Finding a Place

“On our free Sundays, we walked like three stooges around Ottawa’s streets,” muses my mother, Frances Lenarcic, recalling this photograph. In the centre of the picture, she smiles shyly, flanked by her friends Mici (left) and Bogdana.

My mother was a displaced person — “DP” for short. In the reconfiguration of borders after the Second World War, her village in what is now independent Slovenia was overrun by communist Yugoslavia. Escaping on foot, she was eventually accepted by Canada in early 1949. Like other postwar DPs, she was required to work a one-year contract as a domestic servant.

Arriving at Halifax’s Pier 21, my mother took a train to Ottawa. There, her first employer was waiting to take her home to the five children she would care for. From her $35-a-month pay, she had to save $200 as security before she could sponsor my father to join her. He arrived in 1950; they later moved to Toronto, where my father began work at what is now Planters Canada. He toiled there for 29 years while Mom raised four children. Years later, when my brother was promoted to vice-president, she exclaimed, “Wow! I was a DP — now you are a VP!”