KAPUSKASING – The Ron Morel Memorial Museum is pleased to announce that it will be hosting a talk, and book sales and signing by author Sandra Semchuk for her book The Stories Were Not Told: Canada’s First World War Internment Camps.
The talk and book signing will take place in Civic Centre Green Room 1 on Thursday, May 16, beginning at 7 p.m. Doors open at 6:30 p.m
From 1914-1920, thousands of me who had immigrated to Canada from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire were unjustly imprisoned as “enemy aliens,” some with their families. Kapuskasing is one of those communities where mostly civilian immigrants were interned.
The Ron Morel Memorial Museum has a permanent exhibit on the Kapuskasing Internment Camp, and Sandra Semchuk, through her book The Stories Were Not Told, will speak about this largely unrecognized event through photography, cultural theory, and personal testimony, including stories told by internees and their descendants.
Both an author and a photographer, Semchuk describes how lives and society have been shaped by acts of legislated discrimination and how to move toward greater reconciliation, remembrance, and healing. This is necessary reading for anyone seeking to understand the cross-cultural and inter-generational consequences of Canada’s first national internment operations.
The Stories Were Not Told is published by University of Alberta Press and has been made possible by a grant from the Endowment Council of the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund.
