The house up the street

The haunting of 206 Carlton Street

This is a story about the ghost in the attic. Or more specifically, the ghost down the street. Because it’s Halloween on Monday, I thought I would tell you all a ghost story. 

When I was growing up in Toronto, I lived a few blocks from the house pictured above. For years, I passed it almost daily on the way to school, activities, or visiting family and friends. It has been a constant, looming presence in my life. To this day, I continue to pass by the house frequently on my way across town on the streetcar or my bike. I don’t know who lives there now - as best I can recall I have never seen anyone coming or going. Despite being on a nice street in a great neighbourhood, I don’t know who would want to live there. 

In all likelihood, unless you are from Toronto, and more specifically Cabbagetown, you probably don’t know why I’m talking about the obnoxiously coloured house up the street from where I grew up. Or why it’s haunted. 

This was the Toronto home of Ernst Zundel from 1975 until his deportation in 2000. 

Ernst Zundel was deported from Canada as a result of his activities in promoting Holocaust denial. From this funny-looking house, Zundel produced and distributed books, pamphlets, recordings, and other memorabilia denying the fact of the Holocaust. While in Canada he was convicted for his Holocaust denial activities in 1985 and 1988, successfully having both convictions overturned, before grounds were ultimately realized for his deportation. Zundel died in Germany in 2017. Perhaps more problematic than the overturning of both of his convictions, was the platform these trials and appeals provided for other Holocaust deniers to challenge the truth. This included individuals such as David Irving, who would go on to file a defamation lawsuit against Holocaust historian and US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt. 

The Zundel trial, among other things, provided an opportunity to discuss whether the facts of the Holocaust were something that could be taken for granted, and whether preventing individuals from spreading Holocaust denial would result in a chilling of free speech. Personally, I have always found reading that particular Supreme Court decision to be chilling for reasons that have little to do with free speech. 

From when I was very young, I knew about the man who lived in that house, even if I did not know his name. I knew that someone lived there who engaged in teaching and promoting Holocaust denial. I knew that it was a house where something very bad was happening, and that the bad thing had the potential to spill out onto the street and into our lives if nothing was done to contain it. I lived in fear of his imaginary pupils who could be wandering the streets of the neighbourhood with heads full of his lies about history and my people.

I was only 4 years old when Zundel was deported. For all but a very small portion of my life, he was not the occupier of that house. And yet he was, and for me, always will be. No matter who has lived in that house over the course of my lifetime, there has always been the impression that he is somehow still there. He’s the ghost in the attic. 

Perhaps it is silly to be so fixated on one of the less comely structures in a neighbourhood replete with beautiful historical homes. Perhaps it is silly to be so fixated on one of its former residents. But that’s the thing about ghost stories; they tie a location’s past to its present with unbreakable chains. 

From that house, Ernst Zundel sought to erase a part of history and spread the falsehood that the facts of the Holocaust were concocted by Jews as part of a plot to gain sympathy and control. It’s a story - secret Jewish space laser world domination and manipulation - that seems to be coming up a lot in the last few years. As a child, it was inconceivable that someone would believe that the Holocaust didn’t happen. How could anyone listen to the stories of survivors, see the photographs and videos, read the evidence, visit the camps, and still believe that the horrific events were either fabricated or exaggerated? Even without fully understanding the larger context of Holocaust denial, I knew from a young age that what Zundel was promoting was dangerous.

But the house is more than that. 

Near the end of every episode of Scooby Doo, there is the moment where they catch the monster and they pull its mask off, and it’s not really a monster, it’s a shopkeeper or manager or neighbour. It’s not some recluse living in a cabin in the woods, but just an ordinary person. Holocaust denial and Antisemitic bias are much the same. We don’t expect it to come from our neighbours. But it can, and so often does.

This is an ordinary house, on an ordinary street. It does not look, from the outside, like it was once a hub for hatred. But ghosts are like that. They are the invisible chill down your spine when you enter a room, that reminder of how very present, and inescapable, the past is. The ghost of Zundel is a reminder not only of the relative historical proximity of the events which gave rise to the Holocaust, but also how little time it took individuals to deny it’s reality and spread hatred. 

I am not afraid of ghosts. But in the case of the ghost in the house up the street from where I once lived, I am very afraid of just how alive everything he stood for still is.