You Love Our Milk and Honey: Memoir of a Refugee John Iwan Hartig Author

My family are refugees from Austria. We came with two suitcases in 1954 and landed at Pier 21 in Halifax, Canada, hoping to start over. Dad’s family came from Romania; mom’s family from Serbia. They spoke 5 languages, and faced the fact they’d have to add English to that list, making it an even half dozen. We were given badges to pin to our coats in Bremenhaven before we boarded the S.S. Neptunia to identify ourselves as DPs or Displaced Persons. This was November and we knew nothing about wearing poppies on our lapels to honour Canadian soldiers who had died in the Great Wars. When Don Cherry got fired from Coach’s Corner in November 2019 for calling new immigrants, you people, urging them to buy a poppy to honour Canada’s fallen soldiers for Remembrance Day, I said to myself, This is a good time to write about my life story as a refugee. I have some things to say about my boyhood in war-torn Europe and about my new life in becoming Canadian. My story comes in two volumes: Phase One, Becoming Canadian, where I recount my experiences with systemic racism before I was accepted as a Canadian citizen and Phase Two, Quo Vadis? [Latin for, Where are you going?], which involves my experiences in jobs like teaching, photography, web design and writing, looking for that perfect fit. Despite the rites of passage, Canada has been pretty good to our family. - John Hartig, Canadian author