Shoah’s uniqueness

Editorial

At the annual general meeting of the not-yet-completed Canadian Museum for Human Rights last week, some discord was evident over the centrality of the Holocaust as part of the permanent exhibition.

The facility, now slated to open in Winnipeg a year behind schedule, in 2014, is to have a gallery, Examining the Holocaust, while other genocides will be, as the CBC put it, “squeezed” into a different gallery, titled Breaking the Silence.

The museum is to be the first national Canadian museum established since 1967 and the first outside the Capital Region. The federal government has kicked in $100 million for the project. The province of Manitoba has donated $40 million and the city of Winnipeg has put up $20 million. About $125 million has been raised privately, mostly by the Asper family, whose late patriarch, Israel “Izzy” Asper, first envisioned the project, which is expected to draw as many as 250,000 visitors per year. His daughter, Gail, now leads the movement to raise the needed private funding to complete the $310 million museum.

The issue arose a year ago about the perceived placement of the Holocaust above other atrocities. On the one side, critics accused the museum of emphasizing the Holocaust and, therefore, by implication, diminishing the suffering of other groups. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress raised the issue of the Holodomor, the catastrophic famine of 1932-33. In that event, between five and eight million ethnic Ukrainians under Soviet domination died from starvation during a period of collectivization of farms in what was almost certainly a deliberate act on the part of the Stalin regime. Eight countries, including Ukraine and Canada, recognize the Holodomor as a genocide.

Ostap Hawaleshka, a retired professor and Ukrainian-Canadian who spoke at the museum meeting, acknowledged the unseemliness of the discussion.

“We think that there are other tragedies ... that are at least equivalent in terms of magnitude [to the Holocaust] but you know, there’s nothing worse than counting my dead are more than your dead,” he said.

Unseemly though the whole matter may be, over the past year, both sides have had their say. Officials of Jewish organizations have pointed out that it was the Holocaust that was the final straw that led the world to adopt such intended safeguards as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Museum officials have reminded critics that other genocides are not being ignored, but will be included in the permanent exhibits as well.

It is worth stressing that the Holocaust is different, for a range of reasons, if not quantitatively in a world filled with catastrophes, at the very least in a number of qualitative ways involving intent, process, routinization, the ambivalence of bystanders and collaborators, the inversion it represented of an advanced European civilization, the meticulous thoroughness, the legal foundations upon which it was premised, the longevity of the terror and a panorama of factors that have been explored in libraries of materials.

Yet there is another issue at hand, even as some critics are suggesting that Jewish suffering is eclipsing the suffering of others.

There is a growing inclination toward insensitivity to Jewish concerns, whatever those concerns may be. Even the implications that the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants are not adequately sensitive to the concerns of other groups is itself an unsubstantiated libel that owes much to classic anti-Jewish stereotypes. In media and in private conversations, there is a discernible attitude that “we’ve heard enough of you,” that the Holocaust is just one of many genocides, and your incessant need to differentiate your experience is tiresome, self-absorbed and (perhaps, ultimately, if usually implicitly) “the very root of the troubles you bring upon yourselves.”

At the AGM, the museum’s chief executive officer, Stuart Murray, said community consultations are ongoing, but he tried to remind the attendees of the purpose of the museum. “We try to be very clear with all communities we talk to that we’re not a genocide museum, that we’re really a human rights museum in the sense of how we’re looking at some of these issues,” Murray said.

“Is it the museum’s intention to teach our children that all human rights flow from the Holocaust?” a woman shouted from the audience.

In fact, there is a direct correlation between the modern universal concept of human rights and the realization of the degradation that occurred in the Shoah. Hopefully, this heckler and the many others who are equally ignorant of this fact will visit the museum’s Holocaust gallery when it opens.

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