A still from the documentary Resistance: They Fought Back. (theyfoughtback.com)
Resistance: They Fought Back screens March 3, 2pm, at Rothstein Theatre. Presented by the Vancouver Jewish Film Centre, special guest at the screening will be director Paula S. Apsell.
The film’s synopsis reads: “We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed ‘Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.’ Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel and the U.S., Resistance: They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of nonviolent resistance against the Nazis.”
For tickets ($10) to the screening, visit vjff.org.
During Hillel BC’s Holocaust Education Week, Drs. Gene Homel (pictured above) and Rachel Mines offered Unheard Echoes, a program on Jews in Lithuania. (photo by A. Jaugelis)
Unheard Echoes, a program on Jews in Lithuania, was held Jan. 29 during Hillel BC’s Holocaust Education Week on the University of British Columbia campus. Dr. Gene Homel, an historian, and Dr. Rachel Mines, a Yiddishist and English instructor, spoke about the past and present experiences of Litvaks, Jews with roots in the region of Lithuania.
Homel began by introducing Lithuania, a liberal democracy in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union, currently in the news because of possible threats from Russia’s attack on Ukraine. He explained that Jews have been a key, productive part of Lithuania since at least the early 1300s, when they were invited by nobility to settle in these territories and were granted a charter to run their own affairs in their own communities. By the 1700s, the largest Jewish population in Europe was in what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, occupying much of Eastern Europe. The partition of Poland in the late 1700s absorbed the region into imperial Russia.
Vilnius, now Lithuania’s capital but then in the Russian empire, was known as “the Jerusalem of the North” for its role as a world-renowned centre of Jewish learning, culture and publishing. However, poverty and Russian conscription motivated many Jews to emigrate in the early 20th century to North America,South Africa and elsewhere.
In 1918, with the First World War winding down, Jews joined the successful push for an independent Lithuanian state. While the restored Polish state, which now included Vilnius, slid into enhanced antisemitism in the 1930s, the much smaller Lithuanian state avoided pogroms and other extreme manifestations of antisemitism. Lithuanian Jews and Christians lived side by side in relative peace.
The 1939 pact between Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union divided Eastern Europe between the two tyrannies, and the Soviets forcibly annexed and Sovietized Lithuania and the other two formerly independent Baltic states, Latvia and Estonia. Mass deportations of Baltic peoples to Soviet Siberia included many Jews, who comprised an estimated 7% of Lithuania’s population but 10% of the deportees.
Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Baltics and the Soviet Union in mid-1941 initiated the Holocaust in Lithuania. Of the 220,000 to 250,000 Jews there, 95% were murdered, most in the early stages of Nazi occupation and control.
Lithuanian historians and researchers agree that, while most Lithuanians were passive bystanders, some thousands (the exact number is unknown) were (by degrees) active collaborators with the Nazis. Homel pointed out that collaborators were active in almost all other European countries, and there were some Lithuanians, such as Catholic clerics, who served as rescuers of their Jewish neighbours. More than 900 Lithuanians have been recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, and there were doubtless many more.
In 1944, the Soviets returned to the Baltics, robbing Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia of their independence, and costing many people their freedoms and their lives. Decades later, the fall of Soviet Communism – Lithuania was the first Soviet republic to declare its independence in 1990 – led to a revival of Jewish culture and institutions, as the Soviet Union had not only suppressed religious and cultural expression but denied or downplayed the Jewish Holocaust in the areas it controlled.
Homel discussed a particularly sensitive issue in Lithuania’s history of wartime Nazi occupation, since there was some overlap between those who were both anti-Soviet partisans from 1944 to the early 1950s (thus nationalist heroes) and Nazi collaborators. Recent published research on Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust has caused a stir of controversy, raising the problems of a competing sense of victimhood and of definitions of genocide. This can be seen as a sort of zero-sum game.Collaboration has been a contested issue in other countries’ histories, of course, for example France and, notably, Poland.
That said, the Lithuanian government has accomplished much by way of justice since the restoration of independence. Shortly after that time, in May 1990, the government issued a declaration condemning “without reservation the genocide perpetrated in Lithuania against the Jewish nation … and notes with sorrow that among the executioners who served the occupiers there were also citizens of Lithuania.” The declaration also stated that there would be no toleration for any expressions of antisemitism, and that all bodies of government and citizens should “create the most favourable conditions for the Jews of Lithuania….”
Four years later, the government created the annual Sept. 23 National Memorial Day for the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews. Commemorations are held in schools and other public and governmental institutions. The prime minister recently joined a march to Paneriai, a site of mass murder of Jews and non-Jews during the Nazi occupation. The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum includes five sites, one being the “Green House” Holocaust museum. In 2011, Lithuania committed to pay 37 million Euros over a decade in compensation for Jewish communal property seized during the mid-20th century, and recently the government passed a bill to transfer another 37 million euros. Rescuers have been honoured in the country, as well as by Israel’s Yad Vashem. International teams of archeologists are working on a project to recover Vilnius’s historic Great Synagogue, which was utterly destroyed by the Soviets in the 1950s.
Mines followed Homel’s presentation with a more personal view of Lithuania, based on her reconnection with her Litvak roots, and her experiences with the non-Jewish Lithuanian community both in Lithuania and in British Columbia. She detailed her father’s family life in Skuodas, a lively and thriving town near the Latvian border, which, prewar, had many Jewish-owned enterprises. His relatives once owned a productive boot and shoe factory in town. In 1936, her father, Sender, moved to Kaunas, then capital of Lithuania, and married. In 1941, Sender and his family were imprisoned in the Kaunas ghetto. That winter, Sender was deported to Latvia and forced into slave labour in several Nazi ghettos and concentration camps. As a survivor, he emigrated to Canada in the early 1950s, where he remarried and started a second family.
Mines and Homel have visited Lithuania a number of times in the last 16 years or so, including a Yiddish summer program at Vilnius University. They found a warm, welcoming reception in Skuodas, where the local museum featured a display on the town’s Jewish population, including Mines’s father. Locals took them to sites of interest, including the Jewish cemetery and Holocaust memorials, which date back many decades, to when the country was still under Soviet occupation. In 2015, Mines was invited to Skuodas to address high school students and adults during that year’s commemoration of the Holocaust in Lithuania. As she learned more about her father’s origins, Mines created a bilingual website on the town, shtetlshkud.com, as a genealogical and historical resource.
Both Mines and Homel are members of the board of directors of the Lithuanian Community of British Columbia (LCBC), which welcomes Litvaks and acknowledges the Jewish contribution to Lithuanian history and culture. The last two years, the LCBC has commemorated Lithuania’s National Memorial Day for the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews, first at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture and then at the Italian Cultural Centre. LCBC’s website is lithuaniansofbc.com.
Richmond RCMP Chief Superintendent Dave Chauhan, left, lights memorial candles with survivors David Schaffer, Sidi Schaffer, Amalia Boe-Fishman and Ilona Mermelstein, and Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie at a commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, at the Bayit, in Richmond, on Jan. 25. (photo by Pat Johnson)
Amalia Boe-Fishman was born in Leeuwarden, in the Netherlands, days before the start of the Second World War. Her mother’s parents and siblings had made aliyah to Israel in the early 1930s, but her mother, Johanna, stayed behind to pursue a career in nursing. Working in the Jewish hospital, she met Arnold van Kreveld, a patient who had been in a motorcycle accident, and they fell in love.
The couple married in 1935 and their first child, David, nicknamed Dik, was born in 1937. Amalia arrived Aug. 23, 1939.
“We had a good life, family, friends and neighbours,” Boe-Fishman said. But then, in May 1940, the German army invaded the Netherlands.
Boe-Fishman shared the story of her family’s survival at a commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, at the Bayit, in Richmond, on Jan. 25.
After the Nazis overran the Netherlands, her father’s parents and siblings were deported to Westerbork, a Nazi transit camp in the Netherlands, on Sept. 3, and on to Auschwitz, where they were immediately murdered, on Sept. 7.
Her father was a scientist and his young research assistant, Jan Spiekhout, a member of the Dutch resistance to the Nazis, would save the lives of the entire van Kreveld family.
“Jan Spiekhout found immediately an address for my father to go into hiding,” Boe-Fishman recalled. “He then found different hiding addresses for my mother, another address for my brother and then one for myself.”
Amalia was not yet a year old and her parents knew they might never see their children again.
“My mother gave me a special doll to keep me company and a letter I brought with me so my new family would understand her little girl a little better,” said Boe-Fishman. “In the letter, [she] told them how fond I was of my older brother Dik. If my parents would not survive the war, the Holocaust, to send us together to Israel to stay with one of my mother’s sisters.”
Amalia was taken to the home of Spiekhout and his parents, Durk and Froukje Spiekhout. The crowded and deeply religious Dutch Reformed household already had six children, of which Jan was the eldest. The younger Spiekhout children were told that Amalia was the daughter of a sick aunt in Rotterdam.
“They became my family,” said Boe-Fishman. “Father Spiekhout took a great risk bringing me into his household. He was a policeman. After all, policemen were supposed to work for the Nazis and round up Jews.”
She learned later that he instead warned Jewish neighbours of impending Nazi roundups.
“My father, typically Jewish looking, with dark hair, went from hiding place to hiding place – at least 26 different addresses,” Boe-Fishman said. “All at night and all arranged by Jan Spiekhout. My mother, not so typically Jewish looking, did not need to flee so often.
“As for myself, I don’t know what I remember or what I was told later on,” she said. “I was not allowed to go outside and I had to stay indoors for three years.”
On April 15, 1945, Canadian forces liberated Leeuwarden.
“What did that mean for me?” she asked. “Liberation should have been a really happy time for me. I was told that I could go outdoors. I didn’t know what to expect, what was waiting for me outdoors. Indoors had become my entire life. Indoors was where I felt secure and safe. Indoors was all I knew.”
Greater change was to come.
“I was told I had a real family and I was told I was going home,” she said. “But who were those people, who were those strangers? I did not want to leave the family Spiekhout. They were my real family and I loved them. My own father and mother were patient with me. They would come over to visit and I would run away or hang onto Mother Spiekhout screaming, ‘I don’t want to go home!’”
Dik, who was now 7-and-a-half, was also a stranger to little Amalia. Most incredibly, and at profound danger, a younger sibling had been born in hiding, a baby named Jan, in honour of the family’s saviour.
The name Jan has profound resonance in the family. Amalia’s oldest son, who joined her at the commemoration, was born in 1962 and is also named Jan.
That the entire immediate family had survived the Holocaust – had grown, in fact – was almost inconceivable. Dutch Jews had one of the lowest survival rates during the Holocaust. The van Krevelds owed everything to the Spiekhout family who, in 2008, were recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority. Boe-Fishman and her children attended a ceremony honouring the Spiekhouts in The Hague in 2009.
In 1961, Boe-Fishman (then van Kreveld) went to Israel trying to find her Jewish identity. The Eichmann trial was taking place at the time, which cracked open consciousness of the Holocaust not only for most of the world, but for survivors, including her family, who had remained almost entirely silent on the subject. In Israel, she met and married a Canadian Jew from Vancouver and settled here becoming, among other things, a devoted speaker to class groups and others about her Holocaust experiences.
Rabbi Levi Varnai of the Bayit contextualized Boe-Fishman’s presentation.
“I think that this year – every year, but this year maybe more than any year – with all the craziness in the world, this event is even more important than ever before,” he said.
Keith Liedtke, president of the Bayit, served as master of ceremonies and credited Michael Sachs, now regional director for Jewish National Fund of Canada, for starting the tradition five years ago of inviting the mayor to recognize Holocaust Remembrance Day annually.
Cantor Yaakov Orzech chanted El Moleh Rachamim. Richmond’s Mayor Malcolm Brodie read the proclamation and reflected on Boe-Fishman’s experiences. RCMP Chief Superintendent Dave Chauhan joined the mayor and survivors in lighting memorial candles. Liedtke read a message from Steveston-Richmond East Member of Parliament Parm Bains. Kelly Greene, member of the Legislative Assembly for Richmond-Steveston, brought greetings from Premier David Eby. Also in attendance were Richmond South Centre MLA Henry Yao and Richmond city councilors Chak Au, Andy Hobbs and Bill McNulty.
In addition to the Bayit, the event was presented with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Kehila Society of Richmond and Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.
Hillel BC’s Holocaust Education Week takes place on campus at the University of British Columbia Jan. 29-Feb. 2. Every day of that week, there will be something going on to attend and learn from, including the exhibit from Yad Vashem called Shoah: How Was It Humanly Possible?, which will be on display the whole week.
Jan. 29, 6 p.m.: Unheard Echoes: Jews in Lithuania Before, During and After the Holocaust. Presentations about the Jewish connection to Lithuania throughout history, focusing on the Holocaust, by Rachel Mines and Gene Homel, two members of the Lithuanian community. Register at forms.office.com/r/s4uAFqv8gc.
Jan. 30, 6 p.m.: Unheard Echoes: The Far Reach of the Holocaust in Asia. Ryan Sun is a PhD candidate in the department of history at UBC, working with Prof. Leo Shin and Prof. Richard Menkis. His transnational project expands the geography of Jewish exile outside Europe and beyond Shanghai, and onto the British colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore. He is particularly interested in Jewish refugees’ ship-bound experiences, how transiting colonial port-cities and encountering local inhabitants informed their understanding of “the Orient,” as well as how these ship-moments disrupt the standard narratives of the Holocaust and survivor testimonies. Register at forms.office.com/r/aQx4LG2Fhi.
Jan. 31, 5 p.m.: In a partnership between Hillel, brothers of the AEPi chapter of Vancouver and Chabad UBC, there will be a reading of the names of those who were murdered in the Holocaust. Meet at Hillel, then walk over to the fountain at the main mall, where the reading of the names will begin at 5:30 p.m. The reading can also be joined online, live on Hillel BC Facebook and Instagram, as well as the Instagram page for AEPi.
Feb. 1, 5 p.m.: A Fireside Chat and Q&A with Survivor Marie Doduck & Dr. Lauren Faulkner Rossi. Marie (Mariette) Rozen Doduck was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1935. She immigrated to Canada in 1947 as a war orphan with three of her siblings and settled in Vancouver. She is actively involved in Holocaust education and is a cofounder of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
Rossi is currently researching child survivors of the Holocaust, the significance of their memoirs to Holocaust studies and the shared language of trauma among child survivors of different genocides.
Feb. 2, 5 p.m.: Students-only Shabbat Dinner with Honoured Guests: Holocaust Survivors will feature a candlelighting ceremony and survivors spread out among the dining tables with students. Students can register at forms.office.com/r/ayufQr3Zmy.
For more information or help with the registration links, email [email protected] or call 604-224-4748.
A still from the documentary Passage to Sweden, which will screen as part of the annual Raoul Wallenberg Day for Civil Courage event on Jan. 21.
This year’s annual Raoul Wallenberg Day for Civil Courage gathering, on Sunday, Jan. 21, held at Congregation Beth Israel, will explore and honour civil courage in Scandinavia during the Second World War.
Just over 80 years ago, in late 1943, Danes, Norwegians and Swedes had to confront moral choices, when Denmark and Norway dealt with military occupation by Nazi Germany. Many people defied Nazi policies that threatened the human rights and lives of their fellow citizens and residents.
In Denmark, thousands of Christian Danes risked their own lives, cooperating in the dramatic, swift and secret rescue operation. The Jews, who faced deportation and certain death at the hands of the Nazis, were ferried to safety in neutral Sweden. Their homes and properties were safeguarded until their return after the war. Sweden welcomed and aided the Danish Jews, risking its own status as a neutral nation.
In Norway, the site of significant armed attacks by Nazi Germany, hundreds of Norwegian police officers refused the orders of Nazi occupiers, a collective action that led to their imprisonment at Stutthof concentration camp in Nazi-controlled Poland. There, the Norwegian police maintained their solidarity as they acted to reduce the suffering of their fellow prisoners, including many Jews, such as the late Jennie Lifschitz, who settled in Vancouver in the early 1950s.
Finland and the Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) were also engulfed in the war, victims of the Soviet Union’s military occupation and, in the case of the Baltics, annexation and mass civilian deportations.
While Nordic peoples, like most Europeans, were not completely free of hostility toward Jews and other minorities, they offer a good example of civil courage, based on the belief that Jewish citizens and residents were their equals.
This year, at the local Wallenberg Day event, Vancouver Holocaust educator Norman Gladstone will speak about the remarkable rescue of Denmark’s Jewish population. Local researcher and author Tore Jørgensen will speak about the hundreds of Norwegian policemen, including his father, who refused to collaborate with the Nazi occupiers. Historian Gene Homel will introduce the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society and the City of Vancouver proclamation of Wallenberg Day.
As well, the documentary Passage to Sweden will be screened. The film covers the wartime courage of Scandinavians, including Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg, who acted courageously to protect civilians in Hungary, and was taken into custody by the Soviet army. His fate is unknown to this day.
The 19th annual Wallenberg Day on Jan. 21 at Congregation Beth Israel will be held at 1:30 p.m. Admission is free and donations will be gratefully accepted.
For more about the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, which organizes the annual event, visit wsccs.ca.
– Courtesy Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society
In his ambiguously titled book Ordinary, Extraordinary: My Father’s Life, Vancouver lawyer and community leader Bernard Pinsky shares the biography of Rubin Pinsky. As the pages turn, the reader realizes that ordinariness and extraordinariness really do describe the tale of a life that veers from historically monumental to surprisingly, and gratefully, commonplace.
At 1 p.m., Jan. 28, Pinsky will officially launch the book, in honour of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, at a prologue event to the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival. He will present in conversation with Marsha Lederman.
Pinsky’s book is based on videotaped testimonies that his father, Rubin, gave in 1983 and 1990 to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (which is co-presenting the Jan. 28 event), as well as family memories and what is clearly intensive research.
Rubin was born (probably) in 1924, about 100 kilometres north of Pinsk in what is now Belarus but was then Poland. Pinsky sets the stage beautifully, evoking shtetl life, where the smallest of the children slept atop the bakery oven in the tiny home after his father, Baruch, had baked challah and cakes during the day to eke out a meagre living.
After the German occupation, the Nazis quickly identified the men in the Jewish community who had leadership qualities and said they were needed for an important mission in a nearby area. They were marched just out of earshot and mass murdered. In a later selection, Baruch, his wife Henya and 10-year-old Rachel were marched off and never seen again.
Rubin and his sister Chasia were deemed useful for forced labour and spared the executions. Older brother Herzl had earlier been conscripted into the Red Army.
Every survivor narrative includes a series of unimaginable interventions, coincidences and happenstances, often made possible by acts of incredible daring by the survivor. Through a series of audacious escapades – they weighed off what appeared to be likelihood of certain death with the faint hope of survival – Rubin, Chasia and a few others escaped a selection process and fled to the forest. They lived off berries, roots, tree bark and what small game they could capture. In one instance, Rubin slew a timber wolf in a competition for the same rabbit.
The group connected with a diffuse but apparently well-organized network of Jewish and other partisan fighters. Despite the challenges of mere survival, Rubin and Chasia participated in anti-Nazi actions that included cutting telephone lines, destroying railway tracks and undermining the establishment of Nazi garrisons.
Typhus swept through the Jews in the forest. In the winter of 1943/44, Rubin was delirious with fever and expected to die. In one of the terrible choices people were forced to make in such situations, the partisan cadre decided to leave him behind to save the group. Chasia refused to go. The two siblings hid in a ditch and, to the best of her ability, she nursed him back to comparative health.
Each of these unlikely survival stories makes one wonder how many similar stories did not have the relatively happy ending Rubin’s did, how many survivor testimonies or second generation narratives were never written because the fever did not break, or the hero did not take a risk on a faint hope, or any of a million chance escapes or saving miracles did not occur in time.
In July 1944, the forest in which Rubin and Chasia had hid, fought and barely survived was liberated by the Soviet army. Concentration and death camps were repurposed into displaced persons camps after the war and Rubin and Chasia were in Bergen-Belsen. Chasia left and searched for three weeks, eventually finding Herzl and bringing him with her to Bergen-Belsen, where the three surviving members of the family were reunited.
Zionists tried to recruit them to go to Palestine, but Rubin knew that would be a continuation of the conflict, uncertainty and fighting he wanted to put behind him.
“Rubin therefore made up his mind,” writes Pinsky. “He needed a skill or trade in demand in America. He and Herzl made a pact. They would study together, each in a different trade, and go together to the New World. They would help each other and never be separated again.”
The story of how Rubin and Herzl (in the New World, he would be known as Harry) were able to migrate to Canada is another example of chutzpah – an hilarious drama of subterfuge – that has to be read to be believed. Chasia, whose marriage in the DP camp did not last, joined them soon after.
Rubin married Jenny Moser in 1951 and they would have three children: the author, Bernard, his older sister Helen and younger brother Max – all now mainstays of the Vancouver Jewish community. Rubin’s life in Canada was that of a hardscrabble entrepreneur – and not without its seemingly miraculous near-misses and fortunate endings.
As an appendix, Pinsky shares writings from a 2012 family roots trip back to Gzetl, where a dedicated teacher is keeping alive the memory of Gzetl’s Jews.
Pinsky’s memoir is indeed a story both extraordinary and ordinary, of what human resilience can summon in a world turned upside-down – and how the strength developed in unimaginable adversity can carry a survivor through challenges when life becomes, in comparison, ordinary.
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas “visit” the Jericho Arts Centre to tell of their 40-year relationship, of friendships with iconic artists, of Alice’s overwhelming devotion to Gertrude’s genius and how, as two Jewish lesbians, they survived in Paris in the Second World War. They want to find out how their lives are – or are not – remembered.
Lois Anderson directs the United Players production at Jericho Arts Centre Jan. 19-Feb. 11. For tickets, visit unitedplayers.com/gertrude-alice.
At the Nov. 9 Kristallnacht commemorative event, left to right: Dr. Janus Møller Jensen, Nina Krieger, Prof. Chris Friedrichs and Abby Wener Herlin. (photo by Rhonda Dent)
The rescue of Danish Jews during the Holocaust – an operation that mobilized almost the entire strata of Denmark’s population – is one of the bright lights in the history of that dark era. That extraordinary event, which took place 80 years ago last month, is one of the reasons Denmark had one of the highest survival rates of any country during the Shoah. Even this uplifting story, though, has its “shadows,” according to an expert who spoke in Vancouver Nov. 9.
Dr. Janus Møller Jensen, an historian and director of the Danish Jewish Museum, was the keynote speaker at the annual community-wide Kristallnacht Commemoration, presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and held at Beth Israel Synagogue.
Denmark has an unusual history in the context of Nazi occupation. After the Nazis invaded the country with minimal opposition, in April 1940, politicians and the king, Christian X, surrendered, but managed to negotiate terms that allowed the Danish democratic system of government to continue in a so-called “peace occupation.” Importantly, one of the Danish demands was that no Dane be singled out according to their race or faith, said Møller Jensen.
This status quo fell apart in 1943, after a series of strikes and uprisings around the country. Amid the Nazi crackdown came rumours at the end of September that an action against Danish Jews was imminent. At the same time, word spread that Sweden was prepared to accept Danish Jews as refugees. A mobilization of fishing boats began – as did the Nazi mobilization – in early October. Up and down the coast of Denmark, small and larger boats carried their cargo of Jewish Danes across the straight to neutral Sweden. In all, an estimated 7,220 Jews and 686 non-Jewish spouses were transported. Of all Danish Jews, 472 were captured by the Nazis and transported to Theresienstadt, in present-day Chechia, a waystation to the extermination camps. Of these, all but 53 survived the war, in part because the Danish government persuaded the Nazis to allow food and medicine packages to be delivered to the Danish inmates.
Another stunning reality was that, when the Danish Jews who survived – estimates of survival range from 95% to 99% – returned to Denmark, almost all found their homes and possessions intact – a stark difference from what Jews elsewhere in Europe discovered if they returned to their places or origin.
Not all of Danish history is so bright for Jews, said Møller Jensen. A long history of Catholic and Lutheran theological antisemitism permeates Denmark, and immigration policies before the Second World War prevented many Jews from elsewhere from reaching refuge.
“We have letters of refusal in our collection, of people who we know later died in the camps,” said Møller Jensen.
In addition, Danish companies and agricultural producers provided materials to the German war effort, although this was required of all occupied countries, he noted.
Not all rescuers acted on altruistic motives, either, Møller Jensen added. Some fishers took money to transport Danish Jews, but he also noted that, while hindsight suggests the Nazi occupiers turned something of a blind eye to the rescue operation, those involved at the time did not know this and would likely have assumed they were risking their lives.
In addition to the hands-on rescue, Danish society rose up against the Nazis’ action. “Organizations from the entire strata of society – doctors, professors, students, lawyers, industries, working unions – protested,” he said. “The Danish church promulgated a so-called ‘Shepherd’s Letter’ to be read aloud in all of the churches in Denmark the following Sunday, stating that this was an unchristian act, that all people were the same in the eyes of God and that this was wrong and the congregation should assist and protect their fellow human beings…. One of the priests remembered, having read the letter aloud, that the entire congregation spontaneously rose to its feet and shouted ‘Yes!’”
Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld thanked Møller Jensen and reflected on his words.
“The Danish people,” he said, “did exactly the opposite of what happened in Poland. When the Jews came back to Poland, they were murdered and their property was stolen, and when the Jews came back to Denmark, dinner was waiting for them on their tables. That is righteousness.”
BC Premier David Eby spoke at the Kristallnacht event, saying he wanted to provide assurances that all parties in the Legislature are committed to ensuring that the Jewish community in British Columbia is protected from antisemitism and feels safe. He acknowledged the proximate anniversaries of Kristallnacht and Remembrance Day, and noted that his government had just announced that Holocaust education will become mandatory in the BC school system.
“The thing about remembering is you can’t remember something you’ve never learned, you can’t remember something you were never taught,” Eby told the audience. “I’m proud to stand with you, to support your community, to stand against antisemitism, to stand against Islamophobia, to stand against all forms of hate, for British Columbia to be a beacon of hope in the world of what is possible at a time when those who want to promote division and hate seem to be on the rise just about everywhere. We have lots to be proud of in this province and part of what I’m incredibly proud of is the strength of our Jewish community here and I’m very honoured to be with you here this evening.”
Before the keynote address, Prof. Chris Friedrichs, emeritus professor of history at the University of British Columbia, contextualized Kristallnacht and called the Danish rescue “the most spectacular episode of rescue in the entire history of the Shoah.”
The Kristallnacht gathering was presented in conjunction with Congregation Beth Israel and funded by the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, with support from the Robert and Marilyn Krell Endowment Fund of the VHEC. Møller Jensen’s visit was facilitated by Norman Gladstone and Birgit Westergaard.
Corinne Zimmerman, president of the board of the VHEC, introduced a procession of Holocaust survivors, who carried memorial candles. Nina Krieger, executive director of the VHEC, opened the event and read greetings from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Cantor Yaacov Orzech recited El Moleh Rachamim. Councilor Sarah Kirby-Yung read a proclamation from the City of Vancouver. Taleeb Noormohamad, member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville, sent video-recorded greetings from Ottawa. BC cabinet ministers Selina Robinson and George Heyman were in attendance, as was Michael Lee, member of the Legislative Assembly for Vancouver-Langara.
The event drew a record crowd, according to organizers, of 420 in-person attendees and an additional 120 watching via livestream, including groups at the Louis Brier Home and Hospital and the Weinberg Residence.
BC cabinet minister Selina Robinson speaks Nov. 5 at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue. Other panelists at the B’nai Brith Canada event that day were, left to right, Schara Tzedeck’s Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt, BC United MLA Michael Lee and Aron Csaplaros, BC regional manager for B’nai Brith. (photo by Pat Johnson)
British Columbia is to become only the second province in Canada to mandate Holocaust education in the school curriculum. In a surprise announcement at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on Oct. 30, BC Premier David Eby was flanked by Jewish community leaders and survivors of the Holocaust when he said that Grade 10 students will be required to learn about the Holocaust, beginning in the 2025-26 school year.
Until now, it was possible for a student to graduate from the school system in British Columbia without ever having encountered the subject. Teachers have discretion to include the Holocaust in social studies classes and an elective on genocide is available in some schools, but there was no universally mandated requirement for learning about the Shoah. Ontario recently instituted mandatory Holocaust education at the Grade 6 level, becoming the first province in the country to make the subject compulsory.
Speaking at an event on Nov. 5, BC cabinet minister Selina Robinson recounted how the milestone decision unfolded. She credits former BC education minister (now minister of transportation and infrastructure) Rob Fleming with launching the idea in 2018. Fleming came to Robinson and asked if she knew that Holocaust education was not mandatory.
“Just like many, many others, I was surprised to learn that,” said Robinson. “He started the ball rolling.”
The COVID pandemic derailed the plans, as educators and administrators struggled to simply deliver learning to kids.
It was while reading Vancouver author Marsha Lederman’s book Kiss the Red Stairs that Robinson, who is the province’s minister of post-secondary education and future skills, wondered what had happened with Fleming’s idea.
“So, I picked up the phone and I called Rachna [Singh, the current minister of education] and then I called Rob Fleming and then I called a couple of my other colleagues who had an interest in seeing this move forward,” she recounted. “And then I called the premier and I said, David, this project that we started is moving at a snail’s pace and this needs to get done. We cannot wait any longer. I want to give kudos to our premier, to David Eby. He said, I’m on it.”
Robinson was speaking at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue on Sunday as part of a panel on antisemitism and Holocaust education organized by B’nai Brith Canada. Numerous members of the legislature, as well as mayors, councilors and school trustees from around the province joined the event virtually. Robinson’s fellow panelists were BC United MLA Michael Lee and Schara Tzedeck’s Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt. Aron Csaplaros, BC regional manager for B’nai Brith Canada, moderated, with senior leaders from B’nai Brith beaming in from Eastern Canada.
From Robinson’s post-COVID jumpstarting of the Holocaust education planning, things leapt forward, she said.
“It really moved, I would say, from June until probably the beginning of September, at lightning speed – and anyone who’s ever had to work with government knows that nothing ever moves at lightning speed,” Robinson said. “So, I want to give kudos to our partners at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and CIJA [the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs] and [the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver] for coming together and working in partnership. I know that B’nai Brith is new on the scene [in BC] and this is a very important piece, but I also think it’s really important to recognize those that have been working … for a number of years to make this happen.”
The timing of the announcement, in the weeks after the Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel and in the midst of a massive spike in antisemitism worldwide, was coincidental. The issues, though, are related.
Robinson said the provincial government has been vigilant in monitoring antisemitism and potential for violence in British Columbia. She credited Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General Mike Farnworth for spearheading the response.
“He called me every single day from Oct. 7 for about 10 days, to report in to me about what was happening on the ground,” she said. In addition to her official role with advanced education, Robinson said she is known among colleagues as “the Jew in the crew,” as the provincial elected official who is most publicly visible in her Jewishness.
On Nov. 1, Robinson convened a meeting of the heads of the 25 post-secondary institutions in the province.
“I got agreement from all 25 presidents that they would do everything within their power to make sure that everyone felt safe on their campuses,” she said. “I don’t think solving that is going to be an easy task, but it’s absolutely a requirement of all of them, because, in this province and in this country, we believe that everybody has the right to be who they are and to feel safe and, if it’s not happening, then we need to fix it.”
A bipartisan love-in that has been going on between Robinson and Lee, who represents Vancouver-Langara (the provincial constituency that includes many of Vancouver’s Jewish institutions and residents), continued Sunday in the obvious respect and affection between the two MLAs despite party lines. Lee made the news last week after rising in the house to give a personal tribute to Robinson’s strength as a leader who is Jewish in this challenging time and Robinson reciprocated kind words at the B’nai Brith event.
“Michael Lee has been a steadfast supporter, not just in this particular situation,” she said. “But also [to me] as a Jewish person who is having her own experience as a Jew around what is happening.”
Robinson spoke emotionally about the impacts of current events on her family, which includes her Israeli soon-to-be son-in-law, who became a permanent resident of Canada at the end of September.
Making Holocaust education a mandatory part of the province’s education curriculum has been a dream of the people at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre since the organization was founded, in 1994, according to Nina Krieger, the VHEC’s executive director.
“I think stars aligned and David Eby acknowledged Selina Robinson as being a key driving force in this initiative,” Krieger told the Independent.
A process of consultation will now begin and Krieger expects her agency will be central to that work, identifying and providing resources to help craft the new curriculum, which is likely to be a component of the Social Studies 10 learning outcomes.
“Certainly we bring a wealth of experience and a roster of programs and resources and best practices that will be relevant to the curriculum development process,” she said. “We are also poised to work with the minister of education to play whatever role is needed for that process. Also, we know the implementation and resource tools and training that teachers are going to need will be really important as well, so we’re looking forward to supporting the province and the teachers directly with that.”
The Jewish Federation and CIJA will continue to be engaged with the planning for mandatory Holocaust education. Both organizations issued statements after the announcement Oct. 30.
“When left unchecked, antisemitism culminates in some of the darkest chapters in human history. By learning from the Holocaust, we honour the memories of its victims and, we hope, contribute to preventing future tragedies,” said Ezra Shanken, Federation’s chief executive officer. “Today’s announcement shows the BC government’s commitment to creating a safer society for all.”
“Education is key to ensuring that our children learn to combat hate and that the Jewish community can live in a safer province,” said Nico Slobinsky, CIJA’s vice-president for the Pacific Region. “We look forward to working with the BC government on implementing mandatory Holocaust education in our province’s K-12 curriculum.”
At Sunday’s event, Marvin Rotrand, national director of B’nai Brith’s League of Human Rights, speaking virtually from Montreal, noted that 15 US states have some form of mandatory Holocaust education – and early indications from studies in those jurisdictions indicate a decrease in hate crimes not only toward Jews but other groups as well.
The costs of completing the documentary A 20th Century Passion include editing time, colour correction and sound mix. (screenshot)
A GoFundMe campaign has been launched to bring to the big screen a documentary about the late Peter Gary, a Hungarian-born composer, Holocaust survivor and resident of Victoria.
The online fundraising effort to complete A 20th Century Passion was started by filmmaker David Malysheff and Gary’s widow, Judith Estrin. Their goal is $35,000.
Gary passed away in 2016, the same year his oratorio A 20th Century Passion premièred in Jerusalem. The work spans the period from the First World War to the Nuremberg trials, including his experiences living in and surviving three years in three different concentration camps.
Gary had a message, the campaign organizers say, which was to stamp out hate. Over the years, he delivered this message to tens of thousands of students throughout Canada.
“The message of the oratorio is to remember history, that hate is ugly and brutal and should be stopped. It is a love piece in honour of Peter’s mother, who was brutally murdered by the Nazis while Peter spent three years in death camps,” Estrin said.
“Like all classical oratorios, it is tragic – this one deals not with the life of Jesus but with the six million murdered Jews. Because Peter had to deal with the murdered bodies of children, he dedicated the piece to the murdered 1.5 million Jewish children,” she said.
While Gary wrote the oratorio over a period of many years, revising it right up to time of his death, it was mostly written during 1970s and 1980s. Barak Tal, the conductor who led the work in Jerusalem, spent time with Gary at his home, going over every note.
The documentary explains how the oratorio came to fruition, using the Jerusalem performance as the score beneath the narrative. The film also shows Gary speaking to high school students about his experiences.
Malysheff, who has been a cinematographer for The Nature of Things, Us and Them and The Fifth Estate, described the film as a passion project – one for which he has not received any payment in the seven years since he began working on it. The costs of completing the film, including editing time, colour correction, sound mix and more, have led Estrin and him to appeal to the public for support.
The importance of A 20th Century Passion at this time cannot be overstated, Estrin said. “With antisemitic hate crimes and acts up just since Oct. 7, the message to stamp out hate, to go in peace, is more critical than ever,” she said. “The world has lost its moral compass, and this piece is about the hope that [people] will remember what horror the 20th century held for the world. We are facing an enemy who wants to annihilate all Jews. Once they are done with us, they will come for everyone else.”
The filmmakers also point out that a significant number of North Americans born after 1981 cannot name a single concentration camp or ghetto and think that fewer than six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. An alarming percentage of young people, they added, hold the opinion that the Jews caused the Holocaust.
Gary was born in 1924 into an artistic family that included famed Hungarian musicians, such as conductor Eugene Ormandy and pianist Lili Kraus. Through his mother’s encouragement, he began his musical training on the piano before the age of 5.
Deemed a musical “wunderkind,” Gary was admitted at the age of 9 to Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy of Music, where he studied advanced choral and orchestral composition, as well as conducting, under the tutelage of Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly and Leo Weiner.
In 1940, Gary’s education stopped when both he and his mother were arrested by the Nazis. His father was away on a business trip, which allowed him to escape into hiding. Gary spent the next years in concentration camps before he was liberated from Bergen-Belsen by the British on his 21st birthday.
Following the war, Gary moved to Paris to resume his musical studies at Sorbonne University. He received a doctorate in musicology there in 1949.
Gary then immigrated to the United States and, for a brief time, worked in the music department at MGM. In 1963, he took a year off to compose a ballet suite that was performed in France. During his life, he composed more than 20 orchestral pieces, which have been performed in the United States, Canada, Germany, Holland, France and Scotland.
The film runs approximately 90 minutes. Malysheff and Estrin would like it shown at Jewish film festivals and in schools. They have a curriculum for secondary schools that uses the libretto as text. To date, the oratorio has been translated into Hebrew, French and German.
To donate to the documentary’s fundraising campaign, visit gofund.me/d335a5f8. All who send in a contribution will receive a screen credit for being part of the message of the film.
Sam Margolishas written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.