Sixty-five years ago this month, the first Canadian freedom train sped through New York State heading for Montreal. On board were Jewish men, women and children - some of the very few who would escape the war in Europe and start life anew in Canada.
Audio: John Margolis talks to The Globe's Les Perreaux about his family's escape from Europe aboard the Serpa Pinto
There were 107 families on board, and some of them would go on to become pillars of Canadian society. Young Frederick Lowy, who waited in the United States while his parents went ahead to set up in Montreal, would go on to become president of Concordia University. Ilse Marx, a 20-year-old clerk described by fellow passengers as "a real looker," would have three children in Canada, including David Berger, the former MP and ambassador to Israel.
But their arrival was a rocky one. Not unlike trains headed for Auschwitz or Treblinka, this one had passengers who had been loaded onto railcars and kept there under lock and key. As it chugged out of the station in Philadelphia, armed men stood guard to guarantee that no one could flee.
The train was carrying people through one hostile country to another that didn't really want them either.
The tale has seldom been told of how those aboard this train, and a few others like it, eluded capture by the Nazis, travelled through the mountains to neutral Portugal and crossed the Atlantic on voyages that included one high-seas confrontation with a German U-boat captain who forced them to spend six hours in lifeboats while he pondered their fate.
Among the millions needing rescue, Canada took in only 5,000 Jews from the mid-1930s through the late 1940s, and only several hundred during the war. Historian Irving Abella has described the record as a disgraceful low among Western countries.
Overshadowed by the Canadian government's shameful refusal to save more victims of the Holocaust, the survival of 450 Jewish refugees in 1944 represented a major victory for early Canadian Jewish leaders. Whisky magnate Samuel Bronfman and Saul Hayes, the Canadian Jewish Congress's executive director, had spent a decade begging and cajoling. Those who were finally allowed into the country became the long-shot winners of a deadly lottery.
Montrealer John Margolis was a toddler at the time, but he has amassed an archive documenting his family's escape. This week, as the world was marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, he sifted through his records to show how his family and others sailed to safety aboard a vessel that has taken on iconic status: the Serpa Pinto.
Mr. Margolis was an 18-month-old babe in the arms of his eight-year-old brother, Fred, as his family traversed the Pyrenees to make their way from fallen France into neutral Spain. His mother, Licel, was hobbled by a recent bout with typhus while his father cast a wary eye on the Andorran smugglers who guided them on their trek. They had a habit of leaving clients to die in the mountains.
But Mr. Margolis's father, Emmanuel, had spent the war fighting in the French army and underground and he knew how to handle them.
"He told them some of his colleagues were expecting a postcard from him from Spain, and if they didn't get it, that would be it for them," said Mr. Margolis, using his finger to slice across his throat.
And what if the Nazis caught up with them? The elder Mr. Margolis wore a belt of grenades and he was prepared to use them rather than allow his family to be captured.
The family made it to Spain, but their troubles were far from over. Emmanuel Margolis was nabbed by fascist authorities who accused him of spying. He was tortured for six months in prison, leaving kidney damage and other injuries that cut short his life in Canada.
Spain was officially neutral, but political killings were common, and the Germans had offices in Madrid decorated with swastikas.
"But Spain was neutral enough that people could survive," shrugged Mr. Margolis, who became an artist and poet and, at 66, is still a competitive Olympic-style weightlifter.
Once Emmanuel Margolis was released in 1943, the family moved on to Lisbon, as other Jews also trickled into Portugal, which was one of the few remaining havens in Europe.
Experiences ranged widely. While Mr. Margolis's family survived on courage and wits, fellow Montrealer Maurice Shenkier admits that the money his father had amassed as a diamond dealer in Belgium helped clear the way for his family.
Mr. Shenkier's blond hair and blue eyes allowed the 13-year-old to hide in plain view among his classmates at a school run by Jesuits. "I just couldn't take a pee in front of anybody," he quipped. "In fact, I still can't."
The family fled to Nice, but had to leave when friends in the German army knocked on their hotel-room door to let them know they were on the next day's roundup list.
"It took two more weeks and a huge amount of money to finally get to Portugal," Mr. Shenkier said.
But with Northern Africa and France in Nazi hands, most arrivals lived in fear that the Iberian Peninsula would fall next. Meanwhile, rumours circulated of a rescue ship.
The Serpa Pinto was an 8,000-ton Portuguese transport ship sailing under the command of Americo dos Santos, a captain who gained hero status among many of his Jewish passengers.
But the Serpa Pinto played both sides of the war. On two occasions, it hauled Jewish refugees from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro and returned to Europe loaded with Nazis eager to join their Fuhrer's fight.
With a capacity of 600 people, the 150-metre vessel made regular excursions from its base in Lisbon to Rio, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. The ship is credited with transporting about 7,800 refugees, including hundreds of Jews.
Shortly after her arrival in Canada, Maria Lowy, the mother of Frederick Lowy, wrote an account of the harrowing crossing in May, 1944, that brought her to port in Philadelphia.
She recounted that the trip began as any luxury cruise would, with dancing and fine dining. The ship was lit like a Christmas tree so German U-boats would easily make out the metre-high letters spelling the ship's name and neutral country of origin. Nine days into the trip, on May 25, Ms. Lowy had gone to bed when a frantic officer knocked and ordered all passengers on deck.
A U-boat had intercepted the Serpa Pinto and was threatening to sink it. The passengers were ordered into lifeboats.
The evacuation quickly turned into chaos. Two crew members were killed when a wooden lifeboat broke from its hoist. But the most horrifying loss came moments later.
Eva Trapunski later described handing her 16-month-old baby, Betty, to a waiting sailor, who lost his grip as the lifeboat lurched. The child plunged into the sea and was never found.
"I was almost crazy; I know I kept screaming, but a large part of those horrible hours in the boat is almost a blank," Ms. Trapunski told newspapers at the time. She said that when the evacuation was ordered, she found a lifebelt for her older daughter, but none would fit the baby. "And that is why she died," she said.
The passengers spent six hours on the open seas while Captain dos Santos negotiated with the U-boat captain, demanding that he seek permission from Berlin before sinking the Serpa Pinto. The U-boat finally left just after sunrise, leaving the Serpa Pinto afloat.
Betty Trapunski was the only Jewish casualty of Canada's 1944 Iberian evacuation. Acquaintances in the Jewish community say her family is still deeply scarred by her loss.
Among those who were saved, gratitude and pride outweigh bitterness that Canada offered so little refuge while Jews died.
Ms. Marx, who was married twice and is now Ilse Hatam, splits her time between Montreal and Paris. Though her memory is dimmed by the passage of her 80-some years, she remembers being a young woman who fell in love twice as she ran from the Nazis with her father, a middle-aged banker. Religion and war kept getting in the way, she said.
She is proud of what her children have become, but she is reluctant to link her family's success to her wartime experiences.
"I think it's more luck than anything," she said.
However, the history gnaws at Mr. Shenkier, who worked for 30 years as a sales rep for the German automotive-sound-system company Blaupunkt.
He remembers the bribes his father paid to get out of France. Then there was the grudging "temporary" status Ottawa granted his family and the open anti-Semitism in high government ranks that history would later reveal. After the modest evacuation in 1944, the door slammed shut again until the end of the war.
"I still think about it, and it still bugs me," Mr. Shenkier, 78, admits, his gregarious demeanour dimming briefly.
"Nobody wanted a Jew. We were well-educated, the best and the brightest, the most assimilated, and still they didn't want us."
It wasn't all easy for Mr. Margolis's family, either; his father died in 1955 at the age of 45. He never understood how his mother managed to keep the family fed and sheltered. His brother, Fred, was forced to drop out of university to work.
"My brother saw terrible things in Europe, and it's hard to know how it affected him," Mr. Margolis said. "It was different for me. I don't remember anything."
But for many, the long odds against escape and their Canadian good fortune add up to a miracle.
Mr. Margolis's vast personal archive documenting the Serpa Pinto rescue includes a 1984 tape-recorded interview with David Rome. As the CJC's press attaché in 1944, Mr. Rome travelled to Philadelphia to meet the ships and he was the public face many rescued Jews remembered as their saviour.
He told Mr. Margolis that he never figured out why the Canadian government softened for that moment during the war. He also urged Mr. Margolis not to get hung up on the small numbers rescued.
"The miracle under these conditions is that one person manages to get away. That you had a cup of coffee this morning is a very great, historical, meaningful event," Mr. Rome told Mr. Margolis.
"Not that I had a cup of coffee, but that you did."
Les Perreaux is a member of The Globe and Mail's Montreal bureau.
Les Perreaux