The rise of Hitler

With the absence of solidarity between the politically left parties in Germany, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party gained political power. The members of the party were called Nazis, and as discussed in Chapter 2, the party was radically right-wing, fascist, antisemitic, anticommunist, and antidemocratic (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2022a).

When the Nazi movement first began in the early 1920s, it was small, ineffective, and marginal. In 1928, the Nazi Party won less than three percent of the national vote in elections to the German parliament. However, beginning in 1930, the Nazi Party started to win more votes, largely because of the economic and political crisis in Germany. The German government was unable to address the problems of unemployment, hunger, poverty, and homelessness. Germany was politically divided, which made the passing of new laws almost impossible because of disagreements in the German parliament. Many Germans lost faith in their leaders’ ability to govern. Radical political groups like the Nazi Party took advantage of the economic and political chaos and worked to gain the support of Germans who were fed up with the political stalemate. The Nazi Party promised to fix the economy and put people back to work; return Germany to the status of a great European, and even world, power; regain territory Germany had lost in World War I; create a strong, authoritarian German government; and unite all Germans along racial and ethnic lines. The Nazis also, as discussed in Chapter 2, played on people’s hopes, fears, and prejudices by blaming both the Jews and Communists for the country’s economic and social problems (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2022a).

While Hitler and the Nazi Party were not directly elected to power, their success in the two 1932 elections made it difficult for the German government to govern the country without their political support. Hitler and the Nazis refused to work with the other political parties that had been elected. When Hitler demanded to be appointed as Chancellor of Germany, President Paul von Hindenburg initially resisted the demand. However, in early 1933 he gave in. Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2022a).

By the end of 1932, some of Auntie Léa’s professors and comrades in the Communist Party told her she needed to leave Germany as soon as possible to escape the growing violence of both anticommunism and antisemitism. She left reluctantly, and upon her return to Canada, joined the Communist Party in Montreal, where she could put what she had learned about political organizing in Berlin to use.

With the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor, life in Germany not only became more dangerous for the Jews, it also became dangerous for gay men and lesbian women. One month after he was sworn in as Chancellor, Hitler banned gay and lesbian bars and journals. All the gains German women had made under the Weimar Republic (which governed between 9 November 1918 and 23 March 1933) were reversed. Several months later, on 6 May 1933, the Nazis destroyed Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research, which at the time was internationally well-known for its extensive library, its groundbreaking research on sexuality and homosexuality, and its calls for sexual reform to protect gays and lesbians from arrest and prison (Setterington, 2013, p. 25).

Several days later, on 10 May, the Nazis held large book burnings and burned the thousands of books held by the Institute. In June 1935, the Nazis passed a law that punished any act that could be construed as homosexual. Even an embrace was criminally punishable. Then, two years later, on 15 September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws – the Laws for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor – were passed. This was the law that deprived German Jews of citizenship and rights. In 1936, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp opened near Berlin. Men caught in homosexual acts were sent there and to other similar camps (which were not yet death camps). Romani and Sinti people (a community within the Romani community), as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses, were also arrested and sent to concentration camps (Setterington, 2013, pp. 163–166).

Uncle Harry and Auntie Betty did not leave Berlin with Auntie Léa in early 1933. They stayed on so Uncle Harry could finish his medical degree. But in May 1933, Uncle Harry was arrested with some friends because they refused to respond to a “Heil Hitler” from two Nazis in the street. Auntie Léa recalls that Betty managed to get Harry out of prison, and two days later, he was in England. Auntie Léa also remembers that Auntie Betty stayed behind with their baby daughter Maud (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, p. 128).

The story of how Harry, Betty, and Maud escaped from Germany is remembered differently by their son Howard Roback who was born after the family returned to North America. In a 2022 email correspondence between Howard and my cousin Melanie Leavitt, Howard reported that his father sent Betty and Maud back to Montreal before he himself left Berlin (Melanie Leavitt, personal communication, 25 March 2025). In his email to Melanie, Howard also mentioned that he had been contacted by a historian at Harvard University who was writing an article about a doctor who, along with two other Jewish medical students in Berlin, was “pulled out by the Gestapo for particularly cruel treatment.” The historian told Howard that Harry Roback was one of the other two medical students and that he was looking for information about “why the three had been taken to Gestapo headquarters and beaten badly.” As mentioned earlier, the answer to this question in Auntie Léa’s recollection was because they had refused to respond to a “Heil Hitler” from two Nazis on the street.

When Auntie Léa is asked by Nicole Lacelle what year Harry left Berlin, she says she isn’t sure, but she knows he was gone before Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, in 1938. Kristallnacht, which means “The Night of Broken Glass” in English, was a night of violence that targeted Jews. Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues, and homes were vandalized and destroyed. Jewish men were rounded up and taken to concentration camps, making it the first time Nazi leaders made massive arrests of Jews just because they were Jews, without any other cause for arrest (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2019).¹⁸ A year later, in 1939, Hitler initiated a decree that empowered physicians to grant a “mercy” death to the mentally and physically challenged, or any person considered to be genetically defective. The same year, the Nazis began to deport German Jews to Poland, and by 1942, they began mass gassing of Jews in the concentration camps in Poland, which had become death camps. By the end of the war in May 1945, six million Jews had been murdered by the Nazis (Setterington, 2013, pp. 167–169).

Although her years in Berlin were some of the most exciting and enriching years of her life, Auntie Léa never returned to Berlin. When interviewer Ghisla Bénesty-Sroka asked her if she had ever gone back, Auntie Léa answered, “No, the people I knew there are dead. I sent packages, but I never knew if they received them.”

Joining the Communist Party in Montreal

After leaving Berlin, Auntie Léa returned to Montreal and went to live with her mother and father in their home in the neighbourhood of Outremont. Uncle Harry, Auntie Betty, and Maud moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States where Harry could find work as a psychiatrist.

Beginning life again in Montreal, Auntie Léa joined the Montreal branch of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). Being a member of the CPC at the time was risky as the party had been declared an illegal organization in 1931 under Section 98 of the Canadian Criminal Code . Section 98 made it illegal to “sell, speak, write or publish” anything related to an “unlawful association” (Lévesque and Clapperton-Richard, 2018). While the definition of “unlawful association” was vague, it was meant to include groups that advocated the use of force to bring about political change. This included many left and labour organizations. While the Canadian government repealed the provision in 1936, being a member of the CPC before then meant risking spending time in prison.

Section 98 was created by the federal government in 1919 to limit the power and influence of labour and left activists after the Winnipeg General Strike. The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was one of the largest strikes in Canadian history. For four weeks between 15 May and 25 June 1919, more than 30,000 workers left their jobs to fight for improved working conditions. Factories, shops, transit, and city services were all shut down. The strike resulted in arrests, injuries, and the deaths of two protestors, but did not immediately succeed in empowering workers and improving job conditions. However, the strike did help unite working-class people in Canada, who continued to advocate for better working conditions. As well some of the strikers from the Winnipeg General Strike worked to establish a left-of-centre federal political party, which today is known as the New Democratic Party (NDP) (Reilly, 2006). Founded in 1961, the NDP has formed the government in several provinces but never nationally. Today, the federal NDP is committed to issues of affordability, climate action, improved health care, and Reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous Peoples (NDP, 2019).

Needing to financially contribute to her parents’ household, Auntie Léa found a job working for the Young Women’s Hebrew Association (YWHA). The YWHA played an important role in the Jewish community in Montreal. At the time all social and recreational services in Quebec were segregated along religious and linguistic lines. During the Depression, there was no work for young people and “a lack of everything,” even food (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, p. 131). The YWHA was established in a big house on St. Urbain Street, which was located in the heart of the Jewish immigrant, working-class neighbourhood of Montreal. There were always young people hanging around the house, so the staff brought them inside and gave them something to do. Auntie Léa organized programming for the children: dramatic presentations, art classes, and outings to galleries. She also “cajoled and blackmailed” the women of the board of the YWHA into giving her money to buy essentials for the young people she worked with. She also organized an unofficial Marxist study group (Weisbord, 2022, p. 47). Sunday mornings the staff would show movies to the children and youth, and serve snacks, like ice cream cones. Those who could pay an admission fee, did; those who couldn’t, didn’t. Every Sunday about 100 young people would show up for the movies (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, p. 131).

In 1934, Auntie Léa left her YWHA job to follow a lover who was in the Soviet Union and spent three months there. He wanted to marry her, but Auntie Léa decided it was not her place to stay in the Soviet Union. She needed to go back to Montreal and try to create change in Quebec. She explained:

After returning from the Soviet Union, Auntie Léa found a job at Cedar Knolls School, a school for young offenders near Gloversville in the state of New York. She didn’t stay there very long. She was incensed by a comment made by one of the women on the board of directors who had no idea what the lives of the girls Auntie Léa worked with were like. The school was on a hill and had a view of the Rockefeller estate.

When an opportunity to leave her job at the school came up, Auntie Léa took it.

Auntie Léa meets Fred Rose

While Auntie Léa was working at the Cedar Knolls School she came back to Montreal for a weekend visit. During the visit, she was told that Fred Rose, a Communist Party member was going to run in the upcoming provincial election. Like her parents Fanny and Moishe, Fred Rose was a Jewish immigrant from Poland. He arrived in Canada at the age of ten and trained to become an electrician and union organizer (Anctil and Woodsworth, 2021, p. 241).

The year before Rose had run in the federal election as a candidate in the Montreal riding of Cartier. After losing, he decided to run in the 1936 Quebec provincial election and asked Auntie Léa to be his campaign manager. Once again Auntie Léa’s ability to cross borders between French, English and Yiddish was extremely valuable. As Melanie Leavitt explains:

When Fred Rose asked Auntie Léa to manage his campaign, she told him she had never done anything like that in her life. He told her she would learn along the way, but he didn’t have much money to pay her. For Auntie Léa, money wasn’t an issue. She could live with her parents and eat her meals at home. Despite not having the right to vote in Quebec because she was a woman (women didn’t get the right to vote in Quebec until 1940), Auntie Léa decided to leave her job at the school and learn how to run Rose’s campaign (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, pp. 135–136).

Fred Rose and Auntie Léa raised money for the campaign from Jewish refugees living in Rose’s riding who had immigrated from Eastern Europe and Hitler’s Germany. They knew what fascism meant and wanted to stop it. They also received donations from immigrants living in the riding who had lived in Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Poland. They too had seen fascism first-hand. Their donations were delivered to the campaign office wrapped up in packages of local ethnic newspapers. Inside were lots of pennies and sometimes some nickels. Once or twice, Auntie Léa found a dollar bill. The donors also went campaigning door-to-door telling people, “We have to see that Comrade Rose gets in!” (Weisbord, 2022, p. 87). Fred Rose lost the 1936 Quebec provincial election but several years later he ran again in a 1943 federal by-election and won. Rose became the first Canadian Communist Member of Parliament (MP) to be elected, and as of today, remains the only Communist MP to be elected to parliament.

The Modern Book Shop and the Padlock Law

Around the same time as Auntie Léa began working on Fred Rose’s campaign, she also helped open and manage the Modern Book Shop, one of Montreal’s first and most influential Marxist bookstores. In the 1930s, there were two leftist bookstores in Montreal, and both were closely linked to the Communist Party. The first was the Hidden Book Shop on Saint Catherine Street. It was managed by a brother and sister team, Ann and Sam (Sol) Feigelman between 1933 and 1934. The Feigelmans could not sell Communist books and newspapers freely because of Section 98 of the Criminal Code. In fact, in June 1933, the Hidden Book Shop was raided, and the Feigelmans were charged and found guilty of selling seditious literature that encouraged people to revolt against the state (Lévesque and Clapperton-Richard, 2018). The second leftist bookstore was the Modern Book Shop that Auntie Léa set up. It sold books listed in the Index as well as progressive novels, journals, pamphlets, and newspapers, such as The Daily Clarion from Toronto, and Clarté , a Montreal weekly paper that began publishing in 1935.¹⁹

While the Canadian law concerning seditious literature had changed by 1936, it was still a politically repressive time to be selling Marxist material in Quebec (Lévesque and Clapperton-Richard, 2018). Section 98 had been repealed, but the newly elected Union Nationale government in Quebec, headed by Premier Maurice Duplessis, together with the Catholic Church launched a vast anti-communist campaign in October 1936. The campaign was part of the Red Scare and hysteria that emerged (particularly in the United States) following the 1917 Revolution in the Soviet Union. Communists were perceived as a threat to the government and the Church, a threat that would intensify during the Cold War after World War Two. Bookshops were among the first places to be targeted in crackdowns on published communist material. Auntie Léa found herself confronting the police, who were monitoring the selling of “subversive” books and newspapers. She also had to deal with threatening letters, vandalism, and broken windows. For example, in a digital research project called The Radical History Poster Project, Montreal history professor Andrée Lévesque has posted the contents of a letter the bookshop received in 1936. The letter said:

A few months later, in March 1937, the Quebec legislature unanimously passed The Act to Protect the Province Against Communistic Propaganda,” commonly known as the Padlock Law, which allowed the police to close down and padlock the door of any premises used to disseminate “Bolshevik” propaganda. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were a far-left faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party founded in 1898 in Minsk. The party later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The Padlock Law made it unlawful to print, to publish, or to distribute any writing that propagated or tended to propagate Communism or Bolshevism, and it applied to bookshops, meeting halls, even private houses, making it increasingly difficult to organize meetings and buy and sell leftist literature. In her interviews with Merrily Weisbord, Auntie Léa mentions travelling to New York City to smuggle in books that were banned by the Index (Weisbord, 2022, p. 47).

Andrée Lévesque writes that at the time, left bookshops such as the Modern Book Shop were more than just places where books and magazines were sold. Meetings were held there, new publications were launched there – providing a community space for leftists to connect with other leftists. It was at the Modern Book Shop where Auntie Léa Roback met communist doctor Norman Bethune. Today Bethune is well-known for his work to develop mobile medical units and surgical instruments which saved many lives in the Spanish Civil War where he performed blood transfusions in the midst of heavy fighting. In Sophie Bissonnette’s film, Auntie Léa talks about the impact the Padlock Law had on the Modern Book Shop and her family:

Commenting on the impact of the Padlock Law on the members of the Communist Party, Merrily Weisbord writes that rather than frightening the communists into submission, the law made them angry and determined. Auntie Léa told Weisbord that the home where she lived with her parents was visited five times (Weisbord, 2022, p. 91).

The police took Auntie Léa’s leather souvenir case from Grenoble, her address book with notes from friends in Europe, her library of works by Marx – which, because the books were in German, she knew the police couldn’t read. While police visits to their homes didn’t stop Auntie Léa and her comrades from doing the political work they had undertaken, it did make their work more difficult. It was her anger, Auntie Léa told Weisbord, that kept her going.

So, despite the threatening letters, vandalism, and visits from the Red Squad, Auntie Léa continued to manage the Modern Book Shop until 1936 when she was offered a new job: the position of Educational Director with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), which was working to unionize dressmaking workers in Montreal. While Auntie Léa knew the bookstore was a valued space where the communist community could meet, she also knew that unionizing the workers in the dressmaking industry was important. She accepted the ILGWU position and was given the task of developing an education program that would support the unionization of the dressmaking industry in Montreal. Auntie Léa’s work with the ILGWU is discussed in Chapter 4.

Leaving the Communist Party

As the Cold War between the East and the West deepened, Canadian Jews began to receive reports that the Communist Party in the Soviet Union was repressing Yiddish culture and the people who were trying to keep it alive. When the Red Army took over Berlin at the end of the Second World War in May 1945, the “great historic centres of Ashkenazic [European Jewish] culture” in Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia became subject to the influence and power of the Soviet Union (Anctil and Woodsworth, 2021, p. 240). The reports of the repression of Yiddish culture, which was so important to Eastern European Jewish people living in Montreal and other parts of Canada, were alarming. Then in 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev released a report that detailed the execution of some of the Soviet Union’s most well-known and respected Yiddish poets on 12 August 1952 – a night that became known as the Night of the Murdered Poets, or in Yiddish, Harugey malkut funem Ratnfarband. The release of The Khrushchev Report, or the Khrushchev revelations, was the first time Canadian communists (including Auntie Léa) say they discovered the atrocities committed by Stalin in the Soviet Union. The report sparked outrage in the Canadian Jewish diaspora, including Jewish Montreal. As Pierre Anctil writes, the last surviving enclave of Jewish creativity in Eastern Europe had now been destroyed (Anctil and Woodsworth, 2021, p. 246).

As discussed in Chapter 2, Auntie Léa grew up listening to the Yiddish stories her father brought into their home. These stories both expressed the many injustices in the world and contained dreams of a shenere un besere velt—a better and more beautiful world. The dreams of a better world fuelled Auntie Léa and other Jewish activists in confronting oppression through their work with the Communist Party. The execution of Yiddish poets in the Soviet Union shattered many people’s faith that communism in the Soviet Union could create a better and more beautiful world. While many Jews left the Communist Party of Canada after Khrushchev’s report was released, Auntie Léa didn’t leave the Party until 1958, two years after the Khrushchev Report was released. Her reasons for doing so are discussed below. However, several years prior to the release of the report, Auntie Léa’s focus and energy began to shift as she added new family commitments to her political commitments. In 1952, Auntie Léa’s brother Michael was diagnosed with cancer. Michael had two daughters: Judith, who was eight or nine years old at the time, and Barbara, who was only two. Auntie Léa’s mother Fanny wanted her to take care of Barbara. “So,” Auntie Léa told Nicole Lacelle, “I took care of the youngest” (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, pp. 171–172). My cousin Barbara remembers sleeping over at Fanny and Auntie Léa’s house and Auntie Léa talking about how Barbara always woke up early – at 6:00 a.m.

After both their father Michael and their mother Gertrude died, Gertrude’s sister Ida came to live with Judith and Barbara. Their Roback aunts and uncles helped out financially and kept up a close relationship with their nieces. Judith and Barbara also received support from their parents’ Communist Party friends and acquaintances. Both Michael and Gertrude had been part of the Jewish leftist social circle in Montreal, and Judith and Barbara were friendly with children from other leftist families such as writer Merrily Weisbord whose historical research on the Communist Party in Canada appears in this chapter. Judith remembers:

In a 2024 email exchange Judith told me, “We were surrounded by the warmth felt for our parents.”

Almost all of Judith’s social activities were with the children of her parents’ friends, and her first cousins Kathy and Francie, who were Leo’s daughters (Leo was Auntie Léa’s youngest brother; Michael, Judith, and Barbara’s father was her second youngest brother). Right up into high school and university, Judith remembers her social life being centred around people she knew from camp or children of the like-minded people her parents had known. On weekends, she hung out with her leftist family friends, listened to folk music and protest songs, and went to “serious” cinema. Even Judith’s optician was a part of her leftist social circle. When she was a student at McGill University and needed new glasses, the optician didn’t ask Judith to pay for them. When Judith insisted on paying, the optician made up a reduced price (Judith Roback, personal communication, 24 November 2024).

The financial and emotional support Judith and Barbara received from their family and family friends allowed both of them to attend university and pursue professional careers. Judith earned a PhD in Anthropology, taught in universities, and later worked in the Toronto Public Library. Today she is retired from the library, lives in Toronto with her partner Richard, and volunteers in the Library and Archives department at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Barbara became a psychologist and then a medical doctor. She raised twin sons, Joshua and Noah, with her partner Marc, and now lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

In a recent conversation Judith and I had about the revelations made by Khrushchev in 1952, Judith reflected, “it is difficult to imagine the depth of disillusionment, sadness, pain, and anger of all those who had been so committed to their Communist ideals for so many years” (Judith Roback, personal communication, 20 November 2024). Yet, Judith noted, many or most of her parents’ friends and acquaintances retained their communist ideals and values and found ways to put them into action.

Auntie Léa left the Communist Party in 1958 two years after the Khrushchev report was released. Between 1952, the year her brother Michael was diagnosed with cancer, and 1958, the year he died, Auntie Léa continued attending meetings and volunteering for the Party. When she left in 1958, it was for two reasons. She wanted to be available to support Michael and his family during the last stages of his illness, and she no longer had confidence that the leadership of the Canadian Communist Party understood the political needs of Quebec. She told Nicole Lacelle, “I resigned in ‘58 because of the national question...” and then she added, “at the same time, my brother Michael became seriously ill” (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, p. 180).

The national question Auntie Léa referred to is the ongoing political and cultural debate around the status, identity, and future of the province of Quebec within Canada. The debate centres on whether Quebec should remain a province within Canada, seek greater autonomy, or pursue independence as a sovereign nation. The historical roots of the national question lie in Quebec’s history as a predominantly French-speaking society within an English-speaking majority country. Quebec’s sovereignty movement, led by the political party the Parti Québécois, has argued for Quebec to become an independent country to preserve its distinct language and culture. In 1980 and 1995, referendums were held on the issue of sovereignty. In both referendums the “No” side, which voted against sovereignty won. However, it is important to note that in the second referendum, it was a narrow win, with only 50.6% of the ballots voting “No” against independence.

The reason the Communist Party priorities were in conflict with the priorities of Quebec nationalism – and the needs and concerns of francophone members from Quebec – had to do with the fact that ideologically, national identity was considered secondary to the more important issue of class identity. However, even after leaving the Communist Party, Auntie Léa always maintained that the years she had spent working for the party had been important and had shaped her in a variety of ways. “I owe a lot to the Communist Party,” she told Lacelle, “because I had the chance to grow and learn” (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, p. 136). As a member of the Communist Party, Auntie Léa was given the opportunity to open the Modern Book Shop, run Fred Rose’s campaign, and design union education programming for members of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Auntie Léa’s exciting and successful work with the ILGWU and RCA Victor is discussed next.