Halifax
There were no more than a handful of Latvians living in Atlantic Canada before World War II, but that began to change in 1947 with the arrival of the post-war Latvian refugees. One of the leading changemakers was Mariss Vētra.
Before the war, Mariss Vētra had been a star of the Latvian and European opera stage. In 1944, He escaped Latvia in a fishing boat with his wife and two young sons. In Sweden, he was relegated to menial work, but he sought opportunities for work in music through pre-war friends and acquaintances. It was his good fortune that the Halifax Conservatory of Music was looking to found a new opera class and decided to hire him.
Vētra and his family arrived in Halifax in January 1947 with an offer of employment in his field of expertise. It was a rare opportunity.
Mariss Vētra (or Mr. Vetra as he was known to his students) was a high-energy, charismatic individual who embraced both his new homeland and fellow Latvians with equal passion and empathy. He became a beloved teacher at the Halifax Conservatory and implemented an ambitious program to develop Canadian-born singers. He also set his sights on presenting a production of Mozart's Don Giovanni featuring his students for Halifax's 200th anniversary in 1949, and lobbied the City of Halifax for funding. The City granted him $4,000 for this endeavour, but it scarcely covered costs. Vētra acquired the nickname of "Mr. Opera" in the process. Vētra also found he was short of teaching staff and sponsored other Latvian professionals who were languishing in refugee camps to join him in the work of building the new program. These included the baritone Teodors Brilts and conductor Alfrēds Štrombergs, among others.
Vētra and his colleagues succeeded, and this went down as the first opera production performed in Canada with Canadian-born singers.
Even though he was fully occupied implementing a new opera program, Vētra also took on the role of aid worker. As ships carrying Latvian Displaced Persons began arriving in the summer of 1947, Vētra met each ship himself personally, while Brilts took on the work of compiling a register of all arriving Latvians. This led them to found the Latvian Relief Association and advocate for the founding of a central organization for Latvian Canadians, which later became the Latvian National Federation in Canada.
It meant a lot to new arrivals that there was a familiar face on the pier to welcome them in their own language and give them the coordinates of other Latvians standing by to aid them in their new communities.
The poet Velta Toma on her arrival in Canada:
And there stood Mariss Vētra—a lighthouse in Halifax Harbour—handing out the newest Latvian newspapers and hugging friends and acquaintances. No, really, Canada was a place where we could live if this Vētra was the same one we had known before. On the ship, they had given us some food money for the train trip. We shamelessly devoured the full-fat milk, the sweet bread which was covered with either a generous layer of butter and sausage slices or overly sweet jam, as we realized we were no longer on a wallowing ship but on a Canadian Pacific train in immigrant-type cars with cheap seat coverings, shaking from side to side as we were rushed through Canada. There were smallish, frothing streams, rusty bushes, wide, unkempt fields with greyish, unadorned huts, but each had an automobile by the door. Our eyes were confused by the repetitive monotony. If you caught sight of the smooth back of a lake, its shores would be covered with sweet little houses in all colours of the rainbow. And then there would be more empty fields and lonely, bare, neglected cemeteries marked with stone crosses ... (Latvija, 06.09.1949)
Read more about historic Pier 21 on the Canadian Museum of Immigration website.