«Welcome to your new homeland»

A male informant describes the initial impressions and the difficulties he faced, when he reached the port of Halifax.

G.Χ.: Can you imagine now a ship which contained nearly three thousand… immigrants from three different countries? Without knowing the language. We disembarked over there and waited for… for the customs to come and check the things. Because after there, we had to embark on the train to come to Montreal. I have to… tell you and highlight this that during the period we came here, this organization which Canada nowadays possesses as a country was nonexistent, welcoming immigrants or refugees or… political refugees or anything else. Back then… if you had money, when we disembarked the ship… on the ship everything was included in the… ticket. When we went out, if you had money, you ate. If you didn’t, you didn’t eat. Alright? And money wasn’t the only obstacle. Language was a big obstacle. And over there not even… not even people to translate were available. Alright? From where we sat, I see, that hall we had gone to was enormous, and I see from a distance there was a sign and it said “Welcome…” in Greek “Welcome to your new homeland”.


A male informant describes the initial impressions and difficulties he faced, when he arrived at the port of Halifax.
G.Χ.: When we disem… disembarked here in… in… in Montreal, when we arrived here by train… I omitted to tell you something else as well which made a big impression on me and I didn’t… I never accepted it, because I considered it insulting. It was that when we disembarked in Halifax, as we disembarked the ship one by one, we passed in front of someone from the… the immigration, the Canadian immigration and you’d show your passport and they’d put a card on you… here they put a card on us with the name and the address we were going to. And myself, as soon as they put this card on me, I cut it, because I didn’t like it. I thought they regarded me as merchandise or as… as something else. You know? And frankly I should tell you, you know what it reminded me of? Like some… some western films we used to watch in that period, in which they took the oxen and they heated an iron and they put something on their ear in order to… Something… Something like that… I didn’t like it at all and this employee didn’t like this… this move I made, that I cut off the card and he called some officer from the… the ship over there who spoke English and told him that if I don’t put the card back on, he isn’t going to accept me. He’s going to turn me away. You understand? So, this was an ugly, a very ugly experience for me. Alright? And in the first opportunity I could find, when we left there, I was taking the card off. Only when I saw someone with a uniform, I was putting it back on. Alright? Until we arrived here.