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Finding new homes in Canada 60 years ago after Nazi horrors, they worked their way to better lives

The unending line of cakes and fresh bread rolling down the conveyor belt at Richstone Bakery was the first big hint for the two Holocaust orphans: They'd arrived in a land of plenty.

George Reinitz and his best pal, Nick Sebastien, were just off the boat from Europe. After surviving the concentration camps where they'd lost their parents, the teenagers had fought their way through Canadian immigration red tape. They finally arrived penniless in 1948 in a new land where they didn't speak English or French.

"We went hungry for years and suddenly there we were, all alone on the night shift, and we could eat all the bread and cake we wanted," Mr. Sebastien said.

"We ate some, some went in the boxes."

Mr. Sebastien and Mr. Reinitz were among 1,123 orphans of the Holocaust who, with the help of Canadian Jewish groups, kicked down the country's closed doors to Jewish immigration.

A few dozen of those orphans, now mostly in their late 70s, gathered yesterday for a modest party marking the 60th anniversary of their arrival in Canada.

The previous reunion was 10 years ago. With advancing age and a steady stream of recent funerals, reunion organizer Paul Herczeg fears yesterday's gathering may have been the last.

"If you take the average life span, we've already overstayed our time," he said.

Most of the orphans share histories of horror in Europe, humble beginnings in Canada and hard work that led to the Canadian middle class and beyond.

Mr. Reinitz and Mr. Sebastien showed off photos of their early Canadian days. Elite wrestlers, the two bronzed young men stand shirtless in the Iroquois canoe they bought in the 1950s with their modest savings.

Mr. Reinitz became a successful furniture manufacturer. He went to the Beijing Olympics this summer as a major sponsor of the wrestling team.

Mr. Sebastien, who also worked in the furniture business, boasts that his two sons are both physicians.

"You won't find anybody in this room who took unemployment," he said.

Like many of his fellow survivors, Mr. Sebastien was born in and lived in Hungary until the Second World War, when his family was rounded up and sent to Nazi concentration camps. His parents were immediately killed. Piles of bodies are seared into Mr. Sebastien's memory.

Old enough and strong enough to be put to work, the teenagers survived to liberation and then bounced around displaced persons' camps.

After years of a near ban on Jewish immigration, Ottawa allowed 1,000 visas to be issued for orphaned Holocaust survivors in 1947. The Canadian Jewish Congress was charged with finding them homes, jobs and educations.

Canadian officials spent months screening the orphans in the postwar European camps. Many turned 18 during the wait and became ineligible, while others were rejected because they wore glasses or were illiterate.

Most of the orphans who made it were settled in Toronto and Montreal, while a couple of hundred were scattered across Western Canada.

According to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, psychiatrists and psychologists studied the orphans in the 1950s expecting to find major adjustment problems.

"Despite their appalling early experiences, there was an almost complete lack of juvenile delinquency or crime within this group of refugees," says an account published by the centre.

Mr. Sebastien believes the orphans were too young to have been permanently damaged by their experiences.

"We didn't know any better; we didn't know anything. Besides, that's the wonderful thing about human nature. The things that hurt you, you stick in the back of your mind.

"But it's there."

The survivors paused for a moment at yesterday's party to remember the parents, siblings and friends who didn't make it out of the death camps.

Claire Gottesman was one of about 300 girls to make the voyage to Canada. The Nazis favoured healthy teenaged boys and young adults for hard labour, so most girls, older adults and young children were slaughtered.

She started out working in Montreal's garment factories, then a bookkeeping course got her into office work. But she didn't want to talk about herself.

"You have to let me tell you about my children," said Ms. Gottesman, who arrived in Canada a couple of months before her boyfriend, Myer, who is now her husband of 57 years.

"My son is a doctor at Montreal Children's Hospital, my daughter is a lawyer in Toronto," Ms. Gottesman said.

"How's that for a great Canadian success story?"