The Tupper Boys

Book excerpt: In the 1930's, when Hitler's Nazi party was growing in Germany, it also gained popularity in the Sudetenland, inhabited by a German-speaking population that had been added to Czechoslovakia in 1919. A minority group, the Social Democrats, became active in opposing that party. When Britain's Neville Chamberlain ceded the area to Germany in 1938 as the "Price for Peace," these people were in danger of incarceration or even execution. Of those who escaped, a number were able to immigrate to Canada. Although none of them had any training or experience in agriculture, being office or factory workers in towns or cities of central Europe, they were admitted to Canada providing that they become farmers. A group of about 518 ranging in age from 1 month to 54 years were brought to Tupper, BC, in the Peace River District, under the supervision of the Canadian Colonization Association, a subsidiary of the Canadian Pacific Railway, to develop their own farms out of a virtual wilderness. This book is the story of their first five years there.