Quiet people are often underestimated, but this could hardly apply to the Canadian war veteran Susie Gellman, who has died aged 104. Celebrated barely three years ago for the vital role she had played during the Second World War in a Canadian code breaking unit, she was a quiet, discreet woman, just 4ft 8 inches in height. But she stood tall on August 6, 2022, head held high, without walking aids, as a plaque was finally unveiled in downtown Ottawa to honour the code-breaking work done by the 80 members of the Canadian Examination Unit, known as XU, which operated from 1941 until it was closed at the end of the war in 1945.
Without telling her family, the 22 year old Gellman began working for the XU’s Japanese Diplomatic Section, typing intercepted traffic and helping locate Japanese convoys.
While Britain’s better known Bletchley Park code-breaking unit has long been lauded for shortening the war by two years, attracting many visitors to its Milton Keynes country site, its Canadian counterpart long remained in the shadows.
Gellman’s story signals the key role played by women in wartime codebreaking. She was one of the few who worked in this secret enterprise, and with the strength of character praised by people who knew her, she kept the secret up till the last two years of her life.
According to Laurence Wall, writing in Canada’s Globe and Mail, it was only at this ceremony that she ended the oath she had taken not to discuss the unit for as long as she lived. He told the JC; the story “pretty well fell into my lap when I volunteered to help make up the minyan at her funeral last month. The evening before her funeral, I asked a friend, who's born and raised in Ottawa, if he knew her name. He said he had not only heard of her, he knew something about her secret wartime activity.
“Susie Gellman was a very private person. So she was the right person to keep a secret..... that 2022 ceremony finally relieved Mrs. Gellman of the secrecy requirement”.
Canada launched the XU to deflect interest in its secretive mission. It shared information with Britain’s Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park via the intrepid Canadian spymaster William Stephenson who headed British
Security Co-ordination in New York and with US intelligence.
At first the unit was housed with the federal scientific agency, the National Research Council, but as its work expanded it moved to an early 20th century Ottawa mansion.
Sylvia Irene Abelson was the eldest of five children and the only daughter of insurance man Jess and homemaker Mollie Abelson. Her father’s athletic and football prowess won him an induction into the Ottawa Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1986.
Sylvia, known as Susie, had four brothers, Lawrence, known as Duke, Stanley, Alan and Bobby. In 1940 Duke joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but was killed in 1943 when his de Havilland Mosquito nightfighter-intruder crashed on a training flight. Mollie never recovered from her eldest son’s death, and her children felt they had lost their mother as well as a beloved brother.
Susie graduated from a business school after high school where she would probably have learned typing and other secretarial skills. According to Wall: “She never told anyone alive today why she went to work for the XU or how it came about. I suspect she submitted a general application to work for any department in the federal government. Her application was probably directed to the XU simply because it needed people with those skills.”
Gellman was assigned to the unit’s Japanese Diplomatic Section, whose code breakers had successfully cracked Tokyo’s coded messages to its diplomatic missions, which included key information on the Japanese convoys’ location. She typed the decoded messages, which she placed in envelopes sealed with wax and then handed them to and from the Department of External Affairs (now Global Affairs, Canada.) Other sections at the XU focused on coded messages from the Vichy French and Japanese military.
While women comprised up to 40 per cent of the unit’s workers, the number of codebreakers among them remains unknown. The work was, of course, extremely pressurised and stressful and like many involved in secret wartime work, Gellman herself made lifelong friends at the unit.
In 2022 she told CBS News she had maintained her silence about her work during the war and for decades afterwards. “You were so aware of it being a secret mission,” she said. ”And you didn’t tell anybody. And I followed that very closely. I didn’t even tell my family.” This attitude did not surprise her nephew, McMaster University professor Dr Donald Abelson, who said she was known to be “fairly quiet and at times secretive.”
He recalled their many interactions during Passover and Rosh Hashanah when his father would say "just remember, still waters run deep.... She was quiet, pensive, sharp, and would interject in family conversations only to clarify or elaborate on a point that was made. My father would often comment on her intelligence and fortitude.
"Susie has a good head on her shoulders," he would say. 'She's a very smart cookie." Some would say that Susie came across as old-fashioned and rigid. Perhaps, but I think there were several more layers to her than any of us imagined. Duke's death had a profound impact on her, and her relationship with her mother, Mollie. As the only daughter in a family of sports-obsessed men, it must have been devastating to her to lose the intimate connection she had with her mother who never got over this tragic loss. “
In 1957 she married her soulmate, Lawrence Gellman in Lake George, NY. They relocated to New York and their daughter, Barbara, was born a few years later. But in 1970 the family returned to Ottawa to care for Susie’s ageing parents. She worked for the National Gallery of Canada, but in 1987, shortly before he was due to retire Lawrence Gellman died.
The XU was disbanded after the war and its mansion home sold and renamed the Embassy Row apartments. In 1967 it was destroyed and is now an apartment building. Laurence Wall explained; “This speaks to a very Canadian personality quirk: we hate to brag or blow our own horn in any way. So while Bletchley Park was well known in the UK .... the Canadian government didn't see the same need. The mansion that housed the XU would have made a terrific post-war tourist attraction.”
The XU’s work came to light in 2014 when Ottawa researcher Diana Pepall, began tracking former members of the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Services to enable their work to be honoured by Bletchley Park. Gradually information on the XU began to filter through, although the Canadian government refused to acknowledge the code-breaking operation until very recently. In 2020, Pepall’s application to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada resulted in the plaque acknowledging the achievements of the XU.
Ms Pepall told the Globe and Mail; “I thought everyone (with the XU was dead by this point. But during a talk I gave at the Jewish Community Centre in Ottawa in 2016, Susie approached me after and said she had worked there. I was dumbfounded.”
Wall said; “Clearly, the unit helped the Allied cause and hurt the Axis powers through its work. For example, the XU managed to crack the Japanese diplomatic code where other codebreakers (possibly including Bletchley) had failed to do so. So when Tokyo sent coded messages to its diplomatic missions, that included information on Japanese convoys. The XU would relay the decoded material to US authorities who would in turn inform their navy, including their submarines.
“It seems reasonable to assume that some of those convoys were attacked and some ships sunk. The Americans were always careful to send a spotter aircraft before the attack so the Japanese would think that the aircraft had found the convoy rather than guessing that their coded messages had been deciphered..... the XU only handled Japanese and Vichy French/Free French coded messages. It never worked on German coded messages so it didn't share the glory when the Enigma codes were cracked by Alan Turing and his team. But considering that the XU had just 80 people in total working there from 1941 to 1945 (versus the hundreds working at Bletchley), it's fair to say that it played a much smaller but still significant role.”
Susie Gellman is survived by her daughter Barbara Gellman, her brothers Alan and Robert Abelson and several nieces and nephews.
Susie Gellman: born May 8, 1921. Died December 22, 2025
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