Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  While waiting for God’s kingdom, Witnesses recognize that they must live in Satan’s world, but they do not consider themselves citizens of any particular country, as their loyalty is to God alone. They pay taxes but choose not to vote, salute a national flag, or serve in the armed forces. Once a year they meet at huge international conventions that form the highlight of their religious year, similar in importance to Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah for Jews and Good Friday and Easter for Christians.

  LUCIEN SAUMUR WAS born February 6, 1921, in the Gatineau Hills in western Quebec, north of Ottawa, one of fourteen children of an illiterate Roman Catholic farmer and his wife. He grew up attending Mass, taking Communion, and confessing his sins to the parish priest in an era when the Church dominated most aspects of life in the province, including education.

  When he was eighteen, he left the farm and moved to Ottawa. That’s where he discovered the public library and shelves of books just waiting to be read. He began devouring the works he had been denied, and in the process he learned some of the more unsavoury aspects of the Catholic Church’s long history, including the Inquisition. The more he read, the more his suspicion and mistrust grew, especially after a cousin introduced him to the Catholic Action movement, which he described later as a political group with fascist and anti-Semitic leanings.

  In 1943, a Montreal friend showed him a newspaper article about a man named Hector Saumur, who had been given a three-month prison sentence in Timmins, Ontario, for being a Witness and thus a member of a banned organization. Recognizing the convicted man as his own brother — he had left home years before to work in the mines of northern Ontario — Saumur wrote to him and in reply received a Bible and some booklets about the Witnesses.

  It was the first Bible that Saumur had ever seen, and he showed it to his parish priest, who promptly confiscated it. Undaunted, and fascinated by what he had been reading in his brother’s pamphlets about the life of Jesus and the missionary work of the Apostles, Saumur bought another Bible and read it avidly.

  He moved to Timmins to join his brother so that he could learn more about the Witnesses and improve his English. For some time he continued to attend Mass while studying with the Witnesses, but he incurred the wrath of his local parish priest when he began asking leading questions about hell, the Trinity, and the immortality of the soul.

  After hearing his priest denounce the Witnesses from the pulpit, he gave up Roman Catholicism and resolved to commit his life to upholding the teachings of the Bible and modelling himself on Christ’s early followers. Saumur was baptized as a Witness, probably in a secret ceremony, on July 1, 1944.

  A year later he was in Montreal, witnessing from door to door as a missionary for the church, working mostly with Marcel Filteau, a bilingual Witness who had been educated in English Protestant schools after his father rejected Roman Catholicism and became a Witness. The two men were frequently harassed and arrested by the police. One autumn day they climbed the outside spiral staircase on a Montreal triplex and were speaking to the owners of the upper flat when the police showed up. One officer stayed at the bottom and the other climbed the stairs and arrested the two Witnesses.

  Filteau descended first, with Saumur following and the policeman in the rear, administering kicks and blows on the way. Two steps from the pavement, Saumur, a husky guy who worked out with barbells, turned, grabbed the officer by the shoulders, lifted him up and put him down on the ground again, and said: “Be thankful that I am one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.” The policeman, according to Filteau’s account, went white as a sheet. That didn’t stop the officers from throwing the two Witnesses in jail, however.

  One of the mainstays of the Witnesses during this period in Quebec was Frank Roncarelli, an Italian immigrant and affluent Montreal businessman who ran a Crescent Street café called Quaff that his father had opened in 1912. After Roncarelli posted bail for nearly four hundred Witnesses (including Saumur) who had been arrested for distributing religious pamphlets, the police cracked down and, on the orders of the premier, Maurice Duplessis, revoked his liquor licence in December 1946. Six months later he had to close the restaurant because his business had declined so precipitously. He sued the premier for damages with the assistance of legal heavyweights F. R. Scott and A. L. Stein. The case went to the Supreme Court, which finally ruled in Roncarelli’s favour in 1959, some thirteen years later and long after he had gone bankrupt.

  Meanwhile, Saumur was sent to Quebec City to minister with John (Joe) How. That brought him in contact with How’s elder brother Glen, a lawyer and a prime defender of Witnesses embroiled in the justice system.

  GLEN HOW WAS born in Montreal on March 25, 1919, but moved to Toronto with his family when he was about a year old. His father, Frank, was an accountant and personnel manager at paint manufacturer CIL, and his mother, Bessie, was a homemaker. When Glen was five and his younger brother Joe was three, his mother answered the door of their Toronto home, fell into conversation with a Jehovah’s Witness, and soon began attending meetings of the Bible Students, as Witnesses were called in those days. By 1929 she was a pioneer — a full-time minister — a calling she followed until she died in 1969. Initially Frank How was opposed to his wife’s conversion, but he gradually condoned it, although he never became a Witness himself.

  After graduating from Vaughan Road Collegiate in 1936, Glen enrolled at the University of Toronto, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1940 before proceeding to Osgoode Hall Law School. By his own account, How was “not very interested in spiritual things” as a teenager. His conversion can be traced directly to Mackenzie King’s use of the War Measures Act to ban Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  It was “the turning point in my life,” How wrote sixty years later in a biographical article in Awake!, a magazine published by the movement. “When the full power of the government targeted this tiny organization of innocent, humble people, it convinced me that Jehovah’s Witnesses were Jesus’s true followers.” He was baptized, also probably in a secret ceremony, on February 10, 1941.

  Following his call to the bar in Ontario two years later, he began working as general counsel for the still-illegal Witnesses and subsequently qualified in Quebec, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. He relentlessly argued that ministers in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, many of whom had been interned in labour camps, were, like other clergy, entitled to conscientious-objector status. He also defended the right of children of Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse to sing the national anthem at school ceremonies. Some of those children were expelled from school and put into foster care. Late in 1943, he travelled to New York to seek help with his appeals from the wily and experienced Hayden Covington, the Watchtower Society’s legal counsel, who eventually won thirty-six out of the forty-five cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.

  The federal government rescinded many of its strictures against the Witnesses after the war ended, but there was one jurisdiction — Quebec — where religious freedom was still not observed. How spent so much time commuting to and from Quebec to act in criminal prosecutions, ranging from disturbing the peace to sedition, that he moved there in the late 1940s to set up a law practice. Every morning, his first job was to find out how many Witnesses had been arrested the day before and then try to arrange bail for them. A frequent client was his brother, Joe, who ministered with Laurier Saumur on the streets of Quebec City.

  The provincial capital, which was Duplessis’s political stronghold, had enacted a bylaw forbidding the distribution of “any book, pamphlet, booklet, circular, or tract whatever without having previously obtained . . . the written permission of the chief of police.” In response, the Witnesses produced “Quebec’s Burning Hate,” a four-page tract listing names, dates, and places of violence against Jehovah’s Witnesses, and began distributing it across Canada in late 1946.

  Within days, Duplessis declared his infamous “war without mercy against the Witnesses of Jehovah” and ordered sedition charges laid
against anyone caught distributing the pamphlet. In the first sedition case to go to trial, How, who had still not been called to the bar of Quebec, worked under Jewish lawyer A. L. Stein to defend a Jehovah’s Witness named Aimé Boucher. Meanwhile, Saumur, who had been arrested some hundred times for violating the flyer bylaw, filed a civil suit against Quebec City and its bylaw restricting his right to canvass door to door.

  The Boucher, Saumur, and Roncarelli cases went to the Supreme Court in the 1950s. The Boucher case, which used truth as a defence, eliminated an archaic Quebec law defining sedition as criticism of the government and led to the dismissal of nearly 125 sedition charges. The Saumur case, which relied on a defence of freedom of expression and religion, established that issuing licences to restrict a person’s right to practise his or her faith went beyond municipal or provincial authority, and it led to the dismissal of more than a thousand bylaw charges. And the Roncarelli case established that publicly elected officials cannot arbitrarily invoke the law against individuals, as Duplessis had done in personally revoking the restaurateur’s liquor licence.

  In the midst of the legal turmoil, Saumur had married Yvette Ouellette, a Witness from Montreal, in 1949. They decided not to have children because their missionary work was more important, especially since they believed the end of the world was imminent. That decision left them free to devote themselves to furthering the work of the Witnesses.

  Eventually the couple ministered all over Canada. In one case, after discovering that one of his potential converts was illiterate, Saumur taught her to read and write so that she could study the Bible on her own. After his wife died in 2002, Saumur moved into a Witness retirement home in Grimsby, Ontario. He died there of pneumonia on March 22, 2007, at the age of eighty-six.

  Meanwhile, How, a slight, dapper man with a thick shock of hair, kept on promoting the interests of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Looking almost biblical despite his short stature, he thundered about the rights and entitlements of his co-religionists in courtrooms across the country and around the world. “He was a very hard-working and tenacious lawyer, but he was wise enough to know that he couldn’t do all the heavy lifting himself, so he would prepare the briefs and the submissions and then enlist others, such as constitutional expert Frank Scott, to help him argue cases before the court,” according to lawyer and writer William Kaplan.

  How was an anomaly. He practised his faith devoutly while using the country’s institutions to win guarantees for Witnesses’ rights. He respected the courts and was willing to accept the rewards of Canadian society if they didn’t overtly violate the tenets of his faith. For example, in the late 1950s he agreed to accept the honorary designation Queen’s Counsel after he received a guarantee that he wouldn’t first have to swear an oath recognizing the Queen as head of state.

  It was this ability to navigate between the religious and legal worlds that made How such a powerhouse lawyer for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In winning freedoms for them, he helped establish implied rights for everyone. In doing so, he influenced legalists, intellectuals, and civil libertarians, including future politicians such as Pierre Trudeau, whose government enacted the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.

  Not all of the cases How argued were celebrated in the larger world. Some, especially the ones in which he fought for the right to refuse blood transfusions, especially for children, are medically and ethically problematic for many people. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe the Bible prohibits the consumption of blood, a stricture that encompasses transfusions and most blood products, even in life-threatening medical emergencies. How was counsel for the Jehovah’s Witnesses in controversial and unsuccessful appeals to deny blood transfusions for underage children and in an Ontario Court of Appeal case that confirmed an adult’s right to make health-care treatment decisions.

  In 1954 he married Margaret Biegel, a British Jehovah’s Witness. Like many Jehovah’s Witnesses, they had no children, and she worked as his secretary as his law career expanded. She died of cancer in 1987. Two years later, in November 1989, he married Linda Manning, a much younger American lawyer and Jehovah’s Witness who had moved north to work in the Canadian organization’s legal department. Until well into his eighties he continued to represent the Witnesses’ legal interests, appearing as a consultant counsel in Osaka, Japan, in 1993 and in Singapore from 1994 to 1996.

  The American College of Trial Lawyers gave him its Award for Courageous Advocacy on September 8, 1997, the first time a Canadian lawyer had received this distinction. He was awarded the medal of the Law Society of Upper Canada in 1998 and a certificate of appreciation and recognition from the Bar of Montreal the following year. In 2000 he was named an officer of the Order of Canada for “consistently and courageously” fighting legal battles to advance civil liberties and helping “pave the way” for the Canadian Bill of Rights and Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Calling him a “man of conscience,” the citation lauded him for working at “minimal compensation” to defend clients “in every province of Canada, many American states and several other countries.”

  He died December 30, 2008, in Georgetown, Ontario, of pneumonia as a result of complications of prostate cancer. He was eighty-nine.

  Rudolf Vrba

  Auschwitz Survivor and Biochemist

  September 11, 1924 – March 27, 2006

  AUSCHWITZ WAS THE largest and most notorious of the five Nazi death camps. More than a million people, overwhelmingly Jews, were slaughtered there in gas chambers, on scaffolds, or before firing squads, or were allowed to perish from disease, beatings, and starvation. Walter Rosenberg was an exception. He escaped and survived to raise the alarm about what was really happening to Hungarian Jews behind the barbed wire in the most sophisticated and industrialized extermination facility of Adolf Hitler’s nefarious campaign to engineer “the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.”

  Rosenberg was only nineteen when he and his older friend Alfred Wetzler eluded the guards and their vicious dogs on April 7, 1944, and escaped from Auschwitz. Three weeks earlier, German forces had invaded Hungary. The infamous Adolf Eichmann had established headquarters in Budapest to oversee the deportation to Auschwitz of the country’s Jewish population. Mass transports began on May 15, 1944, at a rate of twelve thousand people a day. The victims were told they were being resettled, but most were sent straight to the gas chambers.

  Rosenberg and Wetzler were not the only people to slip out of Auschwitz, but they were the most important escapees from that hellhole of murder and depravity because they brought with them detailed descriptions of the layout and function of the gas chambers and crematoria. They hoped that their copious eyewitness testimony to Jewish authorities about what was really happening behind the iron gates adorned with the slogan ARBEIT MACHT FREI (“Work shall make you free”) would make Jewish victims rebel and fight back rather than passively accepting their fates. That didn’t happen, but the alarm did eventually reach the Allies, and many lives were saved.

  A prickly man who tended to be a moral absolutist, Rosenberg hated being thought of as a victim or a survivor, and with good reason: nobody had rescued him — he had beaten Auschwitz. For the rest of his life, even as an acclaimed biochemist at the University of British Columbia, he lived under the name Rudolf Vrba, the nom de guerre that he adopted after Auschwitz, and every year he celebrated his birthday on April 7, the day of his escape.

  Instead of rejoicing that the “Auschwitz Protocol,” as his detailed report was called, saved an estimated 150,000 Hungarian Jews, he remained angry that more lives hadn’t been saved. He believed to the end of his life that Hungarian Jewish leaders had knowingly sacrificed more than 400,000 of their own countrymen in order to negotiate safe passage for themselves and their families.

  The past is not a simple place, especially for those who scrape away the myths that spread like moss over horrific events to make moral complexities more palatable for the living. Vrba was a trou
bling character to many because he threatened the solidarity of the post-Holocaust Jewish community with his accusations of complicity in his memoir Escape from Auschwitz: I Can’t Forgive. As a result, it was easier for many to ignore Vrba’s heroism than to honour it.

  Ruth Linn, dean of education at Haifa University and a native-born Israeli, had never heard about anybody escaping from Auschwitz — and neither had her students — until she watched French director Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary, Shoah. How was it possible, she asked herself, that Vrba’s memoirs had never been translated into Hebrew? Why had he never been recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority? Linn was a key player in having Vrba’s memoir translated, in seeing him awarded an honorary doctorate at Haifa University in 1998, and in rectifying his absence from popular accounts of the Holocaust by detailing those omissions in her 2004 book, Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting.

  Over the years Vrba had made crucial depositions against Nazis trying to escape retribution, whether it was the members of the “final solution” leadership at the Nuremberg trials, Adolf Eichmann after his capture in Argentina in 1960, or former concentration camp guards living undercover in Germany. He was also a feisty witness in the trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel in Toronto in 1985. When Zundel’s lawyer accused Vrba of lying about Auschwitz and demanded to know if he had ever seen anybody gassed, he replied that he had watched people being taken into the buildings and seen SS officers throw in gas canisters after them. “Therefore, I concluded it was not a kitchen or a bakery, but it was a gas chamber. It is possible they are still there or that there is a tunnel and they are now in China. Otherwise, they were gassed.”