CANADA
APTN
Kenneth Jackson
APTN National News
During the Second World War Nazi Germany would herd Jewish people like cattle and load them into train cars heading to concentration camps with just the clothes on their backs.
They didn’t know where the train was going and they didn’t have a choice.
When they arrived they had identification numbers tattooed on them.
At the same time, the Canadian government was doing something similar across the country with Aboriginal children.
Large trucks would pull up on reserves and haul kids to residential schools.
“The cattle trucks come on the reserve, and scoop up the kids to go, and seeing my cousins cry, and then, and they were put on these trucks, and hauled off, and we didn’t know where,” recalled Shirley Leon who attended a residential school in Kamloops, B.C. during the 1940s.
Leon’s story is one of dozens chronicled in “The Survivors Speak” book released Tuesday by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
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