Erwin Schild, rabbi who survived Holocaust, promoted interfaith dialogue

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Erwin Schild, the long-time Toronto rabbi hailed for his commitment to interfaith dialogue, was unjustly detained during the Second World War, first in Nazi Germany and then by Canadian authorities.

Born in Germany, he was arrested during Kristallnacht, the pivotal moment in Third Reich history that foreshadowed the ensuing genocide. Held at Dachau concentration camp, he was released after a coerced promise to leave the country promptly.

He eventually landed in Canada and found himself in captivity again, as a suspected enemy alien, an illustration of his future country’s wartime attitude toward Jews seeking asylum from nazism.

Mr. Schild died on Saturday. He was 103.

While he always made it clear that incarceration in Canada didn’t compare with the barbarity of the SS, he was shocked to be greeted by barbed wire and gun-wielding guards after he had crossed the Atlantic.

“The surprise was that we were received as German prisoners,” he told The Globe in a 2012 interview. “Machine guns. It was unbelievable.”

At least British officials, who initially arrested him after he fled Germany, understood that they were dealing with refugees, whereas “Canadian authorities neither knew nor cared,” he said.

The second of three children, he was born on March 9, 1920, in Mülheim, now part of Cologne. His parents, Hermann Schild and Hetti Neugarten, ran a shoe store.

Young Erwin celebrated his bar mitzvah in March of 1933, weeks after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

In his autobiography, The Very Narrow Bridge, he recalled that, as antisemitism became law, even those who didn’t have animosity for their Jewish neighbours were eventually silenced by the relentless Nazi propaganda.

At school, one teacher who was known for leftist views disappeared. Classes had to start with the compulsory greeting “Heil Hitler!” and one of Mr. Schild’s friends was the first to show up in a Hitler Youth uniform.

With their rights gradually whittled away, “Jews had to be circumspect in public. We had to learn not to attract attention.” Mr. Schild pointed out that many German Jews emigrated, though Canada was one of the least receptive countries to refugees from nazism.

Since he was barred from university, he enrolled at the Jewish Teachers’ Seminary in Würzburg.

The following year, in November of 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old whose parents were among thousands of Jews of Polish origin expelled from the Reich, shot a German diplomat in Paris.

The Nazis used the assassination as a pretext for a massive pogrom later known as Kristallnacht, for the broken glass left after mobs ransacked Jewish homes and institutions.

In Würzburg, men carrying axes and shovels forced their way into Mr. Schild’s student dormitory and destroyed furniture, windows and mirrors. A crowd looted the seminary, tossing books and Torah scrolls into a bonfire. Mr. Schild was among thousands of Jews who were rounded up and taken to the Dachau concentration camp.

Established right after the Nazis took power and started hunting down political opponents, Dachau was the model that set the dehumanizing standard for later camps.

At Dachau, Mr. Schild endured the terror of Nazi camps: shaved heads, flimsy uniforms, poor food, and having to stand at attention at roll call for hours under constant threat of beatings or death.

What he experienced was a thing that “ripened and forged me,” he said in a 2019 commentary piece for The Globe. “That thing is naked fear – a fear I can never truly shake, born of a period of sheer terror.”

He made a vow “that if I should get out alive, I would never allow any future adversity to depress or defeat me.”

Kristallnacht marked the first time the Nazis detained Jews in such large numbers. But it was still in the days before systematic extermination. Instead, Jewish prisoners were extorted into signing over their assets and leaving Germany.

Mr. Schild’s father, also held at Dachau, was released to finalize the forced sale of the family business. Then the younger Mr. Schild was let go, after six weeks, on a pledge that he would emigrate promptly.

He managed to get to the Netherlands, then to Britain. He was at a yeshiva in London when the Second World War began a year later.

In May, 1940, Britain rounded up German- or Austrian-born men who weren’t U.K. citizens, deeming them security risks. “A year and a half after Dachau, I was a prisoner behind barbed wires again,” Mr. Schild said in his memoir.

After weeks of detention, the British decided to ship the internees overseas. The men were lined up at a dock in Liverpool. An officer counted them and split them into two cohorts. Mr. Schild’s group was directed to an ocean liner bound for Canada. Those standing a few rows behind him sailed to Australia.

On July 15, 1940, his ship docked in Quebec City, where armed soldiers took the refugees to a camp in Trois-Rivières. The camp also held German prisoners of war who taunted the newcomers with Nazi songs. The Jewish detainees were able to convince camp officials to place a barbed-wire barrier to separate them from the German soldiers.

Camp conditions were rustic but adequate. However, they weren’t free. “A comfortable prison is still a prison,” Mr. Schild would later say.

The Canadian military refused to consider them refugees and classified them as enemy aliens. Even after Britain gave assurances that the Jewish men weren’t dangerous, the Canadian authorities kept them detained, first in Quebec, then New Brunswick, then back in Quebec.

“It took us a year to be reclassified officially as interned refugees. Almost a full year after that, in February, 1942, I walked through the gates of Fort Lennox in Quebec. Truly free,” he wrote in his comment piece.

His elder brother, Kurt, had been able to get a visa to the United States in 1940 and served in the American army. However, their parents and their younger sister, Margot, were deported to the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, in 1941. Only Margot survived.

Mr. Schild settled in Toronto, married and earned a master of arts degree. After he was ordained, he became, in 1947, the rabbi of the Adath Israel Congregation. Under his spiritual leadership, the community grew from 150 to 1,900 member families.

His advocacy for a better understanding between Jews and Christians was recognized by his 2001 appointment to the Order of Canada and a 2016 blessing from Pope Francis, a rare honour for a non-Christian.

He also received Germany’s Order of Merit, for his work educating Germans about the Holocaust. According to an article in Canadian Jewish News, he kept that award in a box together with a yellow Star of David that his people had to wear under the Third Reich.

In one of his four books, The Crazy Angel, a collection of essays, he said he didn’t hold a grudge against the British for arresting him, and joked that, in the end, being interned had brought him to Canada, all expenses paid.

“Canada has more than compensated me for her initial rejection,” he said.

Mr. Schild was predeceased by his wife, Laura. He leaves his children, Daniel Schild, Dr. Judith Weinroth and Naomi Weitz; 12 grandchildren and a large extended family.

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