Pier 21

The pier at war

Halifax harbour was large, deep, free of ice and close to the shipping routes from Europe, and the city was joined to the transcontinental railway. Pier 21 had been designed for the passengers and cargo of large ocean liners, so from September 1939 it could take the same vessels as troopships, and the Ocean Terminals complex was placed under military oversight for the duration.

About 368,000 service personnel passed through the Ocean Terminals during and immediately after the war; in one three-month period in 1942 almost 60,000 soldiers embarked there. Civilian traffic continued alongside: evacuated British children from 1940, and from 1942 to 1948 the largest single movement through the pier, 64,446 women who had married Canadian servicemen abroad and their children.

Halifax’s immigration staff also spent much of the war resolving the cases of foreign merchant seamen, who might land legally, desert or be brought ashore after a sinking. The accommodation and detention area stayed busy with them throughout; in March 1942 it held more than 170 at once.

The displaced persons movement

In 1947 Canada began admitting displaced persons and political refugees from Europe, and by 1952 almost 200,000 had been accepted under the Displaced Persons Movement. The postwar economic boom had created a shortage of labour, so many were admitted as workers; others came on sponsorship, and some were admitted without secured sponsorship, travel documents or personal identification at all.

Most of the displaced persons who came through Pier 21 embarked from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria and Germany, while most of those admitted as political refugees had fled Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, as well as Poland and Hungary. Between 1945 and 1971 nearly a million postwar immigrants passed through the building, more than a fifth of them displaced persons and refugees. They arrived with little money, clothing or documentation, and frequently needed help from voluntary agencies before they could reach their new homes.

From the ship to the train

Arrival brought a sequence of practical tasks: medical screening, immigration examination, customs inspection, luggage collection and arrangements for rail travel. The immigration annex and railway facilities were part of the same busy environment. Officers, railway workers and voluntary organisations helped move people through a system that combined border control with the logistics of settlement.

Medical clearance often began overseas. Approved examinations reduced the need for a full repeat examination at Halifax, although checking papers did not remove the possibility of further assessment. Pier 21 contained both clinical and hospital facilities, bringing medical treatment and immigration accommodation together on the waterfront. The medical areas changed repeatedly as requirements and available treatments developed.

Voluntary service agencies worked in the hall while families waited. The Red Cross ran a nursery that looked after young children while their parents rested, washed, found food or bought tickets for the train.

When the journey paused

Some people had to wait because documents required checking or an employment arrangement had failed. Large dormitories provided simple beds and bathrooms; more secure rooms served a different detention function. The arrangements could feel restrictive even when residents were permitted to leave during the day. After a 1944 fire, the accommodation was rebuilt with separate dormitories and smaller rooms for families and other groups.

Dining and recreation spaces, airing galleries and the work of matrons formed part of daily life for those waiting. A photograph of Christmas celebrations in 1948 records Baltic refugees making use of the recreation area. The image documents that particular group, rather than a specifically Ukrainian celebration.

A wait could be long. A Jewish refugee family from Poland who landed in March 1950 were held in the detention quarters for three months after a child developed a fever, watching from a window that faced the railway tracks as other passengers boarded their trains. The stated medical grounds turned out to conceal a political suspicion about a relative in Canada, and the family reached Toronto only after a prominent lawyer intervened on their behalf.

Ukrainian journeys through Halifax

One family, deported from Ukraine to forced labour at Linz in 1942 and separated between three camps there, walked south through the Alps in the spring of 1945 and eventually reached an American camp near Salzburg, Camp Lexenfeld, where they spent three years while the IRO planned their resettlement. Before leaving Austria the father signed an agreement to work two years for a sponsoring sugar-beet farmer. Sailing from Bremerhaven aboard Marine Falcon, they reached Pier 21 on 23 June 1948, cleared customs quickly and took a Canadian Pacific train across seven provinces to Taber, Alberta. The farmer met them at the station and loaded them into the box of his grain truck; their first home was an old wooden grain bin converted into two rooms. The eldest daughter, who had married in the camp, followed under a separate sponsorship in 1949, and the family built their own house at Taber between 1951 and 1953.

Another Ukrainian family reached Halifax aboard Samaria on 27 March 1949 from a displaced-persons camp at Heidenau in the British zone, where the mother had worked as the commandant’s secretary and where her daughter had been born in 1945. Having no address for a distant relative in Canada, she wrote to the Ukrainian-American film actor John Hodiak, addressing the letter simply to Hollywood; he placed advertisements in the Ukrainian newspapers in Canada, the uncle saw one and made contact through the Red Cross, and he sponsored the family’s passage.

At Pier 21 that family was not allowed to leave the arrivals area and was put straight on to a train for Regina, sitting and sleeping on wooden benches ranged along the walls of the carriages. A prolonged nosebleed forced a stop in northern Ontario for treatment. In Regina they lived in the cousin’s home for about three years while the mother worked first washing dishes in a restaurant, then as a hospital cleaner and then as a nursing aide, teaching herself enough English to get by, partly from the newspaper comic strips, and repaying the money her uncle had borrowed for their fares.

A third couple landed at Pier 21 on 10 June 1949 from Nea Hellas with their two daughters and travelled on to Montreal, where they settled and where a third daughter was born the following year. They became Canadian citizens in 1959, worked until retirement and were active in the Ukrainian Canadian community.

From immigration terminal to museum

Air travel increasingly displaced ocean travel during the 1960s, and immigration operations at Pier 21 ended in 1971. Its place in family memory survived the closure. Preservation campaigns later brought the building a new role: a museum opened in 1999, and subsequent interpretation expanded the story beyond the moment of arrival to the varied experiences of migration and settlement.