The CBC? It’s personal

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/04/2023 (935 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Someone must be interested in being the ten-thousandth person in a Canadian newspaper, analyzing Pierre Poilievre’s war on the CBC. But it’s not me.

I only get two precious visits with you in these pages every week, and I don’t wish to waste this one on another game of partisan political Ping-Pong. What I would rather do in this space is what Winnipegers have come to expect since I first landed here 40 years ago in the summer of 1983. I want to make the CBC issue personal — encouraging you to do the same.

In the spring of 1944, my father, Mike Adler was a 21-year-old Hungarian Jewish soldier. He had been drafted into an army that was allied with Nazi Germany. Germany is only a little farther from Hungary than Saskatoon is from Winnipeg. He had been wrapping up his military service in the world’s most dangerous neighbourhood — especially for a Jew.

Seventy-nine years ago my dad was given an honourable discharge in one hand, and orders to report for deportation in the other hand.

Mike Adler was the most loyal person I ever knew — loyal to family, faith and country. And so this Hungarian patriot was going to report to the train station, willing to follow his country’s order to leave the country. The message from the country he loved could not have been more insane: Thank you for your loyalty to Hungary; you will now be leaving the country in the custody of Nazi Germany.

Fortunately for my father, his best friend, who was not a Jew and was honouraby discharged at the same time and was not being kicked out of his country, kicked some common sense into my father, who was going to be the obedient soldier and follow an order even if it meant his own demise. This righteous Gentile hid my father from the Germans who had begun to occupy Hungary and were rounding up every Jewish man, woman and child — giving them a one-way ticket to Auschwitz.

My father was supposed to be on one of those trains, but his friend risked his life to hide him and eventually smuggle him into neighbouring Romania, which was also falling under the Nazi umbrella. My father did farm labour for a few weeks until the Soviets rolled into Romania, pushing out Hitler’s army there.

That didn’t create much safety for my father, who was arrested by the Russians. Because he was a Hungarian national, he was treated like an enemy combatant and treated no differently than the Germans who had been captured. He spent next three years in the Siberian Gulag, sharing barracks with German soldiers. War isn’t just brutal; it’s brutally stupid.

The train to Auschwitz my father did not board carried his father and mother and siblings and many other members of their extended family. The Mike Adler I met only 10 years after he was captured was dramatically different than the man he was pre-Holocaust. People who knew him before that capture told me always had a smile on his face.

My father once told me that while Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, he stole his smile.

In the little broom closet-sized business called Adler’s Tailor shop in Montreal, Mike Adler spent most of his life hunched over a sewing machine or a steam press. I spent most of childhood at my father’s side. I, too, worked the sewing machine, ironed clothes and delivered them to our customers, mostly on my bicycle.

But my real job was doing whatever it took to make my father smile. Fortunately, life gave him a highly competent assistant.

The radio was always on at Adler’s Tailor Shop, and at 6:30 p.m. it was on CBC. The show was As it Happens. The eloquent, elegant journalist doing all the interviews was Barbara Frum. My father fell in love with her mind, voice and smile.

For 90 minutes every night, I got to see the real Mike Adler. This man, who was unable to rescue his family from a Nazi oven, rescued me from Communism, putting me in his backpack when I was two, carrying me out of Hungary, bringing me to the Adler family’s promised land — Canada.

I hope my partisan Conservative friends will forgive me for not joining them in their loathing of CBC. But now they know why I am eternally grateful to the CBC, and their late superstar Barbara Frum.

Barbara Frum, who introduced me to Mike Adler’s smile.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. His column appears on Thursday and Saturday.