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When Flight Sergeant Nathan Dlusy of the Royal Canadian Air Force died in August 1944 on a mountaintop near Inverness in Scotland at the age of 23, he was fighting for Canada. And yet he was never recognized as Canadian.

His brother, Jon Dlusy, wants to change that.

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As Jews, the Dlusys managed to escape Berlin in 1938, just before Kristallnacht. “We left everything behind,” recalled Jon, now 91.

They arrived in Montreal, where they were naturalized as British subjects. Nathan enlisted in 1942 to fight the Nazis. When the Canadian Citizenship Act came into effect in 1947, anyone naturalized was automatically made a Canadian citizen. But by then, Nathan was dead.

“I have been looking into whether posthumously he could be issued Canadian citizenship because he gave his life for Canada during the war,” Jon Dlusy said in an interview Thursday.

The story of Nathan Dlusy is one of hundreds in Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II (New Jewish Press, $26), a new book by journalist and Centennial College professor Ellin Bessner documenting the contributions of the 17,000 Canadian Jews who served in the Second World War; 450 never made it home.