Shoah

Survivor urges vigilance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doduck said the world needs to learn from the past.

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

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

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

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

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

The lives of these individuals defied expectations, he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons from past for today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebuilding a life after Shoah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does history matter?

The promise of the internet was that people could access unprecedented volumes of information for the benefit of themselves and society as a whole. What has regrettably proven to be the case is that it is a fount from which people draw to “prove” falsehoods they choose to believe – or, for nefarious reasons, claim to believe.

Amid the oceans of “information” online, it is sometimes difficult to tell what people genuinely believe as opposed to what they say they believe in public to mislead their audiences. For example, does the U.S. member of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene actually believe that reliance on solar energy means the lights will go out when the sun goes down? Or is her apparent stupidity a deliberate foil for her support of polluting energy sources? If she believes what she said, this is misinformation. If she knows she is telling a lie, it is disinformation.

The terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” are sadly necessary to understand what is happening in our era, as we have said in this space before and feel moved to repeat. In few places is this difference as consequential as in discussions of the history of the Holocaust.

Correspondence between Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and right-wing journalist Bronislaw Wildstein (and two others) leaked last week defines some of the world’s foremost Holocaust scholars as “enemies of the entire Polish nation.” There is other chilling language in the back-and-forth, detailing how top Polish authorities are expending enormous energies to rewrite the history of Polish collaboration in the Shoah.

A 2018 law forbids any suggestion that the Polish state or Polish people participated in Nazi crimes against Jews. International pressure saw the penalties for breaking this law reduced from a criminal conviction to a civil matter potentially resulting in a fine. But the intent and impact remain clear. Prof. Jan Grabowski, a Polish-born Canadian academic, and a Polish colleague, Barbara Engelking, were victorious in a 2021 appeal that saw an earlier court decision order to apologize to a descendant of a Shoah-era perpetrator for betraying Jewish neighbours to the German Nazis. But this court decision has not quenched the thirst for revisionism.

The obsession among top Polish officials on this subject is unabated. The email exchange includes the suggestion that Polish authorities should strategically coopt the Jewish experience in the Holocaust to their own benefit, recasting Poles as the Nazis’ primary targets and victims.

Poland also recently extended its Holocaust-related legislation to explicitly forbid financial restitution or compensation to survivors or their heirs.

The Polish government has steadfastly asserted that Nazi atrocities catastrophically affected non-Jewish Poles, which is plainly true. But two things can be true simultaneously. Many Poles were victimized by the Nazis and many Poles collaborated with the Nazis – and, in some cases, both involved the same individuals.

Wildstein, the journalist who seems to have the prime minister’s ear, makes threatening noises about top Holocaust research and archival bodies, including the Jewish Historical Institute, in Warsaw, and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and mentions “the possibility of introducing our people into their midst.” He accuses the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research of presenting “an almost obsessive hatred of Poles.”

There is paranoia in the idea that exposing historical truth is identical to hatred. Ironically, while Germany is the European country that has engaged in the most introspective contrition, as much as a society can hope to do for so unparalleled a crime, Poland has steadfastly dug in its heels. The society that bears more blame for complicity with the Nazis than any other is the one that is not only refusing to confront its grotesque past but most stridently whitewashing it.

All of this has led to strained relations between Israel and Poland. It should also be a source of friction with other countries, including Canada, partly because it is a Canadian citizen, Grabowski, who is among the most targeted objects of Polish scorn, and partly because all democracies should stand up to this appalling historical revisionism.

There is a grim silver lining in this “debate.” The Polish authorities understand, as too few in the world seem to, that history matters. What happened in the past informs our present and future. If they can recast the past, they can affect the future.

The question for us is whether we, as a society, have the same understanding of and commitment to historical power. Are those who seek truth as motivated as those whose goal is to subvert it?

Editor’s Note: For a contrary point of view, click here to read the letter to the editor that was published in the Jewish Independent’s Sept. 2/22 issue.

Remembering the Great Roundup

Entire Jewish families were rounded up and interned in the Vel d’Hiv and other places in France, when La Grande Rafle began on July 16, 1942. (unattributed image)

It is 80 years this summer since La Grande Rafle (the Great Roundup) took place in France. It is not only a significant, tragic anniversary for the Jewish people, but one that impacted me directly.

“Happy like God in France” was a saying sometimes heard among Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe a century ago, even though antisemitism was fairly widespread in France and few years had passed since the Dreyfus Affair. Falsely accused of selling military secrets to Germany, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was publicly humiliated and sentenced to Devil’s Island in French Guiana. However, in the end, justice prevailed: Dreyfus was proven innocent and restored to his rank. Jewish loyalty to France remained unshaken. In 1939, as in 1914, Jewish men, citizens and immigrants alike, volunteered to fight in the defence of France, but the country for which they spilled blood betrayed their trust.

The humiliating defeat of 1940 led to the division of the country into two main zones, a Germany-occupied zone in the north and a so-called “free zone” in the south. It also led to the collapse of democracy and a replacement of the republic with a fascist regime, called Etat Français, in Vichy, headed by Marshall Philippe Petain. That regime enacted the sweeping antisemitic Statute des Juifs, the most racist legislation in occupied Europe. Its application was entrusted to a special commissariat for Jewish affairs, of which the first incumbent was Xavier Vallat, who declared to the younger hauptsturmführer (captain) in the SS, Theodor Dannecker, in Paris, “ I am an older antisemite than you are: I could be your father in these matters.”

Vallat was soon replaced by the more vicious Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, a gutter journalist, who, as early as 1937, proposed in one of his screeds to “solve the Jewish problem in France” by wholesale extermination.

At the time, there were 300,000 Jews living in France, who represented less than one percent of the population. Their origins were diverse; Ashkenazim, Sephardim, immigrants from a variety of European and Mediterranean countries, religious and non-practising, etc. That population was composed of native and naturalized citizens. The Census of 1940 placed French Jews under the protection of the Vichy government, while at the same time expelling them from the professions, civil and military. Non-naturalized Jews were liable to internment at the discretion of regional police prefects. Instinctively respectful of the laws of France, even Jews who bore French surnames and spoke fluent French obeyed the order to register.

The regime created a Gulag-type network of internment camps that covered both major zones of the country. Beginning in 1941, Jewish men were summoned by groups, depending on their nationality, to present themselves at the police commissariat nearest to their places of residence (there were no ghettos in France). They were sent to hard labour in camps, of which the most notorious were Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, northeast of Orléans, and Drancy, a transit camp in a suburb of Paris, from where departed the deportation cattle car trains bound for Auschwitz. Naturalizations granted after 1927 were ordered rolled back.

Beginning on July 16, 1942, a dramatic change in the deportation policy was initiated: La Grande Rafle. Entire families were now targeted, regardless of age or sex. Beginning at 4 a.m., police squads bearing lists of the names and addresses of about 27,000 Jewish immigrants fanned across Paris in vans and requisitioned urban buses, knocking at countless apartment doors. About half of the targeted victims, warned by the Jewish communist underground, were able to escape arrest and find shelter among gentiles, mainly in rural areas. Arrested during that roundup were 3,118 men, 5,019 women and 4,115 children (3,000 of them born in France and, therefore, French citizens).

The Grande Rafle, codenamed by the police Vent Printanier (Spring Wind), was the greatest mass persecution in the city of Paris since 1572, when thousands of Protestants were murdered on the night of St. Bartholomew by Catholic mobs unleashed by Queen Catherine of Medici.

The 1942 military-style operation against the Jews in Paris was carried out from start to finish by French policemen, with no German participation, as they did not have sufficient resources. In fact, the Germans had ordered the French not to arrest children below the age of 16 for the time being, since, as stated, 3,000 of them were born in France. However, then-prime minister of France Pierre Laval averred that it would be “inhuman” to separate children from their parents. On his own initiative, he declared that he assumed the burden of “ridding France of its Jews.”

Laval ordered that entire families be rounded up and, pending deportation to the east, interned in the Winter Circus (Vel d’Hiv), Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Conditions of interment in the Vel d’Hiv were hellish: suffocating heat, the stench of public latrines, next to no medical attention, and scant distribution of food and drink. Many people went mad, some died. In the end, families were split all the same: adults were transported from Drancy to Auschwitz, while children initially sent to Pithiviers were next carried in the cattle car trains, along the same harrowing itinerary of death, with almost no adult supervision. Many of those children were brutalized by French policeman, who even robbed them of what their parents gave them.

One month after the Grande Rafle, similar atrocities were perpetrated in the free zone of the south, where there was no German occupation and the French government retained complete sovereignty over internal affairs, bearing no obligation other than supplying the Nazis with the products and produce that they demanded.

Caught when we illegally crossed the demarcation line, which divided France’s two major zones, my parents and I were among those “assigned to residence” in a requisitioned hotel of the small town of Lons-le-Saunier, near the Swiss border.

On the morning of Aug. 26, a rafle collected hundreds of Jews across the city, including my mother and me; happening to be on an errand, my father escaped. A pitiful column, we were marched across the city – hurried along by policeman who brutalized and insulted us, calling us “dirty Jews” – to the railway station, where a train awaited to transport us to the gruesome concentration camp of Rivesaltes, near the Spanish border.

The railway station became a scene of unrestrained police brutality, which spared neither adults nor children. I was seized by the hair and the seat of my pants by a brute who was about to throw me on the train, when I was saved by my maternal aunt, a French citizen, who, through personal contacts, obtained my release thanks to the timely intervention of a gendarmerie officer. I last saw my mother as she was being violently dragged along the floor of the station, then waved to me from a window, as the train departed for Rivesaltes. From there, with fellow victims of the rafle, she was transported several days later in a train that traveled north, this time to Drancy. And, there, she was squeezed into a cattle car train bound for Auschwitz. At least two-thirds of the women who left in that convoy either perished along the way, or were gassed following the selection on arrival.

Few of the Vichy regime organizers, policemen and other perpetrators of the summer 1942 and subsequent rafles paid for their crimes. Laval was tried and sentenced to death by firing squad in 1946; Petain was sentenced to life exile on a small island in the Atlantic Ocean; René Bousquet, chief of the national police, was briefly deprived of citizenship rights by General Charles de Gaulle and then resumed his functions, until he was mysteriously assassinated in his Paris apartment shortly before he was to be tried for crimes against humanity in 1980.

Obsessed by his wish for national reconciliation of the French, de Gaulle put a stop to any prosecution of persons who had collaborated with the Nazis. Throughout the postwar decades, the French deluded themselves with the myth that most of them supported or joined the resistance.

It was not until 1995 that then-president Jacques Chirac publicly declared that the opposite was the case – that “France had committed the irreparable,” that at least some financial compensation should be awarded to the survivors of the Holocaust, who had suffered or lost relatives to French collaboration with the Nazi action.

It should be noted, however, that nearly 75% of the Jewish population of France survived the Holocaust, thanks to the assistance offered by French citizens, both urban and rural, who sympathized with the Jewish people. Also, unlike Holland or Belgium, small, crowded countries, the French countryside offered vast areas of wilderness in which many Jews found shelter or joined the resistance.

René Goldman is professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.

Different horror, same hell

As soon as they got into power, German Nazis began to make life hell for German-Jewish men – partly to promote their sadistically comic-book ideal of “Aryan” masculine supremacy, and partly out of a desire to plunder valuables and property. And also, it must be said, out of simple criminal/pathological malice.

Fighter, Worker and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933-1941 (University of Toronto Press, 2022) is a thoroughly researched book. In it, Sebastian Huebel – a sessional instructor in the history department at University of the Fraser Valley – depicts various strategies used by the Nazis to isolate and degrade German-Jewish men in the years prior to the concentration camps. His metaphor for this program of debasement and humiliation is “emasculation,” and the word identifies the book’s focus: how the Jewish-German (heterosexual) male was shamed by the dispossession of any masculine identity as “fighters, workers or family men” – the traditional markers of masculinity in Europe in those days.

Gender is a rare focus in Holocaust literature and, when the topic of gender arises there, it is almost always about women, and written by feminist scholars, as Huebel notes.

But men’s victimization, as Huebel demonstrates, also deserves scrutiny. During the 1930s, the overwhelming percentage of camp internees were male (“cheats,” “traitors,” “greedy bankers,” “race defilers,” “manipulators of international capitalism,” etc.): in other words, women did not fit the Nazi stereotype of the gendered male Jewish fifth-column “enemy.”

The Jewish male “enemy” was uniformly forced out of work, his business expropriated; he was excluded from the military, and his military service in the First World War ignored. In public, he was ridiculed, he was caricatured in propaganda and openly derided – all, as mentioned, to further the absurd Nazi fantasy of the “Aryan” übermensch. For what reason? Simply to “justify the need for protecting Germany from within” by inventing a supposed internal threat – to this day, a tried-and-true strategy practised by would-be and extant dictators.

(It’s worth noting that Huebel does not address the perceived threat emanating from the predominance of Jewish men in the German Communist and Social Democratic parties, in labour unions, and among other dissidents.)

In private, the Jewish father/husband paradigm crumbled under the weight of Nazi deprecation. With no work, no “bread being won,” the only way the Jewish father/husband could show his worth to the family was to arrange for emigration. But, as Holocaust historians have amply shown, by the time it was clear to the German Jews that the Nazis were not going to go away, the “free world” had closed its doors to them. (Canada’s famous response to the question of how many Jewish refugees should be admitted was “None is too many!”)

On a more positive note, Huebel notes that the at-home father model led to increased bonding – unusual for the time – between father and family, and Huebel offers lots of documentary evidence of signs of love and affection between the unemployed father and his children. As well, fathers frequently became at-home teachers to their expelled children – more evidence of “a new presence at home” that led to a reaffirmation of men’s role as father/mentor-educators.

On the streets, as Nazi violence against men increased, men were often coated with tar, made to walk barefoot over broken glass, made to stand for attention for long hours in bitter cold, and forced to open their mouths for Nazis to spit in. As a result, women were more and more often required to go out in public for menial chores.

The gender-specific treatment of men in the camps has not, Huebel says, been examined as closely as has been the treatment of women. To illustrate his point, he stresses how forced labour demanded of men, particularly in brickworks and quarries, led to disfigured bodies, “violated psyches” and premature death. Those who survived returned home like ghosts, permanently traumatized both physically and mentally, tortured by nightmares and often considering (and committing) suicide.

At no point in his book does Huebel denigrate the experiences of Jewish women under Nazism: “different horrors, same hell,” as Myra Goldenberg and Amy Shapiro said in the title of their excellent 2013 book.

Huebel’s oft-stated intention is to draw attention to the specific way men were abused, from beard-pulling to climbing up and down rock quarries until death. Jewish males were, as mentioned, typically regarded by Nazis as the “greater threat,” and were victimized accordingly.

Overall, Huebel shares the hope, in his conclusion, that a study of the erosion of Jewish male masculinity under Nazism can “sharpen our understanding of contemporary issues related to gender.”

This is a daunting objective, if not fulfilled, at least boldly addressed in this groundbreaking book.

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.

Legacy of the “Ghetto girls”

The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s Dr. Abby Wener Herlin, left, interviews author and historian Dr. Judy Batalion at this year’s Kristallnacht commemorative event on Nov. 4. (screenshot)

Jewish girls and young women in Poland were uniquely positioned to play major roles in the resistance to Nazism – and the stories of countless young heroines have been too long overlooked.

This was a key message at the Kristallnacht commemorative event Nov. 4. Held virtually for the second year in a row, it featured Canadian historian Judy Batalion. Dr. Abby Wener Herlin, program and development manager of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, introduced the author and posed questions.

Jewish girls and women were not subject to the irrefutable proof of Jewishness that Jewish men were, said Batalion.

“Women were not circumcised, so they didn’t risk being found out in a pants-drop test,” she said. “If a man on the outside [of the ghettos] was suspected of being Jewish, he would be told at gunpoint to drop his pants, and women didn’t have that physical marker of their Jewishness on their body.”

A secondary reason women could play such an important role in the resistance was that, at that time in Poland, education was mandatory to Grade 8. Many Jewish families sent their sons to Jewish schools or yeshivot. “But, to save on tuition, they sent girls to Polish public schools,” Batalion explained. “In these public schools, girls became more acculturated and … more assimilated women. They were girls and teenagers who had Catholic friends. They were aware of Christian rituals, habits, nuances, behaviour.”

Resistance fighters and underground operatives might have dyed their hair blonde or otherwise altered their outward appearance to pass as Christians. But there was more to it, the author said.

“Gesticulation was very Jewish,” she said. “So one woman had to wear a muff when she went undercover, to control her hands.”

Batalion’s book The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos is the culmination of 12 years of research, which had its beginnings in another project.

Batalion was in the British Library doing research for a performance piece she was working on about Hannah Senesh, a young female hero of the resistance whose story is perhaps among the more well known. Senesh was born in Hungary and had made aliyah to Mandate Palestine in the 1930s, but she returned from that comparatively safe haven to join the fight against the Nazis.

“She joined the Allied forces, became a paratrooper and volunteered to return to Nazi-occupied Europe,” Batalion said of Senesh, who the author first learned about in Grade 5 in Montreal. “She was caught quite early on but legend has it she looked her executioners in the eye when they shot her.

“I grew up with Hannah Senesh as a symbol of Jewish courage,” she said. There were not many books on Senesh at the renowned London library, however. “So, I simply ordered whatever they had. I picked up my stack of books and noticed that one of them was a bit unusual. It was an old book with yellowing pages bound in a worn blue fabric with gold letters and it was in Yiddish.”

Batalion speaks Yiddish, in addition to English, French and Hebrew.

“I flipped through these 200 pages looking for Hannah Senesh, but she was only in the last 10. In front of her [were] dozens of other young Jewish women who defied the Nazis, mainly from the ghettos in Poland.”

The stories featured guns, grenades, espionage. “This was a Yiddish thriller,” she said.

As Batalion soon discovered, it was young Jewish women who were disproportionately represented in some of the most daring acts of resistance of the time.

“These ghetto girls hid revolvers in teddy bears, built elaborate underground bunkers, flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine and whiskey and shot them,” she said. “They planned uprisings, carried out intelligence missions and were bearers of the truth about what was happening to the Jews. They helped the sick and taught the children, they organized soup kitchens, underground schools and printing presses. They flung Molotov cocktails in ghetto uprisings and blew up Nazi supply trains.

“I had never read anything like this,” said Batalion. “I was astonished and equally baffled. Who were these women? What made them act as they did? Aside from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which I’d heard of, what was the story of Jewish resistance in the Holocaust?… And why had I, who grew up in a survivor family and community, who was so involved in Jewish arts and culture – I even have a PhD in women’s history – how had I never heard this story?”

Thus began a dozen years of research in Poland, Israel, England and across North America, in archives and living rooms, memorial monuments and the streets of former ghettos, she said. “I trod through testimonies, letters, photographs, obscure documentaries and the towns where these heroines were born and raised,” she said.

“Reading through all this material, I was astonished to learn of the scope of the underground,” she said. “Over 90 European ghettos had armed Jewish resistance units … 30,000 Jews enlisted in the partisans. Rescue networks supported 12,000 Jews in hiding in Warsaw alone. Uprisings occurred in ghettos, in labour camps and death camps, all this alongside daily acts of resilience – smuggling food, making art, hiding, hugging a barrack-mate to keep her warm, even telling jokes during transports to relieve fear. Women were at the helm of so many of these personal and organized efforts, women aged 16 to 25. Hundreds of them, possibly even thousands of them.”

The ability to do such things, under unimaginably dangerous conditions, was aided by a social phenomenon that predated the Nazi occupation.

The early 20th century in Poland was a time of extraordinary Jewish intellectual ferment. Making up about 10% of the country’s population, Jews had a profound social infrastructure, including 180 Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw alone. Jewish political movements proliferated – left, right, religious, secular, Zionist and non-Zionist – creating a vibrant discourse and networks of interrelated groups across the country. By the 1930s, almost all Polish Jews were wondering if this was a country where they could continue to thrive, whether they belonged to the country where their ancestors had lived for 1,000 years.

“As part of this identity struggle, 100,000 young Jews were members of Jewish youth movements – that’s a huge proportion,” said Batalion. “These were values-driven groups that were affiliated with these varying political parties and stances.”

For example, when war broke out, Frumka Plotnicka was 24 years old. Her youth movement urged their members to flee east – “That’s also how my grandparents survived,” noted Batalion – but fleeing a crisis did not suit Plotnicka.

“Stunning her comrades in her movement, she was the first to smuggle herself back into Nazi-occupied Poland,” she said. “She went to Warsaw and became a leader in the Warsaw Ghetto. She ran soup kitchens for hundreds of Jews, she organized classes, discussions and performances. She negotiated with German, Polish and Jewish councils, she helped extract Jews from forced labour.

“She covered her Jewish features with a kerchief and makeup and left the ghetto, traveling across Poland, keeping communities connected. She brought with her information, inspiration and books,” Batalion said. “They had a secret printing press. She ran seminars across Nazi-occupied Poland.

“In late 1941, the youth movements acknowledged the truth of the Nazis’ genocidal plans and they transformed from education hubs into these underground militias. Frumka still traveled to disseminate information. Now, it was about mass executions. She was one of the first to smuggle weapons into the Warsaw Ghetto. She had two guns in a sack of potatoes.”

She was killed while firing at Nazis from a bunker in 1943.

While disguised as non-Jews, some of the woman warriors were able to exploit the prejudices of their tormentors.

“Nazi culture was classically sexist,” said Batalion. “They never suspected that a sweet-looking girl had a pocket full of ammunition. Jewish women played to this underestimation. One courier … was once carrying a valise full of contraband material and she was getting on a train and noticed they were checking bags. She was very beautiful and bashed her eyelashes and went up to the Gestapo man and said, ‘My bag is so heavy, can you carry it for me?’ He was being chivalrous, ‘Of course, I’ll carry it for you,’ and he took it on the train for her and, of course, they didn’t check the bag.”

These young Jewish fighters had lost everything and still soldiered on, the author said.

“They knew they wouldn’t topple the German army, yet risked their lives time and time again to fight for justice and liberty,” she said. “Small victories are achievable and necessary for great change. It is through these young women that I learned that not only is trauma passed through generations of Jewish women but so is courage and daring, strength and resilience, passion and compassion.”

Batalion’s book won the 2021 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the Holocaust category and has been optioned for a Steven Spielberg film, for which Batalion is working on the screenplay.

The annual Kristallnacht commemorative lecture is presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in partnership with Congregation Beth Israel, with support from the Robert and Marilyn Krell Endowment of the VHEC, and funded through the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver annual campaign.

Prior to the keynote address, Holocaust survivors lit candles in their homes. Kennedy Stewart, mayor of Vancouver, offered reflections and Nina Krieger, executive director of the VHEC, read a proclamation from the city. Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld thanked the speaker.

Our obligation to remember

Isa Milman, a member of the Second Generation, lights a candle of remembrance at the Victoria Shoah Project’s Kristallnacht commemoration Nov. 9, accompanied by grandson Isaac Phelan. (screenshot)

In a Kristallnacht commemoration no less poignant because it was held virtually, speakers emphasized the responsibility to remember.

“Why do we keep remembering?” asked Isa Milman, a Victoria writer and artist who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. “Why does it matter? Isn’t it time to let go, to move on, to stop looking back and turn instead to the present and the future?

“We believe that the lessons of the Shoah, the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, are more important than ever,” she said. “We must speak out against injustice wherever we find it and as soon as we find it.”

Milman was speaking Nov. 9, the 83rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, at the commemoration organized by the Victoria Shoah Project. It was the second annual such event held virtually in the city of Victoria, because of the pandemic.

“Every day, I am filled with grief when I think of my murdered family, shot into pits,” said Milman, “and my 2-year-old cousin Mordecai, who was buried alive because a bullet would be wasted on him.”

As she leaned in to light a candle of remembrance for family members, Isaac Phelan, Milman’s grandson, six days shy of his second birthday, ambled to his grandmother’s side.

“But here I am appearing before you, throbbing with life despite everything,” said Milman. “Tonight, we are reminded of our moral imperative to remember, to speak out and join together in the strength of community to protect everyone from harm, wherever and however it arises. That is the lesson of the Shoah we must never forget.”

Rabbi Lynn Greenhough of Victoria’s Kolot Mayim Reform Temple spoke of the precedents that allowed an event like Kristallnacht to occur.

“Kristallnacht reminds us every year that those buildings, those synagogues, those shops that burned across Germany were what was seen above ground,” she said. “Underneath that same ground were seams of hatred and fear of ‘those people,’ those ‘not Christians,’ that existed and smouldered for centuries and for generations. Hitler was not an anomaly.

“Tonight, we remember,” she went on. “And, tomorrow, we continue to do the work of bringing greater peace and greater justice into this world. We stand for our place in this world as Jews, as Israel, to ensure those underground seams of hatred never burst through the ground again.”

Congregation Emanu-El’s Rabbi Harry Brechner said he misses the power of having religious, ethnic and communal leaders stand with him on the bimah on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, something that has not been possible since the beginning of the pandemic.

“Kristallnacht is really about the entire city coming together to say: not here. I think that we are in a time now where so many injustices of our past are coming up, not just in Kamloops but all around us…. And, really, for us to really talk about reconciliation, we do need to face really difficult truths,” said Brechner.

Highlighting the theme of this year’s commemoration – “Communities standing together” – Richard Kool spoke of an encounter, when he was a young adult, with a figure who may have been the Prophet Elijah. Kool lent the man a copy of The Atlantic magazine and, when the man returned it, it included a handwritten note with a surah (chapter) from the Koran, in Arabic, and, in Hebrew, the words of Leviticus 19:33-34, which is a directive about the treatment of sojourners in your midst, because “for sojourners were you in the land of Egypt.”

Dr. Kristin Semmens, an assistant teaching professor in the department of history at the University of Victoria, noted that it was her sixth year participating in the commemoration, but the first time she shared her personal motivations.

“The Nazis sent my maternal grandfather, a 17-year-old Ukrainian boy, to be a forced labourer on a farm in Austria during the war,” she said. “He never saw his family again. My maternal grandmother was an ethnic German growing up in the former Yugoslavia. She fled the advancing Red Army to end up on that same farm. She also never saw her village again.”

Semmens’ mother was born in 1949, in a refugee camp for displaced Germans.

“My family’s experiences were, of course, nothing like the suffering of the Jews of Europe during the Shoah,” she said. “I mention them now only to tell you why I became an historian. I wanted to know more about that time. And I did learn more. As an historian of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, I know more than I ever wanted to about how awful human beings can be to one another. Every year, I stand before you and recount the events that are themselves horrific, but which only preceded far worse horrors to come. This year, given our world’s current challenges, I want to do something different. I want to highlight those who stood up to the Nazis at each stage, no matter in how small a way. I must stress at the outset they were exceedingly few. One of the most upsetting outcomes of my research is endless evidence about how ordinary Germans not only passively accepted but also often enthusiastically supported Hitler’s persecution of other Germans.”

In response to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, there was precious little opposition. A rare exception, she said, was Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the mayor of Leipzig, who expressed outright criticism of the laws. In 1944, he would be executed for his part in the plot to kill Hitler.

She also cited Otto Wels, chairman of the Social Democratic Party, who spoke out in parliament, but who soon had to flee the country as the Nazis cracked down on their opponents.

“The regime imposed a boycott on Jewish-owned stores, businesses and practices. Brown-shirted Stormtroopers and Hitler Youth stood outside, refusing customers entry. Many ordinary Germans obliged and even openly jeered the humiliated shop owners,” Semmens said. “Others, though, bypassed the … sentries and went shopping. They apologized to Jewish business owners. They brought flowers to their Jewish doctors to express compassion. That they rejected injustices directed at individual Jews was encouraging, yet it must be said that they almost never openly criticized the Third Reich’s newly realized systemic racism.”

While the murder of almost 100 Jews, the arrest of 30,000 more and the destruction of hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish-owned businesses over that one night is widely known, she said, extensive damage to private residences is less well remembered. Semmens spoke of survivor testimonies of the night.

“They recalled spilled ink on paintings, rugs and tablecloths, and that blankets were cut with glass shards. Many dwellings were now uninhabitable,” she said. “Though such wanton damage and public violence upset many Germans, there were almost no cases of open opposition to Kristallnacht – but some defied the Nazis’ intentions in other ways. They denounced assailants, vandals and thieves to the police – not surprisingly, to no avail. Others assisted Jewish Germans directly by providing food, shelter and loans of household objects to replace those destroyed or stolen. They warned Jewish neighbours about impending arrests and even, albeit infrequently, hid them from the Gestapo. Some brave police officers and firefighters protected synagogues and doused their flames against the Nazis’ orders to refrain.”

Despite these anecdotes, important and uplifting as they may be, Semmens said, “Far, far too many merely stood by.”

She said, “It is easier to turn a deaf ear or a blind eye to discrimination and defamation – yet we must find courage to challenge the wrongs of our society.”

Shoah education continues

Dr. Claude Romney speaking to students pre-COVID. (photo from Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre)

For many years, people dedicated to educating about the Holocaust and its moral lessons have been adapting to new realities. The declining number of survivors and the need to preserve their eyewitness testimony has necessitated innovative means of conveying these lessons to successive generations. As a result of these preparations, organizations like the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) have been remarkably prepared to continue their work despite the limitations imposed by a global pandemic.

Dr. Claude Romney has been sharing her wartime experiences with younger audiences for several years. Her father, Dr. Jacques Lewin, was arrested in Paris at the end of 1941 and was among the first prisoners transported to Auschwitz. While Romney and her mother survived the war in southern France, evading numerous close calls, her father survived the most notorious Nazi camp because his skills were useful to the Nazis – he was a doctor who was put into service at the camp. Romney has researched and spoken about the experiences of her father and other “prisoner-doctors.”

Since the pandemic began, Romney has done two virtual presentations to schools and, while she wishes the talks could be in person, she is grateful that the technology exists to allow them to happen at all.

“I personally, and I think the other survivors who continue to talk to students online, have to be grateful both to the [Vancouver] Holocaust Education Centre and, of course, most of all, to the teachers who still get in touch and haven’t given up,” she said. “It’s something which could easily have fallen by the wayside. I think it’s very fortunate that teachers are dedicated enough to continue.”

A year and counting into the pandemic, Romney said the global upheaval could have led to lost opportunities.

“We feel there is some urgency because we’re not getting any younger,” she said. “It’s very important.”

The online events differ, depending on the audience. Some classes that are still meeting in person are set up so that the speaker sees the teacher but not the entire class. When classes are virtual, the speaker is one of many faces on a Zoom call.

“This would never have been possible for students 15 years ago, 10 years ago maybe even,” Romney said. “It makes a big difference because, of course, there are books and articles, but it’s not the same as hearing somebody tell their personal stories.”

While the survivor speakers are talking about their past, the lessons they aim to impart are for the present and future.

“I think it’s vital that the new generations know about what happened because it’s up to them to prevent this kind of thing from happening again,” she said. “And to understand that it’s vital to be tolerant of other people who may be different in some ways because they come from different cultures, different religions. It’s a cautionary tale really.”

Ashley Ross has been teaching a course in genocide studies at Aldergrove Community Secondary School for four years. She can attest that students make connections between the present and the past – and that relevance has been honed more sharply in the past couple of years.

“When I first started teaching it, it was very hard for them to understand the German context of that era,” she said, noting that she was challenged to demonstrate the “slippery slope” of hatred, fear and scapegoating. Sadly, students understand that phenomenon better than just a few years ago. “Right now, they are immediately seeing connections and understanding and seeing it play out in their current world.… More than ever, the lessons of the power of propaganda and the fear and the scapegoating are really resonating in our world. It’s through those historical lessons that we are better equipped to process what we’re currently facing.”

She maintains that the survivor speakers’ virtual events are every bit as powerful on the students as an in-person one. She even sees a benefit in the fact that, when they know they can’t be seen by the speaker, students may be more open with their emotional responses.

“Because the Holocaust survivor is only looking at my face rather than their faces, I find that it’s often more raw for the students. In a large auditorium, it doesn’t have that same personal impact,” said Ross, who has led a student trip to Europe that included a visit to Auschwitz.

Sharing firsthand accounts with young generations puts a human face to a part of history that is enormous in scope and perhaps remote in time from the perspective of a teenager.

“I think there’s a sense of honour to have a direct connection to this history that sometimes feels so far away,” she said. “It’s a reminder that it isn’t so far away. I think it’s really impactful to hear first-person accounts [about] something that can get so bogged down in huge numbers.”

photo - Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar, education director and curator at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre — Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar, education director and curator at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. *(photo from vhec.org)*

Dr. Ilona Shulman Spaar, education director and curator at the VHEC, acknowledges that her team did not know what to expect when the pandemic began a year ago. At the same time, the remote delivery of programs and resources that was necessary due to COVID was something for which the centre was already prepared. Not only were Holocaust survivors and other educators delivering virtual talks to student groups in remote parts of British Columbia, a vast digitization process over the past several years has made much of the centre’s collections accessible online, including artifacts, documents, written testimonies and videos.

“In a way, that’s nothing new for us,” she said.

Some research requests saw an uptick as teachers encouraged students to undertake individualized projects – and because the revised provincial curriculum also emphasizes “self-directed learning.”

The VHEC also saw an increase in donations of artifacts and documents. This may be because people are spending more time at home and deciding to clean out attics and closets. Shulman Spaar also thinks people may have a little more time to read the communications they send to supporters, which often include appeals for family records and other items.

Echoing the Aldergrove teacher, Shulman Spaar thinks another factor for increased interest in the VHEC’s programs and resources may be due to current events. Political situations in the United States and around the world, the increased awareness of violence against minority communities and other topics in the news daily underscore the relevance of the organization’s work.

“Ultimately, we are an anti-racism-based Holocaust education centre,” she said. “If you look at what’s going on, it does seem very relevant at the moment.”

There were challenges in rapidly scaling the delivery of virtual programs to more groups. Docents, educators and survivor speakers had to learn the new technologies and adapt their messages to the medium.

Conversely, there have been silver linings. Some survivors who, for health or mobility reasons, could not present their testimonies in person have been able to do so virtually. As capacity has grown for delivering programs remotely, so have requests. The VHEC has welcomed invitations from other provinces, as well as schools in northern British Columbia and other remote parts of the province where survivors are unlikely to visit.

Moreover, said Shulman Spaar, some participants have commented that seeing survivors in their own homes, rather than on a stage, is unexpectedly powerful.

“It’s not the same as an in-person encounter,” she acknowledged, “but, also, hearing the speaker speaking from her or his living room, it’s a different intimate situation that happens. Yes, there is this screen still, but some students and teachers comment how they feel very close and it feels like an intimate encounter rather than being in a big hall and on a stage.

“It’s just different,” she said.

Yom Hashoah commemorations

There are several opportunities for the local community to commemorate Yom Hashoah this year.

On Wednesday, April 7, 3 p.m., the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) is partnering with the Montreal Holocaust Museum for an online program focusing on the importance of remembrance and the intergenerational transmission of memory. The program will include survivor testimony clips and comments from members of the second and third generations about their families’ experiences during the Holocaust. Attend live via facebook.com/events/188237616165702. For more information, visit museeholocauste.ca/en/news-and-events/yom-hashoah.

On Thursday, April 8, 3:30 p.m., community members can join Premier John Horgan for a Holocaust Memorial Day service livestreamed from the B.C. Legislature in Victoria, in a gathering organized with the VHEC and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. Holocaust survivors are invited to a private pre-ceremony reception with Horgan at 3 p.m. – survivors may RSVP to receive a Zoom link by emailing [email protected] or phoning 604-622-4240.

Also on April 8, at 4 p.m., the VHEC, together with the Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, Azrieli Foundation, Canadian Society for Yad Vashem, Facing History and Ourselves, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal, March of the Living Canada and UIA present a Canada-wide Yom Hashoah program featuring survivor testimony from cities across the country, a candlelighting ceremony and other components that share stories of resiliency, faith and hope. Register via holocaustcentre.com/2021-cross-canada-yom-hashoah.

On Sunday, April 11, at 11 a.m., the Victoria Shoah Project is inviting the community to attend a virtual Yom Hashoah with the theme of “Preserving and Honouring Voices from the Shoah.” The program features a tribute to a survivor originally from Hungary, George Pal, who will speak about his book, Prisoners of Hate, which was published in 2018. The service will also include an historian speaking about the Holocaust in Hungary, a recitation of the Kaddish of the Camps, commemorative music, and a message from Rabbi Harry Brechner of Congregation Emanu-El, Victoria. For the Zoom link, visit victoriashoahproject.ca.