{"id":23764,"date":"2017-04-07T03:58:57","date_gmt":"2017-04-07T10:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=23764"},"modified":"2017-04-04T16:44:44","modified_gmt":"2017-04-04T23:44:44","slug":"marking-yom-hashoah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2017\/04\/07\/marking-yom-hashoah\/","title":{"rendered":"Marking Yom Hashoah"},"content":{"rendered":"

Claude Romney will give the keynote address on April 23. (photo from Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Jacques Lewin, a Jewish physician in Paris, was arrested at the end of 1941 and was sent to Auschwitz on the very first convoy from Western Europe to that notorious death camp. His profession almost certainly saved his life, as he performed a role that the Nazis deemed useful: that of a prisoner-doctor.<\/p>\n

Lewin\u2019s daughter, Claude Romney, has studied the Holocaust experiences of prisoner-doctors like her father and has a forthcoming book on the subject. She will share her family\u2019s story, and illustrate aspects of the experience of prisoner-doctors, as the keynote speaker at this year\u2019s Yom Hashoah Holocaust Commemorative Evening, which takes place April 23, 7 p.m., at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.<\/p>\n

Lewin\u2019s arrest took place two weeks after Romney\u2019s third birthday. She and her mother, Saya, survived the war in Bagn\u00e8res-de-Bigorre, a small town near the Spanish border that was occupied by the Germans less than three months after they arrived.<\/p>\n

Romney\u2019s presentation will begin with some context about the state of French Jewry in the early part of the war, something she said is not as well known as it could be. She will share a bit about her and her mother\u2019s experiences during the war, then turn attention to her father\u2019s story.<\/p>\n

That story is something that Romney has pieced together mostly after her father\u2019s death in 1968. \u201cI remember when he died, thinking that so much had remained untold,\u201d Romney said. \u201cHe never talked about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Years after her father passed away, Romney\u2019s mother gave her a file containing documents from her father\u2019s past, including a few articles he had written immediately after he returned to France after the war. These had been published in a newsletter distributed by the French resistance and never reached a wide audience.<\/p>\n

Romney has obtained the transcript of the testimony her father gave at the 1947 trial of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf H\u00f6ss, but it is not comprehensive.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe transcript of his testimony looks as though he was so frustrated that he wasn\u2019t given more time to talk about it,\u201d said Romney. \u201cI don\u2019t know if it was 10 minutes or what, but it looks as if he was really frustrated because at one point he enumerates a number of atrocities that he saw and he said, \u2018it could take me days and days to tell you about them.\u2019 I think that\u2019s why he never wrote any more. I don\u2019t know whether he was approached to testify anywhere else, but he never did.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, other prisoner-doctors did write and testify. Romney\u2019s forthcoming book, Saving Lives in Auschwitz: The Written Testimonies of Prisoner-Doctors<\/em>, is based on the experiences of 60 individuals who survived and told what they witnessed.<\/p>\n

When Lewin first arrived at Auschwitz, he and the others in his transport were put to work constructing a new section of the camp \u2013 to be known as Birkenau.<\/p>\n

Lewin was one of only a few from this group that survived the war, Romney said, because he was a medical doctor. The Nazis decided around the end of 1942 that they could use prisoner-doctors to treat ill and wounded inmates who were doing forced labour. Prisoner-doctors tried their best to help other inmates, but routinely confronted horrific ethical dilemmas. They were faced, Romney said, with what the Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer called \u201cchoiceless choices.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they had refused to obey orders outright, they would have sent them to the gas chambers too,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

After the war, Romney studied at the Sorbonne and became a professor of French linguistics and literature, first in Toronto, then Sudbury and finally Calgary, before retiring to Vancouver. She and her husband, also an academic, thought Canada seemed an ideal place since he was English and she was French.<\/p>\n

The annual Yom Hashoah evening is presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC). It is supported by the Gail Feldman Heller Endowment and the Sarah Rozenberg-Warm Memorial Endowment Funds of the VHEC, and funded through the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign.<\/p>\n

In addition to Romney\u2019s keynote address, the evening will feature cellist Eric Wilson, Yiddish singer Myrna Rabinowitz, Cantor Yaacov Orzech and the Kol Simcha Singers. Artistic producers are Wendy Bross Stuart and Ron Stuart of WRS Productions. Holocaust survivors are invited to participate in candlelighting.<\/p>\n

Pat Johnson<\/strong> is a communications and development consultant to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Claude Romney will give the keynote address on April 23. (photo from Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre) Jacques Lewin, a Jewish physician in Paris, was arrested at the end of 1941 and was sent to Auschwitz on the very first convoy from Western Europe to that notorious death camp. His profession almost certainly saved his life, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23750,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6943,53,2364,329],"class_list":["post-23764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-claude-romney","tag-holocaust","tag-vhec","tag-yom-hashoah"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}