A Changing Canada: Reflections of a WWII-Era Refugee

Karla Poewe (R) poses with her sister on their confirmation day in front of a church in Toronto in 1956. Courtesy of Karla Poewe

Karla Poewe has thought a lot about culture and national identity. She came to Canada as a refugee in the aftermath of World War II and is now retired from a long career in anthropology.

As Canadians prepare to celebrate Canada Day, the 82-year-old Calgary resident reflects on all she has valued about Canadian culture and how it has changed in the past 70 years.

“Canadians of that time knew exactly who they were,” Poewe told The Epoch Times, reflecting on her early years in Canada in the 1950s.

She was 13 when she started school in Toronto shortly after arriving in Canada. “I was in some ways a little free girl, having been sort of on the streets,” she said.

She was born in 1941, became a refugee at the age of 3 when her hometown in the then-German province of East Prussia was bombed, and bounced around to various parts of Germany before landing in Canada.

“The teachers had a sound set of values. I was very much aware that they simply knew what was right and what was wrong,” Poewe said. “[The teachers] represented a kind of person, the Canadian person, who was kindly, but had nonetheless a firmness and knew precisely what sort of student they wanted.”

Karla Poewe, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Calgary, fled Germany for Canada in the aftermath of World War II. Courtesy of Karla Poewe

She recalled the uniform they wore for calisthenics—an uncomfortable “ballooned” cotton outfit. “The cotton didn’t give way, there was nothing stretchy there,” Poewe said. If students didn’t have these uniforms starched and ironed, they couldn’t participate in the calisthenics class. Expectations of decorum were clear.

A friend initiated her further into the Canadian way of life by bringing her to a cottage in Muskoka and taking her waterskiing. “I had never done anything like it,” she said.

“They let me in, and I was eager to assimilate,” Poewe explained. “The word assimilation is still a very positive thing for me. Assimilation does not mean that you become a carbon copy of every Canadian, something that’s impossible.”

She said assimilating is about assenting to participate in a democracy, in a country with its own history and form of government and law. “It does not take anything away from you. In fact, it will give you new perspectives.”

Grappling With German Identity

While Poewe became Canadian, she grappled with her German heritage post-war. She says she saw her birth country at once as a “land of poetry” but also “one that committed an atrocity.”

Although she was always aware of Germans being viewed as “the enemy” when she arrived in Canada, she still felt accepted as a newcomer.

In university, she met with varied reactions to her German heritage.

In one instance, a professor asked her to read the works of German sociologist and historian Max Weber in the original German and to share her insights. That helped her solidify her desire to retain her native language and the worlds of thought it could open to her.

On the other hand, “some people thought there must be a peculiar psychology to me, as if being from a country that once committed a crime, I must be eternally that. But, you know, I just sort of took it,” she said.

She dealt with it by studying how the Nazis rose to power, what gave them power, and how the Holocaust could happen. She did so alongside her anthropology work, which included studies in Africa and also teaching—she is now professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Calgary.

For several months she pored over archived materials, letters, and original documents related to World War II.

“That made very clear to me that that phenomenon came from a specific time,” she said. The guilt of World War I placed on Germany “was one of the reasons why Germans slithered into feeling some affiliation for this horrible figure, Hitler.”

She learned from that experience not to trust history books. She found that many of the historical accounts at the time were “full of propaganda and fury and hate.” Her grandmother, and also priests who were among the refugees as she fled her home, “steered us away from any thoughts of revenge or hate.”

Poewe recognizes the atrocity of the Holocaust in Germany’s history, but still loves her “land of poetry.”

Canada Today

There has been an escalating movement to cancel Canada Day due to issues such as the legacy of the residential schools and the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Immigration Act, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which has been denounced for having halted virtually all Chinese immigration to Canada for 24 years.

But Poewe speaks of what it means to struggle with difficult parts of a nation’s history while still celebrating that nation, noting that no country is “whole,” something she only really learned after becoming an anthropologist.

She encourages Canadians to become more aware of and knowledgeable about the country’s history and look into original historical materials to discover the facts about what really happened in the past.

If she were to come to Canada today as a 13-year-old refugee, she thinks it would be a very different experience. There’s much less certainty about who Canadians are and what they stand for, she said.

The new “thought fashion” is for people to construct their own identities based on their ideas. “The choices are you can be this, you can be that, you can change your biology,” she said.

Having been through the experience of war, she says her identity comes from real experience rather than an idea. “I don’t even call it identity. That’s just what I am.”

Poewe doesn’t think she would find today’s teachers to be like those of the 1950s, sure of what it means to be Canadian and upholding the values and standards that come with that. “I do not think I would find quite the same teachers.”

She recalls with fondness those teachers who treated her with firm kindness and eventually took pride in how she had become “a little Canadian.”