On this day, 12 May 1940, 20-year-old Austrian Jewish Edinburgh University student Edgar Lion was arrested by British police. His friends wouldn’t see him or hear from him for years.
Lion was taken to a police station, then shipped to the Isle of Man alongside thousands of other Jewish detainees where they were locked up in hotels surrounded by barbed wire. He was then taken to a dockyard and told to choose between two ships. He chose the one on the left, and so was taken to Canada – the other would end up in Australia.
In Canada, Lion was then interned alongside 2,300 other Jewish refugees in internment camps alongside German Nazis who had also been interned. Here the refugees were forced to perform harsh and boring physical labour for almost no pay: in Lion’s camp, Sherbrooke, detainees could choose to make fishing nets or socks. The refugees were held in camps in appalling and unsafe conditions for nearly three years.
After the war, a number of Jewish people in Britain decided to continue their fight against fascism. Hear their story in our latest podcast episodes: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/02/17/e35-37-the-43-group/
Pictured: Jewish labourers in a Canadian internment camp https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1424018761116603/?type=3
Powerful statements like these, that juxtapose the condemnation of such a simple and pure thing as love with the honour and worship of violence and death, always hit me hard and stay with me for days
This is the tombstone of Technical Sergeant Leonard Philip Matlovich, the first gay service member to intentionally out himself in order to fight the ban on gay people in the military. He hadn’t only served for Vietnam, he was a career Air Force member in good standing who would have liked to continue his career even though he knew coming out would most likely make that impossible.
He’d also been an elder in the LDS church but was excommunicated
He was on the cover of Time magazine in 1975 which was the first time an openly gay person appeared on the cover of a U.S. magazine and had their name printed in that magazine
He was an advocate for AIDs/HIV patients from the start of the outbreak in the 70s. He contracted the virus in 1986 and died 2 years later
His name doesn’t appear on his tombstone because he wanted it to be a memorial for all gay veterans
