.
[01:09-01:16]
Cut to Helene Goldflus in front of the camera.
>> Most people who emigrated from France went to Montreal, if they came to Canada, because it was French-speaking. Nobody came to Toronto.
[01:17-01:30]
Cut to black-and-white photograph of a corner street scene with pedestrians walking along the sidewalk and a man biking in the bottom-right corner of the image. Taller buildings and a water tower are visible in the distance. The camera zooms in to show more details of storefronts on the street. The photo caption appears in white text on the left-hand side of the frame, “Toronto, 1940s”.
>> But I met some, I joined a Jewish club that was on Harbord Street. And they were young orphans—young, same as I was or even younger, from Belgium. There was a whole group of them.
[01:31-02:23]
Cut to Helene Goldflus in front of the camera.
And a lot of them had been adopted by people here in Toronto. So we formed a whole group, there were maybe 4 or 5 French, maybe 10 French, from France, and the rest was from Belgium. So we were a group like that, and we stayed friends who quite a few years. And we were, like, we gave each other moral support and whatever, because there was… And then, they founded l'Alliance française, but it wasn't Jewish. But it didn't matter because it was just a place to meet and speak French, and go to the movies, and something that was familiar to us. Because the English was so alien and the people were so, like, even my aunt and uncle's friends, like, not that they weren't nice to us, but they didn't go out of their way to welcome us. Nobody really cared.
[02:24-02:34]
Music plays for the remainder of the video. Three credit pages appear in white text on black screen: Interview conducted by Sharon Weintraub, Holocaust Documentation Project, Toronto, 1992, Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre
Images: City of Toronto Archives; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Helene Cantkier Goldflus
Directing: Helgi Piccinin; Editing and Colorization: Michaël Gravel, Helgi Piccinin; Audio Mix and Original Music: Pierre-Luc Lecours. [Logo for Chaire de recherche du Canada en patrimoine ethnologique]
Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, copyright 2017.
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End of transcript.