On January 3, 1939 I started going to classes at Central Collegiate, a high school in Hamilton. For three dollars a week, Marianne and I shared a room with a Jewish family. Many years later I found the notebook in which I had written down how much I spent on food: five cents for sardines, a little more for cream of wheat. We brought milk, fruit, and potatoes from the farm, where we spent our weekends.
Canadian bread was terrible; the “Jewish” bread that one bakery carried was somewhat better, although “Canadianized.” Day old bread was shipped to a silver fox farm up north. We soon discovered that we could buy this bread for half price.
When Marianne lost interest in school, she returned to the farm, where she was put in charge of the chicken coop. I stayed in school. Unlike the situation in the Gymnasium, here one could choose ones subjects. Except for English, I did not have to work very hard. When I arrived, the class was engaged in a very detailed study of Macbeth. In the school edition, half of every page of the text consisted of notes. So every night from 6.00 to 10.00 p.m. I read four pages, looking up almost every word in the dictionary. I know that nobody would think of recommending that method of learning a language, but I learned English very quickly. In the spring I received a letter from McMaster University. I was accepted for the fall semester, regardless whether I would pass the “senior matric” that students in Ontario took at the end of high school. Besides, I was offered a full scholarship of $150.
History courses in Czechoslovakia had generally consisted of memorizing names, facts, and dates—our Professor Klečkova had been an exception—and students were expected to know almost the entire slender text book by heart. In Canada, on the other hand, we would read a large, illustrated, well written book from which we would be expected to pick out what we considered important. The instruction was problem oriented and we were expected to think.
Probably all students who came from Europe to Canada found school very easy.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 18