refugees in Canada More than most Canadians,


DAGMAR STAFL, 90, understands what it means to be a refugee. Born and raised in a small town in the Czech Republic, this long-time UNHCR donor was forced to flee her country after the Communist coup d’état in 1948. But even before that dangerous escape in the dark of a cold, February night, Dagmar knew what it meant to be caught up in war, to be imprisoned and to be left in agonizing limbo, not knowing the fate of family and friends.


Her story, which she tells in a self- published


Dictionaries, recounts a happy, comfortable childhood as the only child of well-connected bookstore owners. But when the Gestapo marched into her small town in 1939, “the joy was taken out of our lives,” she writes.


Dagmar’s father was part of the


Czech resistance movement and was forced into hiding in


the Beskydy


Mountains. Just 15 years old, with money and messages sewn into the hem of her coat, Dagmar secretly visited him, narrowly avoiding capture by the Germans. A year later, Dagmar and her mother were arrested as political prisoners and sent to an “Intern Camp.” She would not see her father again until the Camp’s liberation three years later in April 1945.


But by the time the war ended and Dagmar and her family had tried to rebuild their takeover


lives, of Czechoslovakia


the Communist had


begun. Dagmar’s father was targeted as a recruiter for the party, but he refused. Unwilling to endure another prison term, Dagmar, then a student


memoir, Blue Suit &


at Charles University in Prague, fled across the border into Austria.


“We waited at the farm until midnight," she recounts.


"It was a


cold, clear night but without a moon, perfect


conditions for crossing.


The dangers we had to avoid were guards and barking farm dogs. Our guide knew the terrain well. Often he would bend and feel the stubs of the harvest from which he could tell, according to the crop, whether we were on the right track to Austria.”


In 1949, just outside of Salzburg, Dagmar registered as a refugee with the World


Refugee Organization,


the forerunner to UNHCR. She writes of the fear and interminable waiting that so many of today’s refugees face. “I felt like I was in a doctor’s waiting room,


reasonably


comfortable, but idle and without any idea of the doctor’s verdict. While we refugees were preoccupied with our lives, the world was entering another dangerous era…”


Canada was the first country to offer her asylum, as long as she consented to spending her first year as a domestic servant (Canada was accepting


farm workers, miners,


lumberjacks, domestics and hospital orderlies). She arrived in Halifax on Victoria Day 1950, and like many refugees,


reinvented herself. She


worked as a housekeeper for a family in a small town in New Brunswick, whose children she still keeps touch with today.


in


Reflecting on her experience of entering an unfamiliar country doing a job she knew nothing about, she says, “To be a domestic—it didn’t look


good—but it was the


thing. As a refugee who didn’t really speak the language—as a university student I knew more about economic terms than household terms—I had to learn fast.”


She feels refugees, empathy particularly for today’s the women


who stay at home to look after their children, and who may not have as many opportunities to integrate into Canadian life.


Retired since 1989 from her job as an economist for the Ontario Government, Dagmar views all her life experiences,


difficult they were, as contributing to the person she has become.


Dagmar and her late husband,


Gerry, have been UNHCR donors for many years, and she recognizes the challenges our world faces with over 65 million displaced people around the globe today. “You cannot solve the problem of displaced people entirely with immigration,” she says. “We have to solve the problems where they originate in the countries where people are being forced to leave. No country can absorb 65 million people.”


Most of all, Dagmar wants others to know that she tells her story, not because she feels it’s special or memorable, but


it’s what people


can learn from her experiences that she believes is important. In an annotation to her book titled “What I learned in my 85 years,” she lists 13 points,


including, “Never


regardless of how


stop


learning,” “Never stop questioning,” and, perhaps most telling in today’s world, “Seek common ground with others.” «


best UNHCR / 7


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