Post-Second World War refugees reunite at local church

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This article was published 03/10/2015 (3671 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The paint may be chipping off Harry Kruger’s homemade metal suitcase, and it may now be empty, but at one time it held more than just memories.

It held all of the possessions the Kruger family could carry as they left one life and headed to a new one.

Kruger, now 76, was one of about 100 people who gathered on Saturday who were linked to a single ship — the Beaverbrae — which brought them as refugees to Canada from Europe in the years after the Second World War.

Kruger was one of more than 33,000 who crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Beaverbrae to begin a new life in Canada, thanks to Canadian Lutheran World Relief. He arrived in Canada with his parents, who originally lived in western Russia, when he was nine in 1951.

“My dad built this suitcase from scratch,” Kruger said at the reunion held at the Lutheran Church of the Cross, at 560 Arlington St., on Saturday. “He took the metal from a plane that was shot down — see the hole at the side? That’s the window from the plane.”

Kruger said his father even made the hinges from scratch with no tools.

“Everything we had was in that suitcase — we had no others,” he said.

“I remember on the ship the suitcase was on the floor, and it just went back and forth on the floor. I can’t remember getting sick, but I remember my first treat was an apple juice in a carton.”

The ship was built in Germany as the Huascaran in 1938 and was used as a transport ship during the Second World War.

The ship was renamed the MV Beaverbrae and was owned by the Canadian Pacific Steamship Co. Between 1948 to 1954, it made 52 voyages and brought 33,000 people from Europe to Canada in the wake of the war.

It later was renamed several times and finally, as the Romantica, it caught fire in 1997 and was scrapped the following year.

Another passenger on the ship, Alvin Kienetz, said he has never forgotten how sick he was on the crossing he was on in 1950 just two days after his 11th birthday.

Kienetz said the problem was the ship, while big enough to hold more than 700 passengers at a time, was on the small side when it came to ships that plied the Atlantic, so it was buffeted more by the large ocean waves.

“I was so sick,” he said laughing.

“I think I was seasick for eight of the 10 days it took to cross the ocean. The first meal on the ship I looked forward to, and then I lost it. I didn’t feel like eating again until the last meal.

“It wasn’t a happy experience.”

After growing up and getting a PhD in geography, Kienetz taught in Hutterite schools through Distance Education Manitoba.

Rev. Tyler Gingrich, an organizer of the reunion and Canadian Lutheran World Relief’s program officer for community relations, said the reunion wasn’t the only one across the country this weekend. Others were being held in Abbotsford, Calgary, Halifax and Kitchener-Waterloo. 

“A good percentage of the people here today were either on the ship or are related to people that had been on the ship,” Gingrich said.

“It wasn’t just Lutherans on the ship. There were Baptist and Mennonites, too. They were people wanting to make new lives in Canada.”

Gingrich said what the refugees on the Beaverbrae faced is similar to what people face fleeing Syria and South Sudan today.

“We can feel empathy for them,” he said.

“Things are not so very different for people who were displaced by the Second World War and people who are displaced today.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca