Tag: Holocaust

Survivors reflect on liberation

Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar moderates a panel with Holocaust survivors, left to right, Janos Benisz, Amalia Boe-Fishman, Dr. Peter Suedfeld and Alex Buckman. (photo by Pat Johnson)

One survivor of the Holocaust who spoke at a panel recently believes that, in a generation or two, people will largely forget about the catastrophic events of that time.

“I think the world will forget about Auschwitz,” said Dr. Peter Suedfeld, a professor emeritus in the department of psychology at the University of British Columbia. “The world has already forgotten about ‘never again.’ We’ve had a fair number of genocides since 1945, in which the world did not intervene. A recent poll that I saw … apparently, the proportion of people who remember anything about how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust, what Auschwitz was, what the Holocaust was and so on, is not all that much above 50%.

“This is going to go on generation after generation,” he continued. “The survivors won’t be here to push the story any further. Their children will for awhile, but they have other things to do and other things to be concerned about and their children even more so. In a few more generations, it will be in the history books and people will say, yeah, I read about that or thought about that in grade whatever but, in terms of remembering it as something in your gut, something that arouses an emotion, something that has a personal connection to you, I don’t think it’s going to last all that much longer. I’m sorry to say that, but that’s what I think.”

Suedfeld, who weeks earlier was invested into the Order of Canada for his decades of work on the psychological and physical effects of extreme and challenging environments, was speaking at Hillel House, on the UBC campus, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27. He was part of a panel of four survivors sharing their reflections 75 years after liberation.

Suedfeld, who was born in Hungary, survived under false papers and a back story as an orphaned Roman Catholic child. He recalled successive bombardments of the various sanctuaries he was in near the end of the war, as Allied bombers repeatedly blew buildings apart while Suedfeld and other children hid in the cellars.

After liberation by Russian forces, Suedfeld was eventually reunited with his father; his mother had been murdered. The lesson he took from the experience, he told the packed afternoon audience, was to cherish and defend the values of freedom.

“Freedom to be who you really are, but freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of everything,” he said. After moving to the United States, Suedfeld became a powerful advocate of the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion and expression. Since coming to Canada, he has been a similar champion of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, he said.

Suedfeld’s admittedly pessimistic perspective on the future of Holocaust remembrance was contested by Alex Buckman, a fellow survivor on the panel.

As long as organizations exist like the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, which co-sponsored the event with Hillel BC, and children of survivors and others who have been touched by their experiences share the lessons they have learned, the future will be better, he said.

“Maybe our children will pick up, speaking on our behalf,” said Buckman. “Maybe they will remember because we will tell them what happened.”

Like Suedfeld, Buckman survived by being hidden by Catholics; in his case, in Belgium.

“They told us that the war was over and that we should rejoice and be happy and our parents would come and pick us up and everything would be hunky-dory,” he recalled. “At 6-and-a-half in an orphanage, nothing was that rosy. We saw parents come and pick up their children and take them home, but nobody came for us. I was there with my sister Annie and she was crying and wondering why our parents weren’t coming and I tried to tell her that I’m sure that they will come. But, like her, I didn’t know why they weren’t coming.”

The pair were moved back to Brussels and put in the care of the Red Cross, which posted the names of orphaned and unclaimed children on sheets around the city. Eventually, a paternal uncle showed up and took the two children to Annie’s parents – who, since little Alex had believed himself to be Annie’s brother, he reasonably concluded were also his parents. The truth came out in a cruel way, when another cousin, in a pique of anger, blurted out to Alex that his parents were dead and that Annie’s parents were not his.

“I took a step back and, for the first time, I realized I was alone,” Buckman recalled. His aunt and uncle did care for him, though, despite the uncle’s misgivings, because of the aunt’s insistence based on a promise she made to the heavens when she learned of her sister’s death.

Also on the panel was Amalia Boe-Fishman, who was born in the northern Netherlands in 1939 and also survived thanks to a Christian family. Like many survivors, her liberation story is not one of joyous freedom but of confusion and fear of the future.

“Liberation should have been a real happy time for me. It wasn’t,” she said. “I was told we were free, but what did that mean? What did that mean to a frightened 5-year-old girl who had been in hiding for three years? What did it mean to be free? I was told that, for the first time I could remember … I would now be able to go outdoors. I didn’t know what to expect. What was there? 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.”

Her first venture out was harrowing. It was odd enough to be surrounded by throngs of strangers after her entire life had been confined to just a few familiar faces. After a victory parade, the girls she knew as her “sisters” decided to walk to the town centre. While crossing a bridge with scores of others – Amalia had never seen a bridge before – a rumour started that the Nazis had returned and panic swept the crowd. Pushing and shoving was accompanied by screaming and concern that the bridge was about to collapse.

“Here I was, trapped outdoors, in a crowd of panicked strangers and I was terrified,” she said. “The bridge didn’t collapse, but, as you can imagine [it was] a very long time before I would ever cross a bridge again.”

Another ostensibly joyous aspect of liberation was also clouded with confusion and fear.

“I was told that I had a real family. I had a real father, a real mother, an older brother and a baby brother,” said Boe-Fishman. “Miraculously, out of many different hiding places, all four of them had survived the war.… But who were these people? They were strangers. So, this is what liberation means to me. To leave the only family I ever had known to go outdoors to a place of terrified strangers, to strange people in a strange home.… I had to adapt to a new and also frightening world.”

For Janos Benisz, liberation was similarly conflicted. As a child, he had seen his father and his grandmother dead in the streets. His mother had been killed earlier by Nazi collaborators, during what was to have been a routine medical procedure.

Young Janos was transported from his hometown of Esztergom, Hungary, to Budapest, where Jews were divided up, many being sent directly to death camps including Auschwitz.

“I ended up in an Austrian slave labour camp,” he said, remaining there for seven or eight months before the Russians liberated them.

“I had the body of a 4-year-old,” he recalled. “At my bar mitzvah, I was under five feet.”

Making his way back to his hometown, he found squatters in the family’s house and learned that, of his immediate family of eight uncles, two aunts and 29 cousins, only Janos and one uncle had survived the Nazis.

Benisz was put in a Jewish orphanage in Budapest, then sent to Halifax, where he was put on a train to Winnipeg. He was bounced from foster home to foster home, back to an orphanage and then to a reformatory.

“I couldn’t fit in,” he said. At 18, he got a job at the Winnipeg Free Press as a copy boy.

“I spent the next 15 years in the newspaper business, then I became a salesman on my own, retired in ’71,” he said. He noted the figurative and literal centrality of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver in his life today. He lives 40 yards from the centre, he said, and much of his social life is focused there.

“It’s my second home,” he said. “I work out there. I shmooze there. I’ve got a group of guys I call the ‘kosher nostra.’ I’m very happy. I absolutely adore this country of Canada. It’s been good to me ever since I turned 18.”

Prior to the panel, Holocaust survivors lit candles of remembrance. Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart read a proclamation declaring International Holocaust Remembrance Day in the city. Rob Fleming, British Columbia’s minister of education, spoke on the importance of Holocaust education and credited the partnership of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC). Student Adam Dobrer shared his family’s Holocaust legacy. Prof. Nancy Hermiston, director of voice and opera at the University of British Columbia, provided opening remarks. Nina Krieger, executive director of the VHEC, introduced the program and spoke of the importance of remembrance and the power of the memory of Auschwitz on the 75th anniversary of its liberation. Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar, education director and curator of the VHEC, moderated the panel. Rabbi Philip Bregman, chaplain of Hillel BC, chanted El Maleh Rachamim and the Mourners’ Kaddish.

Many other commemorations and events took place throughout the province on and around Jan. 27.

Pink Rabbit opens festival

Riva Krymalowski as Anna, in the film, which opens the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival Feb. 27. (photo from betacinema.com)

The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival opens the night of Feb. 27 with the film When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which offers a peek at a pivotal event in writer and illustrator Judith Kerr’s life.

Kerr passed away just under a year ago, at her home in London, England, at the age of 95. She had dozens of children’s books to her credit, including The Tiger Who Came to Tea and Mog the Forgetful Cat; Mog became a series, ultimately totaling 17 picture books.

Born in Berlin, Kerr and her family – parents and older brother – fled Germany in 1933, in the days leading up to the election that brought Hitler into power. Her father, Alfred Kerr (né Kempner), a journalist and writer, was a vocal critic of the Nazis even at that time and was warned that the police were about to arrest him. The story of the family’s journey to Switzerland, then France and, ultimately, England, is told in the children’s book When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which was published in 1971.

The film, obviously, is based on that book, and it captures the fear, excitement, frustration and other feelings experienced by the family as a whole, but mainly by 10-year-old Judith – named Anna in both the book and film. We see that Anna copes, in part, by drawing and colouring pictures of disasters, such as a shipwreck or an avalanche. She, her brother and parents are close, thankfully, as they are uprooted more than once and the family unit is the only constant in their lives.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is both charming – the family’s interactions – and disturbing, in that the family is fleeing a danger that killed millions. It also raises current-day issues of what it means to be a refugee. Anna and her brother Max are given one night to pack. They are allowed one toy and two books. Anna’s choice of her stuffed dog over her pink rabbit gives the story its name.

For more on the film festival, visit vjff.org.

Richmond marks the Shoah

Left to right: Councilor Kelly Greene, Councilor Bill McNulty, Bayit past president Michael Sachs, Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie, Bayit president Keith Liedtke, Councilor Chak Au and Councilor Alexa Loo at the Bayit, after the mayor officially proclaims Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in the city of Richmond. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

On Jan. 22, emotions were near the surface in a Holocaust commemoration that included the official proclamation of Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in the city of Richmond. In a packed sanctuary at the Bayit, a synagogue in the province’s second-largest Jewish community, survivors, rabbis, community leaders and a host of elected officials from all levels of government were on hand to mark what was billed as an historic day.

Writer and teacher Lillian Boraks-Nemetz spoke as a survivor of the Holocaust and shared her first-person account, as well as the moral implications of what happened and the weight of survival.

photo - Lillian Boraks-Nemetz
Lillian Boraks-Nemetz (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

“Not a day passes when I don’t ask myself why did I survive when six million perished, 1.5 million children and among them my 5-year-old sister,” said Boraks-Nemetz. “And I survived. Why? When every European Jewish child was automatically sentenced to death by Hitler, I won. Was my survival a miracle? A twist of fate? The will of God? Why me?”

She recalled the day everything changed, Sept. 1, 1939.

“I was alone on the porch of my grandfather’s summer home when masses of airplanes passed over my head. I heard shots, explosions, my dad ran to get me and we barely made it to the shelter, where the sight of crying children and frightened people confirmed my own fears,” she said. The Nazis invaded her Polish homeland. Jews lost all human rights, her father lost his right to practise law, her uncle was prevented from practising medicine. Teachers, professors and businesspeople were all kicked out of their positions. Jewish children did not attend schools and they were bullied, a precursor of the much graver fate to come.

Soon the Jews of Warsaw were imprisoned in the ghetto, where a Nazi-created dystopia developed.

“People stole food from each other,” she said. “All morality ceased to exist in an amoral world.”

Young Lillian was smuggled into the factory where her mother was a slave labourer. Lillian’s grandmother had bought a small house in a village and promised it to a man in exchange for posing as her husband, creating a pretext of a non-Jewish Polish family. Lillian was then smuggled from the ghetto through bribery and survived the war with her grandmother and the man.

“What were my chances of surviving? The rate of a child’s surviving the ghetto was seven percent,” she said. “We were liberated in 1945 by the Russians. But liberation isn’t liberating to survivors.”

While adults worked to reestablish their lives in a new country, children were left largely to their own devices to assimilate all that had happened. Psychiatry or any professional help was largely nonexistent.

“I was told to forget and to let go by people who didn’t have a clue what was on my mind or my soul,” she told the audience. “This was not a physical wound that results in a bruise or a scab, which then falls off and mostly disappears. This is a branding on the soul of fire caused by man’s inhumanity to man, woman and child. The enormity of the Holocaust is still largely incomprehensible and still emotionally inaccessible to those who were born here.”

photo - Judy Darcy
Judy Darcy (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

Judy Darcy, British Columbia’s minister of mental health and addictions, shared the story of how her father survived the Holocaust and subsequently hid his Jewish identity to everyone, including his own children, until the last years of his life, when he tried to reconcile his experiences in meetings with the late Toronto rabbi Gunter Plaut. Darcy’s story was featured in the Independent (Feb. 24, 2017, jewishindependent.ca/mlas-father-hid-past).

photo - Rabbi Levi Varnai speaks as Keith Liedtke looks on
Rabbi Levi Varnai speaks as Keith Liedtke looks on. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

Rabbi Levi Varnai, spiritual leader of the Bayit, recalled his family’s survival during the Holocaust, and Ezra Shanken, chief executive officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, spoke of the human potential for good and evil.

“We must understand that we as human beings have the capacity for immense love but also to create immense pain and it’s only through disciplining ourselves through education and through moments like this that we ensure that the community that I think we all want, which is a community of love, is what will remain,” Shanken said.

photo - Ezra Shanken
Ezra Shanken (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)

Richmond’s Mayor Malcolm Brodie spoke at the event. In an interview with the Independent after, he noted that he often receives requests for proclamations. Recently, the urgency for making a statement and standing with Jewish people was accentuated when a Richmond auction house had to be pressured to cancel the sale of Nazi military memorabilia. Participating in the commemoration with the Jewish community was significant for him, said the mayor, and the past is a lesson for the future.

“I found it quite moving,” said Brodie, noting the remarks by Boraks-Nemetz and Darcy. It is important, he said, “to remind people, and the greater community, to watch out for the signs, because something like this – hopefully never on the scale – but something could happen again.… There have been enough times recently that antisemitism is still a real thing. It is something that we don’t hear too much about but it is something that is very real. In addition to honouring these millions who died, we have to educate young people to make sure that everybody knows the facts and we make sure that it never happens again.”

Michael Sachs, a Jewish community activist and past president of the Bayit, was pivotal in organizing the event – which was co-hosted by the Bayit, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Kehila Society of Richmond and Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver – and ensuring the attendance of the elected officials. Among the attendees were the mayor, most of Richmond’s city councilors, all four of the city’s members in the Legislature, Member of Parliament Alice Wong and former MP Joe Peschisolido, as well as others.

“There were 100 chairs and it was standing room only,” Sachs said afterward. “It’s historic because it’s the first time in Richmond that this proclamation has been made. To have such an outpouring of elected officials, VIPs and all these people coming out – it’s the first in history in Richmond.”

Sachs was effusive in his praise for the mayor for his actions. While many commemorations are taking place because it is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, that was not a prime motivator of the Richmond event, said Sachs.

“It’s the first step of many that will come,” he said. “It’s the beginning of a real public acknowledgement that will lead to more public education. We had someone who was there, one of the aides of an elected official, and he came up to me afterwards and he said, ‘I didn’t know anything about the Holocaust.’ That’s one person right there,” Sachs said. “And, hopefully, this moment continues to help bring Holocaust education into every classroom in this province.”

War heroism recalled

Prof. George Bluman speaks at the 15th annual Raoul Wallenberg Day commemoration, Jan. 19. (photo by Masumi Kikuchi)

Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara was honoured in Vancouver this month with a lecture on his wartime heroism – by a man who owes his life to the actions of Sugihara when the diplomat served as consul for the Imperial Japanese government in Lithuania, near the start of the Second World War.

George Bluman, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of British Columbia, spoke at the 15th annual Raoul Wallenberg Day commemoration Jan. 19, which was held at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. The annual event is presented by the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society and took place 75 years and two days after Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in Hungary whose actions saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews, was last seen alive. The actions of Sugihara, vice-consul of the Japanese embassy in Kaunas, Lithuania, paralleled those of Wallenberg in that he issued visas and took extraordinary actions to save the lives of the threatened Jews of Europe.

Bluman’s parents, Nathan and Susan Bluman, fled to Lithuania after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. There, they received transit visas from Sugihara, which enabled them to travel through the Soviet Union to Japan. They then obtained temporary permits to enter Canada and they were aboard the last ship sailing from Japan to Vancouver prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

An estimated 15% of Sugihara survivors became Canadians, many of them remaining in Vancouver, including the Bluman family, which has come to number 23, now including great-grandchildren of Susan and Nathan. It is estimated that Sugihara’s actions facilitated the escape of thousands of Jewish refugees.

In addition to the Sugihara descendants living in Vancouver, Bluman noted an additional local connection. On his way to Europe for the series of diplomatic postings that would lead to his heroic acts, Sugihara and his wife Yukiko arrived by ship in Vancouver in 1937, then took a transcontinental train to the East Coast to board another ship, which would take them to Europe.

A 2017 poll in a Tokyo publication rated Sugihara as the most important Japanese person ever. “Why?” Bluman asked. “Against advice from his superiors in Tokyo, he issued transit visas to Japan that ended up saving about 2,100 Jewish refugees who otherwise would have been likely murdered. Those saved included my parents as well as one of my uncles and his wife.… Perhaps as many as 40,000 people owe their lives due to the extraordinary heroic deeds of Sugihara.”

Two diplomats from the Netherlands played crucial roles in Sugihara’s heroics, Bluman said. After the Nazi occupation of that country, in May 1940, an anti-Nazi Dutch government-in-exile was established in London and remained in charge of all Dutch embassies. The anti-Nazi Dutch ambassador in Latvia, L.P.J. de Decker, dismissed his pro-Nazi Lithuanian honorary consul, replacing him with Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch engineer heading Philips electronics in Kaunas.

“Two young Dutch rabbinical students approached Zwartendijk, requesting documentation to go to Curaçao, a Dutch colony in the West Indies, with the aim of traveling east through the Soviet Union, Japan, the Pacific Ocean and the Panama Canal to tiny Curaçao, an island off the coast of Venezuela, about one-sixth the size of Metro Vancouver. They also sought permits for their mostly Polish classmates.

“Why Curaçao?” asked Bluman. “Because no visa was required to enter Curaçao. The local governor had sole authority to permit entry. But this was rarely granted. Zwartendijk was given permission by de Decker, the Dutch ambassador in Riga [Latvia], to issue permits to Curaçao to their fellow rabbinical students that stated, in French, ‘A visa for entry is not required,’ leaving out the condition of the governor’s permission. Moreover, Zwartendijk courageously agreed to issue such permits to all Jewish refugees who applied for them.”

A delegation of Jewish refugees approached Sugihara about obtaining Japanese transit visas, a necessary step for the scheme’s success.

“Without permission from Tokyo, and after getting Soviet approval, signed by Stalin, for refugee transit through the Soviet Union, Sugihara issued transit visas valid for a stay of 10 days in Japan, based on the seemingly sufficient Zwartendijk Curaçao permits,” said Bluman. “Zwartendijk signed 2,300 such permits, until his office was forced to close on the day Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union.… The scam worked.”

With the annexation of the Baltic states to the Soviet Union, all foreign embassies were ordered closed. Though Zwartendijk left, Sugihara managed to stay on for a further four weeks to continue writing transit visas – even for Jews who had not obtained a visa from Zwartendijk.

“These Jews included my parents, who approached Sugihara’s office six days after Zwartendijk had left,” Bluman said.

Ultimately, about 80% of the Jewish refugees issued Sugihara visas survived and about three-quarters made it to Japan. Almost half carried on to Shanghai, China, to wait out the war.

Sugihara’s diplomatic career effectively ended in Romania, where he was posted at the end of the war. When the Soviets occupied Bucharest, Sugihara and his family were imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp for 18 months.

Back in Japan in 1946, Sugihara was dismissed from diplomatic service and spent the next several decades in low-key positions in Japan and Moscow. His retirement from service was ostensibly a matter of downsizing, but some have speculated that his heroic insubordination was a cause.

Only in 1968 did Sugihara learn that most of the Jews he had helped had survived. In 1985, he was recognized by the state of Israel, receiving the Righteous Among the Nations award from Yad Vashem, as well as perpetual Israeli citizenship for himself and his family. Zwartendijk was posthumously honoured in 1997. Sugihara died in 1986, at the age of 86. Bluman retains close contact with the family in Japan.

“In my family,” Bluman concluded, “there is one great hero we always carry in our hearts and to whom we will be forever grateful: Chiune Sugihara.”

After Bluman’s presentation, attendees watched the film Persona Non Grata: The Story of Chiune Sugihara. Earlier, Alan La Fevre, president of the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, welcomed guests, including the deputy mayor of the city of Vancouver, Christine Boyle, who read a proclamation declaring Raoul Wallenberg Day. Diplomats from Japan and Ukraine were in attendance.

The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society was formed in 2013 by members of the Swedish and Jewish communities. The society continues the legacy of the annual Wallenberg Day events in Vancouver, recognizing and honouring individuals who, at great personal risk, have helped others by acting against unjust laws, norms or conventions.

When is never again?

Monday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Scrolling through social media, it was jarring to see the juxtaposition of images and ideas reflecting on that terrible history intermingled with the mundane and fantastical miscellany of everyday 21st-century life. This is the reality of our world: the grave realities of yesterday and today poking through the onslaught of witty memes, outrage over a vast range of real and imagined evils, cute kittens and the panorama of detritus and riches available to, and bombarding us, at every moment.

This is how it is. Even as we recommit ourselves to the promise of “never again,” still we carry on with our daily lives. Yet these realities are not, and should not be, disconnected from one another. The memory of the Holocaust and its victims, and the importance of listening to and learning from its survivors and its messages, are sacred obligations. But their lessons and meanings can and should be applied to the more commonplace events we experience. History is a prism through which we should view the present and the future.

Like the jarring extremes that can be found scrolling social media on Holocaust Remembrance Day, this collision of gravity and triviality is problematic. We recoil from inappropriate comparisons. Yet, in a world where legitimate causes struggle to be heard above the competing din, we often fall back on the most incendiary formulations, so every injustice becomes “fascism,” every leader we dislike a “Nazi.” This dilutes the seriousness of the history it invokes – and it also makes it more difficult to identify and draw attention to genuinely grave dangers, including literal fascism or fascist-adjacent ideas and actions emerging in Europe and closer to home.

The number of lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust are as innumerable as there are human behaviours. A relevant one for our time is the fragility of democracy and civil order. The actions of Raoul Wallenberg and Chiune Sugihara (click here to read story) are examples of a dystopic situation where good people are driven to break laws and norms promulgated by evil forces. In situations where democracy and social order are upended, goodness is criminalized and malevolence is institutionalized.

Democracy is under threat in much of the world right now. Human nature is such that we take for granted once-unimaginable wonders – gadgets in our pockets containing the breadth of human knowledge, the perceived right of every individual to live free from fear of tyranny – almost as soon as we access them. We forget that democracy is barely two centuries old and that it is not only imperfect but tenuous. With extraordinary ease, individuals of various stripes have managed to smother or at least severely disfigure nascent democracies in Russia, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. A more established democracy in Turkey has been twisted away from its secularist, pluralist roots. The world’s largest democracy, India, is engaged in serious religious-based oppression.

In Israel, there are social forces and political parties pushing the extremes, as well. The Kahanist party, Otzma Yehudit, is aiming to again contest the March elections and has been rooting around the emerging electoral alliances for a slot. To his credit, Naftali Bennett, head of the New Right bloc and no raging moderate himself, rejects being in a tent with Otzma Yehudit and rightly warns other parties to steer clear.

And, in ways whose significance we may not yet be able to judge, the fabric of American democracy – checks and balances between branches of government – is being threatened. The president, indicted for attempting to extort our ally Ukraine to participate in political dirty tricks in exchange for desperately needed military funding to defend itself against the encroaching Russian military, seems destined to be exonerated by a Senate more concerned with party discipline than the rule of law, the constitution or human decency. If the probable outcome is realized, it will represent a blow to the grand ideals of the world’s oldest contemporary democracy.

Is raising this example itself a symptom of the problem we are discussing? Is it relevant and proper to discuss the American or Israeli situation in the same context as Russia, Poland or Hungary? Do we diminish the memory of the Holocaust by raising this topic in this perspective? Is it equally specious to assert that we won’t know, perhaps until it is too late, whether we should have been more or less vigilant when a man with little or no respect for norms of nicety or constitutionality ascended to the highest office in the democratic world?

This is the line we walk when we say “never again.” The magnitude of the history underpinning this promise is so enormous that we risk lessening it through invocation. Yet, if we isolate that history and its lessons, like good china saved only for the most special occasions, are we not conversely risking the very promise we undertake?

Auschwitz 75 years on

The King David Hotel was partially obscured by a temporary security barrier as part of the preparations that were carried out in Jerusalem for the arrival of leaders from more than 45 countries for in the Fifth World Holocaust Forum, which took place at Yad Vashem this week, and marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. (photo from Ashernet)

Monday marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. That date, Jan. 27, has been set aside annually to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Scores of officials from around the world were to descend on Jerusalem this week to attend a ceremony at Yad Vashem and a forum on the Holocaust. Expected guests include Canada’s Governor-General Julie Payette, Prince Charles, Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Emanuel Macron, U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence and a long list of royalty, heads of government and others from around the world, especially from Europe.

Among the more attention-grabbing guests is Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine. Zelensky is a particularly interesting man in a particular role at an interesting time. He will be in Jerusalem alongside Pence and other world leaders at the very moments when the U.S. president is undergoing an impeachment trial initiated as a result of a phone call with Zelensky, probably the only reason most North Americans know his name. But that is among the least remarkable things about the leader.

A political neophyte (aside from playing the Ukrainian president in a satirical TV series), Zelensky was elected on an anti-corruption platform. In advance of his visit to Israel for the commemoration events this week, he engaged in a lengthy and witty interview with the Times of Israel about his family’s history – some relatives live in Israel and he has visited and performed comedy there many times – and his reflections on Jewishness, Israel and contemporary politics.

It caused some curiosity when Zelensky was elected because he has, in his words, “Jewish blood.” It is a common term, perhaps especially in formerly Soviet societies where religion was officially negated and so identities are defined obliquely, but the phrase “Jewish blood” is unfortunate in the context of Ukrainian history.

Among the considerations facing the country at present is the complicity of its citizens in the Holocaust, including in the massacres at Babi Yar, a ravine in the capital of Kyiv, where an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 individuals were murdered during the Nazi occupation, including more than 33,000 Jews on one day in September 1941.

In 1976, Soviet officials erected a monument marking the site and the cataclysm – ignoring the Jewish particularity of the mass murder and lamenting the deaths of Soviet victims of Nazism. It is undeniably true that victims at Babi Yar also included Roma, communists, Ukrainian nationalists and prisoners of war, all of whom deserve to be commemorated and mourned. But the omission of the Jewish identities of most of the victims at the site has been a point of pain and conflict for decades.

Zelensky’s government is remedying this. Begun by civic officials and Jewish leaders and endorsed by Zelensky’s predecessors, a Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre is being constructed, with anticipated completion in 2023. The government is also undertaking a more transparent assessment of the country’s role and its citizens’ collaboration during the Second World War, outpacing most of their eastern European neighbours in addressing this dark past.

Still, some red flags remain. Zelensky claims that there is no antisemitism in Ukraine, an unequivocal statement that bewilders. It would be careless for any leader to ascribe complete innocence of bigotry to their entire citizenry, more so the leader of a country with a history like Ukraine’s.

He is, in some ways, between a rock and a hard place. While making blanket denials of Ukrainian antisemitism, he is also attempting to move his society away from the glorification of nationalist – meaning, among other things, inevitably antisemitic – historical figures. He points to the fact that he, a novice politician with “Jewish blood,” was elected to the country’s top post as evidence of tolerance in Ukrainian society. It does seem encouraging.

Also encouraging is the extensive list of world leaders arriving at Yad Vashem not only for a commemoration but for an educational forum, titled Remembering the Holocaust: Fighting Antisemitism. Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin has said the purpose of the meeting is “to think about how to pass on Holocaust remembrance to generations who will live in a world without survivors, and what steps we must take to ensure the safety and security of Jews, all around the world.”

Seventy-five years after that terrible epoch, the topic remains timely.

 

Opera urges “never forget”

The ship’s cabin in Pasazerka (The Passenger), as envisioned by UBC Opera’s creative team. The opera is part of a series of events at the University of British Columbia marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. (photo from UBC Opera)

UBC Opera presents the Canadian première of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Pasazerka (The Passenger). Opening Jan. 30 at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on the University of British Columbia campus, this will be the first time the work has been presented on any university stage in the world.

The Passenger opens on a luxury liner bound for Brazil. A newly married German woman, Lisa, who, earlier in life, had been an aufseherin, camp guard, at Auschwitz, thinks she recognizes a fellow passenger. The passenger is Martha, a Polish Auschwitz prisoner who was thought to have died at the camp. The effect that their meeting (either actual or imaginary – it’s never made clear) has on the two women, and on Lisa’s marriage to the German ambassador to Brazil, is the subject of this dramatic and powerful opera.

UBC Opera’s production is being created from scratch. The opera has proven so popular no sets or costumes are available for rent; consequently, new sets are being constructed and, at this writing, the students were sewing together dozens of striped prison pajamas for the Auschwitz prisoners’ chorus.

After receiving its world première in 2010 at the Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria, The Passenger has seen frequent performances in various German venues, a highly acclaimed production at the English National Opera in 2011 and, more recently, it has been performed successfully in the United States at the Houston Grand Opera and at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. In spring of last year, it was performed at the new Tel Aviv Performing Arts Centre, and it will be performed in Spain later this year.

The UBC production has received funding from various sources, including the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, which promotes Polish culture around the world, and the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland, as well as Poland’s Department of Public and Cultural Diplomacy and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

When the president of UBC, Dr. Santa Ono, heard about the project, he committed further funding for the production. Other funding has come from UBC’s dean of arts, Gage Averill, and the David Spencer Endowment Encouragement Fund. The production also has received support from the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Temple Sholom and UBC Hillel House.

“In our time, antisemitism and neo-Nazism has become shockingly prevalent again. Even our own neighbour to the south has witnessed a growing social and political climate which has encouraged disrespect for other human beings and blatant racism,” said Prof. Nancy Hermiston, head of the Voice and Opera divisions at UBC and the director of this production of The Passenger, in a recent interview with the Independent. “In my opinion,” she said, “this has, in part, been released as a result of the behaviour and actions of President Trump. His attitude has given those elements of the world’s population promoting discrimination, hatred, antisemitism and neo-Nazism, a sense that they have a licence to do so. Our opera highlights the consequences of this hatred and racism. Now is the time to remind ourselves of respect and tolerance for others and of our humanity. It is the exact time to remind ourselves of the horror of the systematic extermination of millions of innocent people. Genocides continue to plague our world. Have we learned nothing from the past?

“We can never forget the tragic deaths of those millions of innocent souls nor can we forget those who survived that crime against humanity,” she said. “We cannot let another Holocaust occur.”

The Passenger is sung in Polish, Russian, Czech, French, Yiddish, German and English, which offers a particular challenge to the young singers at UBC. Equally challenging for the singers, according to Hermiston, is the difficulty of dealing emotionally with the subject matter, which, in rehearsal, has led to periods of weeping and feelings of deep sorrow, both for the singers and “even for me,” admitted Hermiston, “especially at the end, when the chorus of prisoners comes downstage and challenges the audience to ‘never forget, never forget.’” (Hermiston has engaged a counseling team to help the singers through their own trauma as they reenact this emotional narrative.)

Performances of The Passenger are set for Jan. 30 and 31 and Feb. 1 at 7:30 pm, and Feb. 2 at 2 p.m. Tickets are available online at music.ubc.ca/opera-pasazerka-the-passenger.

The opera is part of a larger commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz that is being undertaken by UBC Opera; the UBC Modern European Studies program; the UBC department of Central, Eastern and Northern European studies; the UBC Witnessing Auschwitz International Seminar; and UBC Go Global. During a symposium that runs Jan. 27-30, there will be various symposia and exhibits, and school-outreach programs featuring local survivors and UBC professors and students, as well as the opera The Passenger.

Guest speakers for the symposium include Dr. Michael Berenbaum, Dr. Bozena Karwowska, Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, Dr. Chris Friedrichs, Aleksander Laskowski, Dr. Richard Menkis, Dr. Dorota Glowacka, Dr. Rima Wilkes, Dr. Anja Nowak, Dr. Peter Suedfeld, Dr. Tricia Logan, Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar, Janos Benisz, Amalia Boe-Fishman and David Ehrlich, among others. For more information, visit auschwitz75.arts.ubc.ca.

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.

Last Cabaret almost sold out

Joanna Garfinkel is part of the creative team behind the world première production of Berlin: The Last Cabaret, part of the PuSh festival. (photo from the artist)

The world première of Berlin: The Last Cabaret, presented at Performance Works Jan. 23-26 by City Opera Vancouver in association with Sound the Alarm: Music/Theatre, is almost sold out. Part of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, the only tickets that remain will be sold at the door, though writer and Jewish community member Joanna Garfinkel told the Independent, “I hope we are able to add more presentation opportunities, as well, since this is truly becoming an exciting and rich production.”

Set in Nazi Germany in 1934, a group of artists must decide whether or not to perform their new political show – which, reads the press release for Berlin, “challenges state media, calls out the Nazi classification of gay individuals as ‘degenerates’ and includes parodic inflection that women are being marginalized” under the new regime – or save themselves.

The opera takes place “two weeks after ‘the Night of Long Knives,’” said Garfinkel, “when the future had been cast, but many were not yet seeing it, including my own family. One thing that interested me a great deal is how people are forced to make compromises under oppression, and even make excuses for what’s happening around them.”

The “Night of the Long Knives” was the June 30, 1934, purge by Hitler of more than 85 members of the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi party’s initial paramilitary wing.

Rather than being a satire itself, Garfinkel explained that Berlin: The Last Cabaret “is more an unearthing of the under-heard Jewish and queer artists who flourished in the Weimar era and were crushed by the Holocaust. The humour we employ is their urgent satire, which feels fresh and relevant with all that is going in the world right now.

“My own family escaped from Berlin to Winnipeg (eventually), so I am both bound to respect and honour the history, and also privy to the dark humour we employ about it.”

City Opera Vancouver approached Garfinkel last spring, she said. They had “heard about me from my dramaturgical work with Playwrights Theatre Centre and the historically based Japanese Problem for my own company, Universal Limited. I was excited by the opportunity to work with an opera company, which would be new to me, but on something quite close to my heart, history and interest.”

The relevance of the opera was one of the reasons she joined its creative team. In regard to choosing projects in general, she said, “Right now, it feels like art must be speaking to the world and on behalf of marginalized voices. Theatre is too much work, and the world too messed up, to work on projects that don’t resonate on an activist level. I am lucky right now to get to choose to work on things that are so resonant.”

Garfinkel, who is billed as librettist for the production, clarified that categorization.

“I contributed story, structure and additional dialogue for this piece,” she said, “but it’s important to note that the songs themselves are historical, written by composers Eisler, Spoliansky, Hollaender and Weil, so I am not, technically, the librettist. However, building a story and play around preexisting songs presents its own challenges. It was of central importance to me that the Jewish/queer and other marginalized artists of the time were centred in our story.

“We were working with excellent (but unavailable!) collaborators in our composers and, together with director Alan Corbishley, music director and historian Roger Parton and choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, tried to honour their work and build a vital story around it.”

Cheyenne Friedenberg is also a member of the Jewish community.

Berlin: The Last Cabaret stars actors with a background in music and spoken theatre, rather than traditional opera singers, and each performer, according to the press release, “was involved in the creation of their on-stage characters and storylines.” The production features a live four-person band.

For more information on PuSh, visit pushfestival.ca.

Annual civil courage tribute

Chiune Sugihara, 1941. This year’s Raoul Wallenberg Day event includes the screening of Persona Non Grata: The Story of Chiune Sugihara. (photo from Vilnius-Green House exhibit)

On Sunday, Jan. 19, the 15th annual Raoul Wallenberg Day event pays tribute to courageous actions by diplomats Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden and Chiune Sugihara of Japan. During the Second World War, they engaged in selfless acts of civil courage, at grave risk to themselves and their families, to rescue many tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.

This year, the Vancouver-based Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society focuses on the story of Sugihara. The event features a showing of the biographical film drama Persona Non Grata: The Story of Chiune Sugihara. As a consular official for Japan in eastern Europe during the Second World War, Sugihara saved thousands of refugees by issuing transit visas that allowed people to escape Nazi German forces. Once reviled in Japan, today Sugihara is considered a hero, with museums and a memorial site.

The keynote speaker on Jan. 19 is George Bluman, a local descendent of Sugihara visa recipients and an international expert on Sugihara’s life. Some of those saved by his visas ended up in Vancouver and other parts of Canada.

When possible, the Civil Courage Society also presents an award to an individual associated with British Columbia who, at significant personal risk, helped improve the lives of others while defying unjust laws or norms, past or present. Past recipients include Hon. Ujjal Dosanjh, Chief Robert Joseph and Mary Kitagawa. Their stories inspire Canadians to act with courage and live by their moral values.

This year’s event – sponsored by the estate of Frank and Rosie Nelson, and supported by several organizations and volunteers – is being held at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, and it begins at 1 p.m. Admission is free; donations are appreciated. A reception follows. For more information, visit wsccs.ca. New volunteers and nominations for the Civil Courage Award are always welcomed.

Teaching in new ways

Prof. Ira Robinson of Concordia University’s Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies teaches a wide range of students about the Holocaust and antisemitism. (photo from Ira Robinson)

Ira Robinson is the director of Concordia University’s Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies and a professor of Judaic studies in the department of religions and cultures. A strong believer that an educator shouldn’t teach the same course in the same way year after year, he is always looking for new ways to reach students of all ages.

Born in Boston, Mass., Robinson moved to Montreal with his wife, Sandra, 40 years ago.

“I came to Canada because Concordia offered me a job, and I landed in the right place at the right time,” he told the Independent. “Academics don’t always have a complete choice of where they are going to settle. I came to Montreal and Montreal has a large and interesting Jewish community and a tremendously interesting bilingual culture.”

Though Robinson had never envisioned writing a book about antisemitism or the Holocaust, he did so, publishing A History of Antisemitism in Canada in 2015.

Robinson was trained by students of the late Salo Baron, a Polish-American historian, who once said, “If you want to understand the totality of Jewish history, you have to take into consideration that the pogroms and the massacres take only an infinitesimal amount of time, even though they wreak great havoc.”

According to Robinson, “Ninety-nine percent of the time, we’re dealing with normal life…. Baron and his students decided to look at the Jews as they had lived and not as they had died. That was the lesson that I took.”

For Robinson, this meant he would have to determine his own take on the history of antisemitism in Canada and, hence, “I came out with the book.”

Robinson starts many of his courses by telling students that there is nothing he is going to teach them that is not completely denied by somebody, somewhere. With this message, he is stressing that what he is about to teach is his perspective on what took place.

In looking at the history of antisemitism in Canada, for example, Robinson tried to contextualize the reasons Jews were looked at as guests in the 1920 and 1930s in Canada.

“What I did in this book is create a continuous narrative on antisemitism in Canada from the 18th century through to the present,” he explained. “There have been many very good studies on various aspects of antisemitism in Canada, the most famous of which is [Irving] Abella’s and [Harold] Troper’s None is Too Many. This academic book uniquely made a difference in the political discourse of Canada. Now, whenever anyone debates a refugee issue in Canada, the phrase, ‘None is too many,’ is sure to come into the discourse or debate at some point. That was a great success, but the book only concentrates on the 1920s to the 1940s, and mainly focuses on the Canadian federal government.”

Since the research for Robinson’s book was completed in 2014, antisemitism has increased, he said. For that reason, he decided to find ways to teach about the problem to younger children, kids in grades 4 to 6.

“It presents a challenge, because I have to begin with who they [antisemites] are and where they are,” said Robinson. “And so, I started by talking with them [the kids] about bullying, because bullying, as you understand, is something that kids know about and people talk to them about it.

“If you see somebody bullying somebody else, what are you supposed to do? If you can intervene, you should intervene. If you need to call somebody in a position of authority, you call somebody…. So, I said, ‘imagine that there are kids and you can bully them and nobody is going to stop you. And imagine that, if somebody goes to a person of authority, they will just say, ‘Good for you!’”

Robinson took it a step further, creating a PowerPoint presentation focusing on the wearing of the yellow Jewish star that was imposed upon Jews.

“I showed first a picture of a girl’s dress with the yellow star shown on it – just the dress, nobody in it,” he said. “Then, the next thing I showed was a little girl in a dress with the yellow star. When I changed the slide from just the girl’s dress with the yellow star to the little girl in the dress with a yellow star, I could hear a slight gasp among the students. So, there are ways – you have to talk to the people you have in front of you.”

Robinson gave this presentation in a public school and, as far he knows, there were no Jewish students in the classroom. “I am used to talking to a wide range of people,” he said. “And, in my university classes, for instance, I do expect Jews to enrol, and they do. But, I also expect Muslims and Christians to enrol, and they do, and everybody else, too.”

In Robinson’s view, the challenge of finding ways to disseminate the information effectively is always a worthwhile exercise.

“There are lots of people involved in Holocaust education and I think a lot of them are spending a lot of effort introducing and assisting in educating about the Holocaust in public school systems. The problem, as always, is not lack of good will,” he said, “but that the schools are under great pressure from a whole bunch of different directions. What should our children study? And the mega trend, not merely in public schools, but also in universities, is moving away from the social sciences and humanities, and focusing on other subjects.”

As far as teaching methods regarding the Holocaust and antisemitism, Robinson said, “I think I am able to speak with more depth, because you can’t teach the same course in the same way for decades. You have to develop a scholarly understanding as the field develops and, so, my teaching is informed by my reading and my reading continues to inform me.

“And my power is that I am able to direct students to certain books, certain articles and certain films that I think will help them develop their sense of things. But, before I can even do that, before I can guide anybody, I have to find the things myself, first and foremost.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.