Immigration Struggles

[Text: After immigrating to Canada, Lillian was sent by her family to a private school where she was faced with isolation and forced to hide her Jewish identity.] 

Lillian Nemetz: We moved to a small town called Cornwall, in Ontario, where I really started my first year at school. Which was very traumatic because after having suffered everything else, I became—I was a total failure at school. And there was no ESL. The teachers, really, the principal very explicitly told us that he made no special—there were no special privileges for immigrants certainly, and they just had to fit in the best they could and work as hard as they were expected to and eventually learn. So, I was always—I was the odd—I was estranged in the classroom in Cornwall as I was beforehand in the ghetto, or in the village, or in the countryside. And my parents never talked to me. We didn’t talk about anything; it was all inside. So, I started developing a different personality. I started developing a survivor personality. And I used all my resources that must have always been there because I started becoming the entertainer again. As soon as I grasped a few words of English, I was the entertainer, I was a clown. And the kids, you know, I told them that I was a princess and I had land in Poland. I really made up stories, but didn’t ever, never told them the truth. And I was always afraid to say that I was Jewish, for a long time. For a long, long time.