Holocaust

Zionism wins big in Vegas

BC students at the StandWithUs conference in Las Vegas March 15-18 included, left to right, Adar Latak, Alexis Moscovitz and Ethan Doctor. (photo by Pat Johnson)

What happens in Las Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas. That was the defiant message from Roz Rothstein, the chief executive officer and co-founder of StandWithUs, as she welcomed about 1,000 Jewish and pro-Israel high school and college students, alumni, activists and assorted allies to the organization’s conference in the Nevada city, March 15 to 18. They assembled to become more informed and empowered, to return to their campuses and communities to advance the fight against antisemitism and antizionism.

Among the delegates were about 100 Canadians, including 15 BC students, as well as Vancouverite Zara Nybo, StandWithUs Canada’s campus and high school manager for Western Canada.

StandWithUs, a pro-Israel advocacy and education organization, provides leadership training and educational programs to students at hundreds of schools, as well as operating many other initiatives, including legal supports for Jewish and pro-Israel individuals and groups.

Among the BC students were four Leventhal high school interns and 10 Emerson fellows, who are part of the organization’s college and university track, Nybo said.

Students are selected based on demonstrated leadership in pro-Israel activism. They attend two immersive educational international conferences like the Vegas meeting during their year of service and are required to initiate several Israel-related programs in their communities or on campus.

Delegates heard from a roster of noted speakers in plenary sessions and more intimate, often hands-on breakout sessions.

The intensive morning to late-night schedule included speakers like New York Times columnist Bret Stephens; singer, dancer and online influencer Montana Tucker; sociologist David Hirsh, who is head of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism; Loay Alshareef, a Saudi-born activist who advocates for normalization with Israel; Luai Ahmed, a Yemeni-Swedish journalist; Oct. 7 survivors, including Omer Shem Tov, who was held hostage for 505 days; and scores of others.

photo - New York Times columnist Bret Stephens — New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (photo by Pat Johnson)

Stephens, the New York Times columnist, spoke of the revolutionary impact the potential fall of the Iranian regime could have on regional and global affairs but also warned of unintended consequences.

“Regime change is not at all easy,” he said. “There are all kinds of imponderables.”

The state could spiral into chaos and even more bloody and brutal repression than the government has already brought down on anti-regime protesters, he said.

“I do think there is, in fact, quite a plausible scenario [of regime change] – not now, not during this war, but in six months or a year – if [it’s] a militarily crippled and humiliated regime that is still under sanctions, still cannot pay its bills, cannot pay its civil servants, cannot pay its soldiers,” said Stephens.

Iranian street activists, he said, need to “kick this regime when it’s down.”

“If anyone can do it, 90 million Iranians, 88% of whom, at least, despise the regime and had the courage to come out and cheer when the late ayatollah was killed … I think that that creates conditions in which I can see it happen,” he said.

Ahmed spoke of his ideological and physical journey from being an antisemitic young man in Yemen to a new life in Sweden advancing coexistence with Jews.

“It is our duty as reformist Arab Muslims to stand with our Israeli and Iranian brothers and sisters to reject radical Islam, to fight radical Islam,” he said. “It is our duty to fight the terrorists who occupied my country, who believe that firing ballistic missiles at Jews is more important than feeding the starving population of Yemen.

“Radical Islam occupied Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza,” he said. “Radical Islam married my mother off at the age of 8. Radical Islam is our problem and, today, I stand here as a Yemeni who was taught to hate Jews. And I’m telling you something that radical Islamists fear the most: Jews and Israel are not our enemies.”

Alshareef shared a similar transformation.

“I used to be hardcore antizionist,” he said. “I used to be deeply antisemitic. In my local mosque, I repeated after my imams, ‘Death to Israel, death to Jews, death to Zionists,’ without ever having met a Jew or a Zionist before. Today, thank God, I no longer believe in that cancerous ideology that not only impacts the Jewish community, but it also impacts my community as well.… A society that learns to hate Jews more than loving our own children is not a healthy society.”

photo - Loay Alshareef, a Saudi-born activist who advocates for normalization with Israel — Loay Alshareef, a Saudi-born activist who advocates for normalization with Israel. *(photo by Pat Johnson)*

After Oct. 7, 2023, Alshareef decided to visit Israel.

“I learned that the Jewish community and Israelis were desperate for peace, that the vast majority of Jews and Israelis do not want war with us,” he said. “They want peace, and they are very desperate for this peace. That is something that no one had ever told me until I went to Israel myself to see the truth. I then took it upon myself to try to hammer this newfound truth to my friends and family members. And, since then, I’ve been creating content, sharing the hidden truths about Israelis and Jews that my society either dismisses or is completely unaware of.”

Students shared their experiences with antisemitism and bias from teachers, administrators and fellow students. A high school student explained how he helped get an ahistoric and antisemitic handout removed from his school’s curriculum – it had gone unchallenged since 1998. In plenaries and breakouts, individuals shared personal experiences of harassment, discrimination and loss of friendships.

StandWithUs does not only educate but also uses the law to seek fair outcomes in cases of discrimination.

The conference heard from Yael Lerman, founding director of Saidoff Law, a legal arm of StandWithUs, which includes a team of attorneys backed by a network of hundreds of pro bono lawyers and law firms.

“Imagine being a Jewish student in a high school where there are very few other Jewish kids,” Lerman said. “Day after day, classmates taunt you. They call you ‘dirty Jew’ and ‘Zio,’ they send antisemitic messages. Sometimes, they shove you or punch you. You never know when the next message or the next attack is coming. The school knows about it. Nothing changes. Then you reach out to StandWithUs Saidoff Law. Our attorneys step in. We represent you, we fight for you, and we win. We secure a transfer to a new school, and the original school must pay for it for the rest of your time in high school.”

No student should ever face antisemitism alone, Lerman said.

“Since Oct. 7, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in legal complaints, not only on campuses, but across everyday community spaces,” she continued.

“Recently, one man went to pick up a clothing order at a store where he had been a loyal customer for several years. The clerk looked at his kippa and muttered, ‘You Jews think you can get everything you want.’

“Later that day, he received an email telling him he was banned from the store and the entire chain. So, he reported the incident to StandWithUs. Our lawyer filed a complaint with the appropriate government agency and negotiated a settlement. The store had to lift the ban and compensate him. That is what accountability looks like,” said Lerman.

The conference heard diverse emotional testimonies.

Shem Tov shared the harrowing story of dancing at the Nova festival and, minutes later, being thrown in the back of a pickup truck and transported across the border into Gaza, beginning a nightmarish ordeal of 505 days of being shuttled between locations and then confined in underground labyrinths. For 50 consecutive days, at one point, he was held in complete darkness in a cell where he could not stand up.

“They used to abuse me physically and mentally,” he said of his captors. “There wasn’t any human interaction, I would say.”

Shem Tov was held in near-starvation even as he saw piled boxes of United Nations-supplied rations.

His captors once took him to a house above a tunnel that had been rigged with explosives and told him he would be forced to trigger an explosive blast when Israeli soldiers entered the boobytrapped structure. When they threatened to kill him if he refused, Shem Tov told them they could shoot him, but he would not do it.

After Shem Tov’s presentation, hundreds of students rushed to the front of the hall, surrounding the former hostage and dancing ecstatically as music blared and massive screens declared: “We are dancing again.”

The executive director of StandWithUs Australia, Michael Gencher, led a memorial for the 15 victims murdered during a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach last Dec. 14.

Sami Steigmann, a child survivor of the Holocaust, spoke of the series of flukes and strokes of luck that saved his life.

In addition to Canada and all regions of the United States, student delegations came from Europe, Latin America and Australia. Due to war-related airspace closures, only two delegates were able to travel from Israel for the event.

BC delegates spoke to the Independent about their experiences.

Adar Latak, a University of Victoria psychology student in his final year, said he gained confidence at the conference and made important connections.

“You’re meeting Jews from around the world, and that’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s easy to get brought down by everything, and coming here really lifts your spirits. You’re with other Jews, you’re all facing the same thing, and you’re all talking about it, and you’re giving each other advice and tips, and it is really just a beautiful thing.”

Alexis Moscovitz, a second-year physical and health education student, also at the University of Victoria, echoed Latak’s sense of community.

“Obviously, everybody has different experiences, but it’s all basically the same,” she said. “We’re all fighting antisemitism on our campuses and so, having a support system, amazing staff here, it’s just amazing to be able to be with people that you know are experiencing the same things.”

Vancouverite Ethan Doctor, a Langara College student, has faced threats on campus, including being followed and intimidated by a group of masked and keffiyeh-clad activists. His experience as an Emerson Fellow helped him navigate the college bureaucracy, seeking appropriate security and prevention steps.

“If it wasn’t for organizations like StandWithUs, I wouldn’t know how to properly deal with it and wouldn’t know the proper steps to take,” said Doctor. “I am just eternally grateful to organizations like this.”

photo - Michael Dickson, executive director of StandWithUs Israel, left, speaks with Omer Shem Tov, who was held hostage in Gaza for 505 days — Michael Dickson, executive director of StandWithUs Israel, left, speaks with Omer Shem Tov, who was held hostage in Gaza for 505 days. (photo by Pat Johnson)

Jesse Primerano, executive director of StandWithUs Canada, told the Independent his group’s role is to help young pro-Israel activists, but also people of all ages, find their voices.

“In many cases, they don’t feel comfortable with the facts, to engage with people who are coming at them very aggressively,” he said. “So, our job is to help them understand the facts and how to communicate them to people who disagree.”

Earlier, Primerano briefed the convention on the state of affairs in Canada.

“We look back on times [of] the Holocaust, and I think what we said for many generations was that, as long as our government didn’t turn on us, we would be safe in the countries that we live,” he said. “And, you know, since Oct. 7, antisemitism has become emboldened in a way in Canada that it feels like our politicians know the only way to stay in office is to take an anti-Israel position.

“So, we’ve seen our mayor of Toronto be unwilling to come to an Oct. 7 vigil, unwilling to come to an Israeli flag-raising,” Primerano continued. “Our prime minister in Canada said that he would arrest Bibi [Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu] should he come to Canada. He put an arms embargo on Israel and, most importantly, as I’m sure many of you are aware, he rewarded Hamas with support for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“That type of rhetoric and action from our government has spilled into the streets because it has emboldened those who are willing to take shots at the Jewish community. And I mean that both literally and figuratively. Just [days earlier] in Toronto, we had three synagogues that were shot overnight in four days,” he said.

StandWithUs partners with many different groups, Primerano said, but because they work extensively with university students, some people might wonder how they fit with agencies like Hillel.

“Hillel is, in many ways, the voice on campus,” he said. “They are the coordinators of Jewish life. Their goal and their work and their ultimate obligation is to bring Jewish students and their allies together. Our job is, once those students are together, to help supplement the work that Hillel is doing with Israel education, with helping awareness towards antisemitism. Hillel has a wide array of responsibilities that go far beyond just advocacy. Our job is to supplement their work, to work with them as a partner and bring our resources into their space while they bring the students here to meet our resources.”

At the Vegas conference, StandWithUs unveiled SWUBOT, a free, downloadable artificial intelligence tool providing at-the-fingertips information on Israel, antisemitism and activism.

StandWithUs was marking 25 years since Rothstein founded the group with her husband, Jerry Rothstein, who is the organization’s chief operating officer, and Esther Renzer, who is the president.

Reclaiming Jewish stories

Alix West Lefler plays Frida in The Fast Runner. (photo from thefastrunnerfilm.com)

The Fast Runner, a 15-minute short from director David Bercovici-Artieda is about a young girl’s courage during the Holocaust. (See jewishindependent.ca/balancing-education-and-art.) The film screens April 19, 7 p.m., at the Rothstein Theatre, as part of the event Out of the Shadows: Reclaiming Jewish Stories.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker, Bercovici-Artieda, playwright Mark Leiren-Young and Simon Fraser University professor Dr. Lilach Marom; author and Globe & Mail columnist Marsha Lederman is moderator. The event is co-presented by Chutzpah! Plus and Pacific Legal Education & Outreach Society, with partial proceeds supporting the Antisemitism Legal Hotline (antisemitismlegalhelp.org). For tickets ($18/$36/$54), go to chutzpahfestival.com/out-of-shadows.

– Courtesy Chutzpah! Plus

Bema presents Perseverance

Co-stars Evan Roberts, left, Jerry Callaghan, centre, and Carl Powell in rehearsal for Bema Productions’ presentation of Perseverance, April 22 to May 3. (photo by Becca Elliot)

photo - Jerry Callaghan and Andrea Eggenberger — Jerry Callaghan and Andrea Eggenberger *(photo by Becca Elliot)*

Bema Productions in Victoria presents Perseverance, by L.E. McCullough, from April 22 to May 3. The play is adapted from the 2019 memoir One Holocaust Survivor’s Journey from Poland to America, written by Melvin Goldman and his daughter, Lee Goldman Kikel. It brings to the stage a timely story of healing and renewal.

Few visitors to the G&S Jewelry Store in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighbourhood during the 1960s and 1970s were aware that the cheerful proprietor, Melvin (né Mieczyslaw) Goldman, had spent his teens enduring the horrors of Auschwitz before arriving in postwar America as a penniless refugee intent on reclaiming his life and reshaping his family’s destiny. The play depicts Goldman’s irrepressible spirituality and unflagging love for humanity as he worked to replace darkness with light, one piece of handcrafted jewelry at a time.

photo - Angela Henry and Jerry Callaghan (photo by Becca Elliot) — Angela Henry and Jerry Callaghan *(photo by Becca Elliot)*

Bema Productions’ mounting of Perseverance stars Jerry Callaghan, Andrea Eggenberger, Carl Powell, Angela Henry and Evan Roberts. All performances take place in Bema’s Black Box Theatre at Congregation Emanu-El. For tickets ($25), go to ticketowl.io/bemaproductions.

– Courtesy Bema Productions

Survivor urges vigilance

Resilience and determination were the themes at an International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration at the Bayit synagogue in Richmond Jan. 27. It was the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Marie Doduck, a child survivor who was the youngest Jewish orphan admitted to Canada after the war, spoke of her survival story, as well as her life in Canada, and she urged vigilance in the face of rising contemporary antisemitism.

Doduck was born Mariette Rozen in Brussels, Belgium, in 1935, the youngest of 11 children. She was 5 years old when the Nazis invaded her hometown in 1940. She and her siblings were scattered across the city and countryside, hiding with non-Jewish families, in convents and orphanages, and at times assisting the resistance. While her parents and three of her siblings were killed, eight survived, a remarkable number given that an estimated 85% of Belgian Jewish children were murdered.

In 1947, she immigrated to Canada as a war orphan and, with three of her surviving siblings, was brought to Vancouver. Her memoir, A Childhood Unspoken, was published in 2023. (See the Independent’s review of the book at jewishindependent.ca/an-intense-urgent-read.)

Doduck spent the war years being shuffled from one place to another, even serving as a messenger between her siblings and for the resistance, because of her photographic memory.

“I lived mostly in darkness, literally in hiding places where the Nazis could not find me,” she recounted. “When I returned to Brussels years later, I could not recognize the city in the daylight, for my Brussels was a place of darkness.”

Her survival – and that of seven other siblings – is a result of series of near-miracles and near-misses.

“At one of the orphanages, the mother superior hid me in a rat-infested sewer after one of her nuns found out that I was a Jewish child and reported me to the Gestapo,” she said.

After liberation, Doduck was one of 1,123 orphans sponsored by Canadian Jewish Congress to migrate to Canada. Her adaptation to life in Vancouver, while smoother than many of the children, was very difficult.

“When I first tried to tell people what happened to me, they said, ‘Forget the past,’” she recalled. “We all find our own ways of dealing with pain. I became more resilient and learned from life’s harsh lessons to depend only on myself. I, as a child, had a strength to go on despite the mistrust, fear and pain that I then felt. I went on. I went on because I would not consider the alternative. Those lessons are, in a significant way, responsible for whom I am today.”

Doduck explained that the word “holocaust,” which came into the use in 1950s, originally meant a sacrifice burnt entirely on the altar. She contrasted her own experience with that nihilistic image.

“The person you see before you tonight, Marie Doduck, is a happy Jewish mother, a successful businesswoman, an author, a grandmother, a great-grandmother,” she said. “I’ve also been president of my synagogue and on the board of many Jewish organizations in our community.”

photo - Marie Doduck mingled with attendees after the International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration at the Bayit — Marie Doduck mingled with attendees after the International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration at the Bayit. *(photo by Pat Johnson)*

She is a co-founder of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC).

Doduck’s personal story of success and happiness is replicated among countless survivors of the trauma of that time.

“Although our childhood was ripped away from us, we survived and continued and we thrived,” she said. “We have achieved so much for ourselves, our families, and for our community. And I and many others will continue to speak about our stories and to remember, to acknowledge those who perished, who cannot speak for themselves. It is estimated that only 11% of Jewish children who were alive in Europe in 1939 lived to see 1945. As many as 1.5 million of the six million Jews cruelly murdered by the Nazis were children under the age of 18.”

Doduck said the world needs to learn from the past.

“No society is immune to the danger of prejudice, antisemitism and racism, and we must work together to stand up when we see injustice in the world around us,” she said.

She explained that the vision of the VHEC is a world free of antisemitism, discrimination and genocide, with social justice and human rights for all.

“This noble idea can only be achieved when governments, schools, educators and organizations work together hand-in-hand to teach future generations about the danger of racism and discrimination,” Doduck said. “Together, we must remember the past and pass on the teaching of the Holocaust together.… We must make ‘never again’ a reality, not just an ideal.”

Ezra Shanken, chief executive officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, took exception to the term “survivor” to describe people like Doduck.

“They’re not survivors. They’re thrivers,” he said. “Survivors just get by. Survivors are what they thought we would have as a Jewish people after the Shoah. They thought we would have a group of survivors who could not make it in the world beyond the Shoah.”

The lives of these individuals defied expectations, he said.

“We have thrivers that not only found meaningful relationships, not only built families, not only had kids, but cured diseases and became artists and won Nobel Prizes,” said Shanken. “They did for the world, but the world didn’t do for them.”

The countries where survivors made their homes and contributed so much have become rampant with antisemitism, he said.

Shanken called on those in the room, especially elected officials, to demonstrate clear leadership.

“It is critical that people understand what is in bounds and what is out of bounds within our society…. I know it’s hard as politicians to get that done,” he said. “But I have to tell you, please, on our behalf, keep doing as much as you can because we need you.”

Parm Bains, member of Parliament for Steveston-Richmond East, sent greetings from Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Kelly Greene, member of the BC Legislature for Richmond-Steveston and minister for emergency management and climate readiness, brought greetings from Premier David Eby. Also in attendance were fellow MLAs Hon Chan (Richmond Centre), Steve Kooner (Richmond-Queensborough) and Teresa Wat (Richmond-Bridgeport).

Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie, in attendance with city councilors Laura Gillanders, Kash Heed, Andy Hobbs, Alexa Loo and Bill McNulty, read a proclamation from the city. He noted that there are fewer Jews in the world now than there were in 1939.

Doduck was joined in lighting memorial candles by three fellow survivors, Amalia Boe-Fishman, Miriam Dattel and Regine Fefer. Brodie and Dave Chauhan, chief superintendent of the Richmond RCMP, also participated in the candlelighting.

Sherri Barkoff, vice-president of the Bayit, emceed the event, which was presented by the Richmond Kehila Society, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the VHEC, the Bayit, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.

Rabbi Levi Varnai welcomed guests to the event, Cantor Yaakov Orzech chanted El Moleh Rachamim, Café McMullen, program officer at the VHEC, spoke of the organization’s work, and violinist Lior Perry played before and during the ceremony, including a piece from the film Schindler’s List.

Family memoir a work of art

Karen Bermann’s The Art of Being a Stranger: A Family Memoir, published by New Jewish Press, an imprint of University of Toronto Press, is a work of art. It is moving in ways hard to describe. It might not capture every detail of her family’s history – in fact, wide swaths of that history are missing. What’s not missing, what is powerful, are the feelings this book evokes.

Bermann, who lives in Rome, is professor emerita of architecture at Iowa State University. Her father, Fritz, was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Vienna. At 15 years old, he and his younger sister, Elsa, who was 10, fled Europe, alone, in the late 1930s. They were separated in Haifa, his sister being taken to an orphanage with the other children who were too young to work. Fritz, as lucky as one can be after losing one’s family and home, ended up with a Russian farming family who treated him well. Nonetheless, at 18, he left the farm and headed off to live on a kibbutz.

The way in which Bermann intertwines her father’s words with her own commentary and descriptions is so effective. For example, when Fritz tells her about getting in trouble, at 10 years old, for writing a story about building a bomb to blow up the school, Bermann writes, “‘Oh, Dad, that is really bad.’ Yes, that was a particularly bad one. ‘Were you always so angry?’ I was born angry. And scared. As was my father before me. ‘Even before the Nazis, you were so angry and scared?’ Well, yes. But the Nazis didn’t help.”

This dark sense of humour permeates The Art of Being a Stranger. Bermann doesn’t sentimentalize or sensationalize, she just tells us what her father tells her and sometimes shares her reactions. We also learn – and feel – what she went through as Fritz’s daughter. She writes succinctly, poetically, in both words and images.

From pre-state Israel, Fritz went to New York City, where he worked in building maintenance. After an incident with an antisemitic boss, he found work at a company, where, over 20 years, he rose up the ladder. “Somehow from being a peasant in Palestine I found myself a bigshot in the world of New York building maintenance,” he tells his daughter.

But New York never became, for him, a city of museums and operas, but remained one of crooks and bribes. Just like his Vienna wasn’t the city tourists visited to eat sachertorte and go skating, but rather was “a shtetl of poor religious Jews, a ghetto of ignorant bastards who beat their children for making noise on Shabbos, but who knew in their bones that they were not welcome, who recognized the stench of antisemitism in the street while others were perfuming their noses in the rose gardens.”

Fritz’s trauma, inherited from his ancestors, is passed on to his daughter in full force. Yet, Bermann, as a teenager, would defend her father against her friends’ calling him a Nazi, for instance. He was brutally abusive. She only talks about this in relation to herself, not others in the household. To survive, she built “a parallel structure to the one I live in my father’s house.”

“Fritz was ruthlessly (one of his favorite words) honest about the danger of hope. Hope was more than pointless, it was stupid, and led to suffering,” writes Bermann. “People disappointed by life were stupid people; they made him angry…. He taught us about the strength of character that hopelessness required.”

In addition to sharing some of her childhood experiences, Bermann shares some of her experiences working, at the age of 19, on the rehabilitation of one of the more than 1,000 abandoned buildings on the Lower East Side that she and a group took over from the city: “Ditched by landlords who couldn’t squeeze a profit out of a tenement in need of heat, in need of maintenance, a building that leaked from every weak pore.”

We meet other family members, we find out how Fritz’s story ends. From fragments of a life, we see how complex we humans are, how many contradictions we hold within us, how we can be that which we hate, how we can hurt who we love and how we can love the broken, how beauty exists, sometimes inextricably with the ugly. The stranger of the title is Fritz, it’s Bermann, it’s us. Yet, experiencing The Art of Being a Stranger made me feel more part of humanity, kind of like when we chant Ashamnu together as a congregation: we have abused, we have betrayed, we have been cruel…. None of us is perfect, none of us gets through life unscathed or without hurting others. Yet, we keep getting up in the morning and living. Until we don’t.

Lessons from past for today

At the Kristallnacht commemoration in Victoria on Nov. 6, Congregation Emanu-El’s Rabbi Elisha Herb led a community pledge of mutual respect and support, joined by local politicians, faith leaders and law enforcement. (photo by Penny Tennenhouse)

“Hate has no boundaries and needs to be resisted wherever and against whomever it is found. This is necessary to protect our whole society. The history of the Shoah teaches us the dangers of complacency,” said Micha Menczer in his opening remarks at the Nov. 6 commemoration in Victoria of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

Menczer is a founding member of the Victoria Shoah Project, which held the community’s commemoration at Congregation Emanu-El. The project is a group of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, as well as educators and other individuals, dedicated to Holocaust remembrance and education.

photo - Micha Menczer — Micha Menczer, a founding member of the Victoria Shoah Project, gave the opening remarks at the Nov. 6 commemoration in Victoria of Kristallnacht. *(photo by Penny Tennenhouse)*

After Menczer spoke about the increase in hate crimes in Canada – of which Jews are often the target – Kristin Semmens, a history professor at the University of Victoria, spoke about Kristallnacht, the organized anti-Jewish riots in Germany and Austria on Nov. 9-10, 1938. The violence sent a clear message to Jews that they were not welcome in Germany, said Semmens, noting that, although Jews had already faced extreme persecution, no one foresaw what would come.

“Even after November 1938, even after the destruction and horror and humiliation and fear, even after the shattered storefronts, the burning synagogues, the mass arrests, the physical assaults and murders, few could have imagined how much worse things could get,” she said.

Semmens stressed that, while people came on Nov. 6 to commemorate what happened in the past, it is also fundamentally important to act in the present, to differentiate among people when it comes to basic human rights today.

“We cannot turn a deaf ear or a blind eye to defamation and demonization,” she said. “We must find the courage to challenge the wrongs we see in our society. And, as the events leading to Kristallnacht reveal, we must beware of the beginnings.”

Nina Krieger, British Columbia’s solicitor general and minister for public safety, was the keynote speaker. Due to inclement weather that evening, she spoke from the Lower Mainland via Zoom.

“How can we, today, fathom six million lives cut short solely because they were Jewish?” asked Krieger, who, before entering politics, was the executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC).

“Sadly, as we gather to remember events of 87 years ago, our historical imagination, I think, is less challenged than we thought. With the recent Manchester synagogue attack and the graffiti scrawled on this congregation, the echoes of the past are particularly and painfully resonant.”

In August, antisemitic graffiti was painted at the entrance of Congregation Emanu-El. According to a September post by the synagogue, Victoria police have since found the suspected perpetrator, who “has been charged on two counts: mischief relating to religious property and wilful promotion of hatred.”

Krieger noted that, during the pandemic in Canada, contingents within the anti-vaccination movement borrowed symbols from the Holocaust, such as yellow stars and photos of Anne Frank, to portray their feelings of being marginalized and victimized for the requirement to carry proof of vaccination. She said a commitment to history and memory is the necessary antidote to such Holocaust distortion and trivialization, “which we are seeing with increasing frequency as the Holocaust transitions from lived to mediated memory.”

She pointed to the VHEC’s use of primary sources when engaging with the 25,000 young people the centre educates each year. “Fragments of the Shoah – artifacts, photographs, documents – provide tangible entry points into the past and to individual human experiences during an event that might otherwise be an abstraction of numbers,” said Krieger, who reminded the audience that, in a time of rising antisemitism, the Holocaust may not simply be a lesson but a warning, “an inescapable fact that speaks to what is possible.”

Remembrance of the Shoah, she said, “provides an opportunity to wrestle with fundamental questions about the fragility of democracy and our responsibility as citizens today.”

Music performed by Kvell’s Angels, a local klezmer group, and the Capriccio Vocal Ensemble of Victoria, conducted by Adam Jonathan Con, was interspersed between speakers at the commemoration.

Politicians, leaders from other faith groups and members of the Victoria Police Department rose at the end of the ceremony to recite a pledge of mutual respect and support.

In the program notes to the commemoration, the organizers drew attention to the events that transpired in Germany 87 years ago, when at least 91 Jews were killed and 30,000 Jewish men were forced into concentration camps, Jewish homes and institutions were ransacked, businesses destroyed and synagogues burned. It was, the notes read, “a reflection of the inability of ‘polite society’ – of Jews and non-Jews – to comprehend that the institutions at the very heart of civil society (the police, uniformed people, political representatives) would be at the very core of this violence inflicted on the Jews of Germany and Austria, or contribute … to its devastating effect.”

The commemoration was sponsored by Congregation Emanu-El and the Jewish Federation of Victoria and Vancouver Island.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Rebuilding a life after Shoah

Prof. Robin Judd, author of Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust, speaks with community members at the Kristallnacht commemoration in Vancouver Nov. 9. (photo by Sova Photography)

The history of war brides – generally British or European women who married Allied military men – is widely known and has been explored by historians and social scientists. Between 1944 and 1948, about 65,000 dependents came to Canada as spouses or intended spouses of military personnel.

Speaking at Vancouver’s annual Kristallnacht commemorative event Nov. 9 at Congregation Beth Israel, Prof. Robin Judd discussed an almost unknown subset of this phenomenon: Holocaust survivors who met Allied soldiers in displaced persons’ camps after the war and went on to marry them.

Judd is associate professor of history at Ohio State University and immediate past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, the largest international society for scholars of Jewish studies. Her award-winning book Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust explores the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust.

Many Jewish survivors, as well as community and religious leaders, viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way for the survivors to move forward after extraordinary trauma, said Judd, whose academic interest in the subject stems from family history.

“My grandmother was a war bride,” Judd said. “She was a survivor. She and my father survived the war in hiding. My biological grandfather died at liberation, and my grandmother married an American soldier after the war, who then adopted my father.”

Her grandmother spoke little about her experiences during or immediately after the war, though Judd knew the rough outline of her past. Only when Judd began research into the subject did she learn that her grandmother’s experience was not as unique as Judd had assumed.

The individual stories of these war brides, and their efforts to integrate, offer lessons around survival in the aftermath of trauma, as well as larger issues concerning marriage, immigration and citizenship, she said.

Judd focused on a few couples, including Isaac and Leesha (neé Leisje Bornstijn) Rose, and Sala (neé Solarcz) and Abe Bonder.

Sala survived in the Warsaw Ghetto for more than a year, before deportation to a ghetto outside Lublin, then to Majdanek and a series of other camps. She was liberated during a death march in April 1945.

At Rosh Hashanah services at a DP camp in Hanover, she met Abe, a mechanic in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Until then, Judd said, Sala had avoided the Canadian and British soldiers overseeing the DP camp because she said they made her feel like a monkey in the zoo.

“But Abe came to her and started to speak to her in a very quiet Yiddish,” Judd recounted. “It was his questioning, his real interest in understanding who she was and what she had experienced that made her want to seek a second encounter with him.”

Many of the war brides found themselves at the whims of their new extended families, subsumed into existing structures that were foreign and unfamiliar. Often, they arrived in the new country and did not have homes of their own but lived with their husbands’ families, sometimes with multiple generations in the same home.

Leesha arrived in Ottawa and moved in with fiancé Isaac and her soon-to-be mother-in-law, with whom she had limited language skills to communicate. The groom’s mother took it upon herself to plan the wedding.

“Leesha and other war brides are often talking about how, in these moments, whether it was the marriage or it was having their first child, or it was their first child’s bar or bat mitzvah, or their first child’s wedding, how they so desperately missed those murdered family members at that time,” Judd said.

Newcomers were sometimes judged unfairly, as if their healthy appearance diminished the perception of their suffering. A newspaper article described Leesha as “a good-natured chubby little girl.”

“There was this notion that these women looked almost too healthy,” said Judd, “That the trauma was almost not written sufficiently enough on her body.”

Associations and networks existed for the newcomers to connect with others from similar backgrounds, including Jewish war bride clubs and synagogue-affiliated groups.

The war bride experiences Judd studies are diverse and include sad but also happy memories, she said, from the difficulties of reconstruction and recovery to stories of resilience and rebuilding.

Prof. Chris Friedrichs, a scholar of German history who taught at the University of British Columbia from 1973 until his retirement in 2018, contextualized Judd’s presentation, as well as Kristallnacht and the larger history of the Holocaust.

Kristallnacht sent a message to the world, he said. But the world did not listen.

“This horrific Night of Broken Glass was front page news all over the world, but not for long,” he recounted. “Much else was going on in the world at that time and, within a few days, Kristallnacht was forgotten. In fact, the world learned nothing from Kristallnacht. But the Nazis learned a lot. They realized that whatever they might do to the Jews, there would be no consequences. And thus, once Hitler’s war started in 1939, within Germany itself and in every country the Germans conquered under cover of war, a relentless program to exterminate the Jews began to be carried out by beatings, by shootings, by starvation and by gas.”

Hannah Marazzi, executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC), which presented the event in partnership with Beth Israel and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, called Kristallnacht “a defining moment in which the shadow of hatred quite literally burst into flame.”

Dr. Abby Wener Herlin, associate director of programs and community relations for the VHEC, introduced Holocaust survivors, who lit candles of remembrance.

“Tonight, as we are about to light candles … we vow never to forget the lives of the women, men and children who are symbolized by these flames,” she said. “May the memory of their lives inspire us to live so that we may help to ensure that their memories live on.”

Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld thanked the speaker and reflected on his family’s experience.

“My father left the DP camp and moved to Pittsburgh,” Infeld said. At a party at the Jewish community centre specifically to make shidduchim, marriage matches, for Holocaust survivors, he met the woman who would become his wife and the rabbi’s mother.

photo - Vancouver Deputy Mayor Sarah Kirby-Yung, centre, and councilors Lenny Zhou and Lucy Maloney at the Nov. 9 Kristallnacht commemoration — Vancouver Deputy Mayor Sarah Kirby-Yung, centre, and councilors Lenny Zhou and Lucy Maloney at the Nov. 9 Kristallnacht commemoration. *(photo by Sova Photography)*

Cantor Yaakov Orzech chanted El Moleh Rachamim, the memorial prayer.

Taleeb Noormohamed, member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville, warned of the dangers of ignoring the lessons of history.

“If we don’t take the lesson that remembrance requires us to take, we end up with a quiet normalization of what that night represented,” he said. “This is a fight that we all take on. We take on with responsibility, we take on with conviction, and we take it on to honour all of you who survived and all of you that have relatives and friends and loved ones that didn’t. So, we say, may their memory be a blessing and, indeed, may it be, but may it also be a reminder to all of us that the work that is to be done is for all of us.”

Terry Yung, member of the BC Legislature for Vancouver-Yaletown and a retired senior officer with the Vancouver Police Department, told the audience the future depends on education.

“We cannot arrest ourselves out of hate, we cannot,” he said. “We have to educate people in this world of darkness.”

Sarah Kirby-Yung, deputy mayor of Vancouver, and fellow city councilors Lenny Zhou and Lucy Maloney read a proclamation from the city.

Anne Frank exhibit on now

Created in 1995, the traveling exhibit Anne Frank: A History for Today is on display roughly 300 times a year. Mainly for school groups, people can visit the exhibit at Seaforth Armoury Nov. 11. (photo from Anne Frank House)

The traveling exhibit Anne Frank: A History for Today, hosted by the Consulate General of the Netherlands, is at Seaforth Armoury until Nov. 21. An opportunity for school groups to learn about Anne’s story and the legacy of her diary, the exhibit tours have already sold out, but the public is welcome to visit on Remembrance Day, Nov. 11.

While this is not the first time the exhibit has been in Vancouver, its presence at the armoury and museum is poignant. Started in 1920 by Scottish Canadians, infantry from the Seaforth Highlanders were on the ground in Amsterdam on May 8, 1945. They entered the city as part of the Allies’ liberating force.

Following months of battles and Germany’s surrender, the Seaforth Highlanders offered humanitarian aid to the city’s population. The close ties between the regiment and the people of the Netherlands are commemorated every year.

The school tours at Seaforth Armoury are led by volunteers trained by Phyllis Lewis, a staff member of Anne Frank House, said the house’s director of Canadian activities, John Kastner.

Arriving on Nov. 5, the exhibit required about six people half a day to set up, then there was peer training. The response to the call for volunteers was excellent, said Kastner, as has been the level of interest from local schools.

“I think the premise is from Anne Frank House in Amsterdam – there’s real value for people to become ambassadors of the message. People that are close to the same age as Anne are particularly effective when it comes to relaying the message of the diary,” he said.

Not all the exhibit’s stops are in metropolitan areas. Kastner described its journey to Anne Frank Public School in Vaughan, part of the Greater Toronto Area, then it went to Marathon, a mining community on the shore of Lake Superior, then to All Saints High School in Toronto, before being displayed at Ottawa’s Beechwood Cemetery (Canada’s national military cemetery) and the Dutch consulate in Vancouver, which sponsored it.

And the exhibition will keep moving, said Kastner. “It’s been very busy in 2025 – demand has been very steady and it has hardly been in storage at all.”

Created in 1995, the Canadian exhibitions are just some of the many around the world, in languages including Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Bosnian, Korean, Macedonian and two forms of Portuguese. In total, the exhibit is on display roughly 300 times a year.

Paired with a 30-minute film, Who was Anne Frank?, the tour takes about 90 minutes. It comprises 11 panels of information that are the same worldwide and the 12th panel is curated specifically for the region. The version that arrived in Vancouver this week references the liberation of Amsterdam and all the panels are in both English and French, which is the case for all the Canadian showings, though the exhibit for northern Ontario is also in Inuktitut.

The docents bear a responsibility as ambassadors for Anne’s legacy and message, said Kastner. “You want people who are in classrooms, at dinner tables, in peer groups at schools, who are aware of the story, that become advocates of fairness, opponents of racism, opponents of prejudice, and we really see it in real life – that those docents become docents of the message of Anne Frank House.

“Every generation that comes through, you create a new generation that becomes familiar with the story and the messaging of Anne Frank – not only what she went through, but her optimism in a world surrounded by hate, prejudice and violence…. As people go through the exhibit, they become aware of what an important story it is,” said Kastner. “They come to realize that it is, by definition, a history for today – that it has relevance in today’s society.”

photo - Anne Frank, in 1941. The traveling exhibit Anne Frank: A History for Today is at Seaforth Armoury until Nov. 21 — Anne Frank, in 1941. The traveling exhibit Anne Frank: A History for Today is at Seaforth Armoury until Nov. 21. *(photo from Anne Frank House)*

Kastner spoke about his personal connection to Anne’s remarkable outlook and values, referencing her often-quoted diary entry of July 15, 1944: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

“I wish we could all be as optimistic as Anne was,” he said. “It was remarkable.

“There have been many periods since the Second World War when we’ve had many reasons to be pessimistic, and that’s why it’s a history for today. It’s a recurring message that continues. After 75 years, it still has relevance.”

Kastner praised the design of the exhibit, calling it “fantastic.”

“There’s a timeline ribbon that goes down the centre … the date and the year. Above the ribbon is what is happening in the world politically at the time. Below the ribbon is how it’s impacting people – Anne, her family and everybody else,” he explained. “The idea is that [some people think] what you see on the news doesn’t really matter…. This says, it should matter, it does make a difference. And that creates an awareness of current events, of being involved … of speaking out. Even in minor cases of prejudice, it’s problematic and [can lead] to a greater problem.”

When talking about this idea in Marathon, Kastner gave the example of name-calling. “Calling someone a name, a slur, we can see it as problematic but not the end of the world,” he said. Or, “graffiti on a kid’s locker, that’s not very nice, but it’s not the end of the world – but it leads to a huge problem when [such actions] become the norm.”

Kastner spoke highly of the 3D model of the house, which is “one of the great learning tools that goes with the exhibit.” There is power in asking teenagers, “Who can tell us where Anne slept?”

“When I went to Anne Frank House to work there, where my workspace was, I’d be looking at the courtyard and at the Annex, looking at the tree, and it’s absolutely surreal,” he said. “Being in the presence of that kind of history. There’s no replacement for that.”

It’s the same tree Anne would have seen.

“I’d be in her father’s office at the warehouse and there are all sorts of people traipsing through the house,” he said, and he’d think about “how you [would have] had to be deathly quiet, completely stationary, because people were using that office.”

Certain questions come up time and again. Students want to know how the Holocaust started, for example.

“The Holocaust didn’t start with people getting loaded on trains,” Kastner explains to the kids. “The Holocaust started with all sorts of things that Anne talks about – her bike being taken away, not being allowed to swim in the public pool, not being allowed to take public transit, then extended to larger things. Her dad not being allowed to have a job or own property.… It starts by slow increments.”

At Anne Frank Public School in Vaughan, the kids asked Kastner how Anne’s diary got published. He described the return of Anne’s father, Otto Frank, to the Annex, which had not changed since the day their hiding place was discovered. He told the students that Miep Gies, who had helped hide Anne and her family, “had taken the diary after the Nazis had left and kept it, gave it to Otto and he read through it and then said, I should publish this.”

Kastner said the kids marvel at the serendipity, the turn of events that led to “one of the most important books written by somebody under the age of 16.” He added, “The kids say that it’s amazing that [Otto] survived, that he got the book, that somebody wanted to publish it and then the idea that it’s become standard reading for millions of kids 70 years later.”

During the exhibition’s stop at Beechwood Cemetery, Kastner recalled two students asking him, “What is it about Jewish people? Why do they pick on Jewish people?” And, “Why didn’t somebody do something?

Kastner explained the scapegoat theory to these students. “It’s in Shakespearian plays, it’s throughout history: the idea of a common enemy often solidifies a group,” he said.

Each exhibition site brings different opportunities for learning, said Kastner. Getting it to remote locations can be tough but it’s worthwhile. Shipping the panels to Marathon, for example, was challenging, but Kastner applauded the motivation of the school there as “very noble and progressive.”

“Every place it goes, it has a different impact and it’s going there for a different reason,” said Kastner of the exhibition.

“The message,” he said, “is in Anne’s experience, Anne’s death – that has relevance in today’s society.”

Shula Klinger is an author and journalist living in North Vancouver.

Reminder of humanity’s light

The passage across the Øresund, the body of water that separates the Danish peninsula from Sweden, is, at its narrowest, about the same distance as Horseshoe Bay to Bowen Island. But the waters can be treacherous – especially when it’s 1943 and the waters are swarming with Gestapo Kriegsmarine boats. Yet, for two weeks at the beginning of October 1943, 7,000 Danish Jews – about 95% of Danish Jewry (including the wonderful Victor Borge) – were safely transported across the Øresund in small fishing boats to the “sacred soil” of neutral Sweden.

In his new book, A Light in the Northern Sea: Denmark’s Incredible Rescue of Their Jewish Citizens During WWII, Tim Brady, author of the popular story of the Dutch Resistance Three Ordinary Girls, uses his excellent narrative skills to outline in detail how Danish Jews were warned about Nazi deportation plans, how they escaped and how they were treated when they arrived in Sweden.

Brady has described himself as a storyteller, rather than as a professional historian, but he has done his research and he tells this story in great detail. As he did with Three Ordinary Girls, Brady brings history alive with the telling of stories through the eyes of participants, rather than simply cold facts. The eyes here are, for the most part, those of the remarkable Dutch resistance fighter Jurgen Kieler, whose recently published memoirs (encouraged by Elie Wiesel) would not have been available to earlier rescue historians.

Readers might be surprised that the “light in the northern sea” of the title refers to welcoming Sweden, not, as you might expect, given the book’s subtitle, Denmark. But, as Brady is quick to point out, the Swedish “light” was not always bright – before, and early in the war, Sweden had demanded that Germany mark the passports of Jewish emigrés with a “J” so they could be more easily refused, and Sweden refused potential Jewish immigrants who were not financially independent.

However, as Brady notes, largely due to the enormously influential intercession of the great Danish Nobelist Niels Bohr (a dedicated Nazi-hater) with the Swedish government, Sweden’s position regarding the Jewish immigrants changed radically by October 1943, when it decided to admit all 7,200 Jews fleeing the recently occupying Nazis in Denmark.

Swedes almost universally opened their homes to the Danish Jews. The refugees were also made to feel comfortable in churches, community centres, hotels and schools, as welfare agencies constructed camps, provided clothing and household items, and helped them find employment. Also, as Brady notes, during the post-rescue months of the Danish resistance, Sweden provided a 25 million kroner (about $70 million in today’s dollars) credit to help Denmark train and organize the Danish Brigade revolutionary group.

Interestingly, the “rescue of Denmark’s Jewish citizens” referred to in the book’s subtitle has a double reference for Brady. On the one hand, there is the escape across the Øresund. But there is a second “rescue” described in the ending chapters of the book. These chapters deal with the 1943-45 undertakings of the Danish resistance, including detailed accounts of both their successful and non-successful sabotage activities. However, most of these Danish fighters were ultimately captured, and Brady carefully narrates their terrible experiences in German concentration camps. But, once again, the Danish Jews were “rescued.” Thanks to a coordinated effort of the Swedish Red Cross and the Danish government, most of the Danish concentration camp prisoners were returned to Denmark in the remarkable “White Bus Rescue” that was made possible in March 1945 by negotiations instigated between the Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte and Heinrich Himmler, which Brady describes at the end of his book.

When put into historical perspective, as Brady is careful to do, the rescue of 95% of Danish Jewry, while utterly unique in Europe, was not completely surprising. At no time had Danish Jews been required to wear a yellow star. Moreover, King Christian X, while greeting his Danish subjects, would never salute the occupying Nazis, and would habitually visit Denmark’s Great Synagogue on Rosh Hashanah. (King Christian, in contradiction to popular myth, never wore the yellow star – but he would later be placed under house arrest.) As well, Jews lived comfortably in Copenhagen; for 100 years, they had enjoyed full human rights and become very active in arts, politics and philanthropy. For these reasons, as Brady explains, and also because the Danish population was, in his words, “peculiarly democratic,” Germany hesitated to “twist the arms of Denmark regarding its Jewish problem” (no less was Denmark anxious to “poke the Third Reich bear,” as Brady puts it).

But how did the Danish Jews know about the Nazis’ plans to deport them? To answer this question, Brady emphasizes the courageous actions of Nazi diplomat Georg Duckwitz, whom history should celebrate as a kind of Raoul Wallenberg- or Oskar Schindler-type figure. With his life on the line, Duckwitz tipped off Danish authorities when, in September 1943, the Nazis decided to solve the Danish “Jewish problem” in the way history shows they “solved” other problems. Duckwitz also, after tipping off Danish authorities, courageously traveled to Stockholm to tell Sweden’s prime minister about the impending roundup of Danish Jews.

As a result of Duckwitz’s actions, Danes were warned in time of the impending roundup and, when the Gestapo came calling, there was no one home. Almost all (except the very ill and disabled who did end up deported) were in neighbours’ homes or schools, churches, hospitals or safe houses, preparing for their trip to Sweden.

Once the fishing boats were assembled, the flight to Sweden began in earnest. The boats were usually crammed; children and babies were usually sedated; and the passage was often rough, as high winds would often raise waves four to six metres high.

As an aside, in 1989, the annual Holocaust Symposium at the University of British Columbia arranged by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre focused on the Danish rescue. The speakers were a Danish Jewish woman who was rescued and a Danish fisherman who was among the rescuers. In the Q&A portion of their presentation, the fisherman admitted that he and the other rescuers charged as much as 1,000 kroner ($5,000 in today’s Canadian money) per “Jewish ticket.” Brady notes this, but finds it “understandable,” since the fishermen’s livelihood was at stake in crossing the Gestapo-infested Øresund.

All in all, the Danish rescue, as Brady presents it, is truly a remarkable story – and a welcome reminder that, even in the roughest seas and at the darkest times, the basic light of humanity can shine brightly.

Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education department at Simon Fraser University. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

New bio gives Vrba his due

Rudolf Vrba, left, and author Alan Twigg at the University of British Columbia in 2001. Twigg’s new book on Vrba, Holocaust Hero: The Life & Times of Rudolf Vrba, breaks much new ground. (photo by Beverly Cramp)

Celebrated German factory owner Oskar Schindler is estimated to have saved the lives of about 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. Carl Lutz, a Swiss vice-consul in Budapest, is credited with organizing protective documents and “safe houses” that helped between 50,000 and 62,000 Jews survive. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish envoy in Budapest issued passports and sheltered people in buildings, saving somewhere between 20,000 and more than 30,000 Jews. Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, wrote thousands of transit visas, enabling about 6,000 Jews to escape via the Soviet Union and Japan, some of whom came to Canada and settled in Vancouver.

But few outside certain circles know of Rudolf Vrba. The late University of British Columbia professor of pharmacology escaped from Auschwitz and alerted the world to what was happening there. Estimates of the number of Jews saved by Vrba’s report vary, but a consensus among historians worldwide suggests he helped halt the mass deportation of more than 200,000 of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz. The late eminent historian Sir Martin Gilbert said of Vrba: “No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler and the SS had determined for them.”

And yet, Vrba’s name remains largely unknown. This is not a coincidence. After the war, especially in Israel, there was a deliberate effort to downplay Vrba’s perspective of events.

A new book – the first of a meticulous two-volume assessment of Vrba’s life – has just been released by Vancouver author Alan Twigg. It goes great lengths to broadening awareness of Vrba’s heroism and correcting the many misconceptions around his legacy. In the process, Holocaust Hero: The Life & Times of Rudolf Vrba breaks much new ground.

Coincidental to the release of this publication, a monument to Vrba’s memory is to be unveiled later this month at Schara Tzedeck Cemetery, righting what many locals see as an unjust historic oversight.

While Vrba wrote his own memoirs, somewhat incredibly, Twigg’s book is the first real Vrba biography.

“There’s never been an in-depth biography of Rudolf Vrba,” said Twigg, who deliberately did not replicate the contents of Vrba’s own 1963 book, written with Alan Bestic, titled I Cannot Forgive and re-released in the 1980s as Escape from Auschwitz. “I tried to concentrate on information that was not available anywhere.”

While this first volume is an eye-opener for those who know nothing of Vrba, it contains bombshells and fascinating depth even for those who have read Vrba’s book or who otherwise know something about his story. And Twigg promises more to come in the next volume.

“The really revealing material is going to be in Volume Two,” Twigg told the Independent. “That volume will be almost entirely original material and it will show the evolution of Rudi’s character.”

Those who know of Vrba are aware of his daring escape. But that was, in many ways, the beginning of his historic story. He joined the Partisans and was a decorated war hero. He was an extraordinary intellectual, a difficult personality, had a dark humour many people didn’t understand, and carried anger throughout his life.

“I think it’s so important if you’re writing a biography to get across his character, not just the events of his life,” said Twigg. The participation of Vrba’s widow, Robin, was invaluable and the book includes extended transcriptions of Twigg’s engaging conversations with her.

Rudolf Vrba was originally a false name that came on the forged papers given to Walter Rosenberg soon after he filed his report and then joined the Czechoslovakian resistance after his escape from Auschwitz.

Born in Slovakia, Rosenberg/Vrba was transported to Auschwitz in June 1942. He steadfastly viewed the plunder of Jewish assets – not antisemitism as its own accelerant – as the motive for the Holocaust.

Vrba is said to have had a near-photographic memory, which allowed him to store away data that would change the course of history. It is believed that he greeted almost every train arriving at Auschwitz for 10 months, mentally noting estimated numbers and places of origin.

Eventually, he gained the coveted job of registrar of Birkenau’s quarantine camp, allowing him unusual access to additional information and limited freedom of movement. He learned that plans were afoot to liquidate the last remaining large population of European Jews – the 800,000 in Hungary – whose destruction would be streamlined by the construction of a new rail line to expedite transportation to the crematoria.

Vrba connected with Alfréd Wetzler, another Slovakian Jew who was registrar of the morgue.

On April 7, 1944, Vrba and Wetzler hid in a woodpile, still on the Birkenau site but outside the barbed wire prisoner encampment. Gasoline-soaked tobacco threw search dogs off their scent. They hid there for three days and nights as search parties worked 24/7 to find the escapees. After the intensive search was called off, they made their move.

The pair made an 11-day trek by foot through Poland to the border with Slovakia, where they connected with the Jewish community.

“Their feet were bloodied and misshapen,” Twigg reports. “A doctor was summoned. The malnourished pair recovered and soon cooperated with Jewish Council officials to produce an anonymous report that would be so detailed and emotionless that it could not not be believed.”

The Vrba-Wetzler Report, as it became known, was the first to have any significant reverberations, apparently because of the mathematical tallies and objective, scientific-like writing.

With the report, pressure came down on Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian leader viewed by most as a Nazi collaborationist, to halt the deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. By 1944, the tide had begun to turn against the Nazis and so it was not moral considerations, Twigg suggests, that turned Horthy against the deportations, but the fear of war crimes charges after the war. Regardless of Horthy’s motivations, it was this impact of the Vrba-Wetzler Report that is believed to have saved at least 100,000 and as many as 200,000 lives.

The deportations did not end permanently, though. And here Vrba’s history is inescapably tied up with that of another Rudolf – Rudolf (Rezső) Kasztner, one of the most polarizing figures in Holocaust history.

“A controversy persists to this day as to the extent prominent Jewish and Zionist leaders should be held accountable for a myriad of failures to adequately inform Jews about the lethal dangers of boarding the trains,” Twigg writes. “For the rest of his days, Vrba would chiefly lay the blame for the failure to adequately inform approximately 800,000 Jews in Hungary about the Holocaust on Kasztner, the Zionist leader from northern Transylvania.”

Kasztner was the first non-Slovakian official to see the Vrba-Wetzler Report and a harsh dispute rages still around what happened next.

In meetings among the leadership of Hungarian Jewry, it was apparently Kasztner who pressed for an approach in which, rather than alerting the Jewish population, the leadership would keep the information to themselves and negotiate directly with Adolf Eichmann for favourable terms that made it possible for Kasztner and other senior Jewish figures to save themselves and a number of others.

Kasztner (and those sympathetic to his narrative) would have seen some logic in the fact that the Nazi war effort was foundering and the Germans desperately needed goods and money, something Kasztner and his associates believed they could access through Jewish channels internationally. With the Soviets approaching from the east, they may have thought they could buy time and save more than their limited numbers.

Eventually, Kasztner negotiated with Eichmann that a trainload of about 1,684 Jews, many or most of Kasztner’s own choosing, would set off for Switzerland. It is estimated that the passage for each passenger had been “bought” from Eichmann for about $1,000.

The passengers did not go directly to Switzerland, though, but were rerouted to Bergen-Belsen. Unlike the other Hungarian Jews arriving at the concentration camps, however, these 1,600 or so were kept separate and eventually did make it to Switzerland, in two transports, later in the year.

In the meantime, 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz, where almost all of them were murdered.

The title of Vrba’s book, I Cannot Forgive, is assumed to refer to the Nazis. Twigg, among others, believes it is simultaneously a reference to Kasztner and his coterie of Jewish leaders.

Vrba was openly critical of the Jewish leadership, particularly those in Hungary and especially Kasztner, who by this time had risen to a moderately senior post in the Israeli government, along with other Hungarian Jewish leaders who were senior or mid-level figures in the governing party, Mapai. To some extent, put simply, the Hungarian Jews who had negotiated with Eichmann and who Vrba blamed for preventing his report from saving exponentially more Jewish lives, became integrated into the nascent elite of the new Jewish state. It was decidedly not in their interests to have the provocative professor, now halfway around the world in Vancouver, obtain any wider audience for his book.

Ruth Linn, an Israeli scholar of moral psychology and Holocaust memory at the University of Haifa, has Vancouver connections and stumbled onto Vrba’s story a couple of decades ago. She could not understand why his name was almost completely unknown in Israel. She spearheaded the first publication of the Vrba-Wetzler Report in Hebrew, in 1998, and, in 2004, wrote Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting, which examined why Vrba’s account had been marginalized in Israel and how politics and memory shaped Holocaust historiography.

Capturing the dichotomy of the debate around Kasztner’s role in the Hungarian Holocaust, Twigg juxtaposes two quotes. An Israeli judge, Benjamin Halevi, said of Kasztner, “He didn’t sell his soul to the devil; he was the devil.” Canadian author and publisher Anna Porter, who has written about the subject, said, “If you’re in hell, who do you negotiate with but the devil?”

A 1955 libel trial instigated by Kasztner proved his undoing. Ostensibly a case against Malkiel Gruenwald, who publicized the wartime actions of Kasztner, the trial turned into an examination of the facts of the case. Halevi, the judge who deemed Kasztner the devil himself, ruled that, by saving a chosen few, Kasztner had sacrificed the majority of Hungarian Jews. More than two years later, Israel’s Supreme Court overturned the judgment, but Kasztner did not live to see his legal redemption. He was assassinated outside his home in March 1957.

Twigg came to the Vrba story more by happenstance than design. Twigg edited BC Bookworld, a newspaper about books and authors, for more than three decades.

“I used to keep track of all the books of British Columbia and I had categories,” he said. He could cross-reference, for example, all books on Japanese-Canadians or forestry.

Based on this knowledge, in 2022, Twigg wrote Out of Hiding: Holocaust Literature of British Columbia. (See jewishindependent.ca/a-roadmap-to-remembering.) Its largest, though still necessarily brief, section is on Vrba. However, this was inadequate for Twigg, who decided to expand the project – first as a comprehensive website (rudolfvrba.com) – now as this book.

Not directly related to Holocaust Hero but timely, if profoundly overdue, an ad hoc group of friends and admirers of Vrba will erect the world’s only monument to him on Sunday, Oct. 26, beginning with a ceremony in the chapel at Schara Tzedeck Cemetery at 2 p.m. The program will feature reflections on Vrba’s life, legacy and enduring impact from Dr. Robert Krell, Dr. Joseph Ragaz and Prof. Chris Friedrichs, and will conclude with the dedication of the memorial monument.