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May 16, 2008
A day of remembrance
Province pays its respects to the six million.
RON FRIEDMAN
Members of the Victoria and Greater Vancouver Jewish communities were welcomed to the Legislature on May 5, to pay tribute to the more than six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Holocaust survivors and their families were welcomed by Premier Gordon Campbell and other dignitaries at a ceremony marking Holocaust Memorial Day. The ceremony included words by Campbell and Attorney General and Minister for Multiculturalism Wally Oppal, as well as by Victoria Holocaust Remembrance and Education Society's David Kirk, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) president Jody Dales, Canadian Jewish Congress Pacific Region (CJCPR) chairman Jerry Cuttler and Dr. David Zimmerman, a professor of military history from the University of Victoria and president of the Victoria Holocaust Remembrance and Education Society. Six Holocaust survivors lit six candles to remember the six million Jewish men, women and children killed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.
In his speech, the premier vowed to keep alive the tradition of remembering the Holocaust, so that people never forget the cruelty of which human beings are capable. "Today, we reflect on the lessons of a tragedy so painful and so unthinkable that, generations later, we still struggle to fully understand or explain it," said Campbell. "The victims and survivors are a testament to the fact that we can never allow ourselves to falter in our commitment to reject hatred and to fight to uphold the rights of every individual."
Kirk, a child survivor who fled Germany at 15, spoke about the world's slow reaction in ending the horrors of Nazi Germany in the time of the Second World War and questioned its readiness to respond to genocidal threats uttered against the Jews and Israel today. "In my wider Jewish community, I sense an old, new uneasiness," he said. "The harbinger of evil moves against us Jews collectively. Remembrance of the Shoah perforce sheds light on the present, the cause for my weary message to our countrymen."
Zimmerman spoke about the amazing achievement that Holocaust education has brought forth. "The Holocaust showed the world just how evil human beings could be. This shocked many so much that, over time, racism, anti-Semitism and bigotry became not the norm, as it had been before the Second World War, certainly in this country. But here, in Canada, these ideas are now the unacceptable views of a minority. A minority, which, I am happy to say, is not represented anywhere in this Legislature."
"The governments of British Columbia and Canada are to be commended for declaring and observing a day of Holocaust remembrance, Yom Hashoah," said Cuttler, who, on behalf of CJCPR and the entire Jewish community, was presented, by the premier with a framed scroll, enshrining the province's commitment to Holocaust remembrance. "By commemorating this day every year, Canadians reaffirm that we must stand together to reject hatred and discrimination, embrace diversity, democracy and freedom, and renew our commitment to uphold human rights and equality for all Canadians," continued Cuttler. British Columbia began commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day eight years ago.
After the ceremony, the survivors and their families were invited to the Legislature gallery to view the afternoon session of Parliament. They were welcomed and introduced to the assembled MLAs by Campbell.
This year's ceremony marked a changing of the guard in terms of local leadership. Dales took over the post of president of the VHEC, replacing her longstanding predecessor, Rita Akselrod. Dales, whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, has been involved in Holocaust education since the centre's inception 12 years ago. She said that, over the years, she has developed many personal relations with Holocaust survivors and described those interactions as the highlight of her job: "They are my heroes, they're my inspiration," she said.
"What makes our centre unique is that it is not a narration of history. Our centre is truly about enlightenment and education, which is different from a lot of Holocaust-based centres," said Dales. "The Holocaust survivors who founded the organization said that the ultimate purpose is not necessarily to create a place for us to mourn. That is an important element, and crucial for the healing of this particular community, but there is no legacy in that. The legacy is in the messages that we can impart, the legacy is in being watchdogs for racism, to teach about intolerance.
"If we were a museum, within a few generations it would be just another story in history, tragic as it may be," she continued. "The second you take that and you extend it to the next level, asking 'What does the story tell us?' 'What can we learn from it?' 'How do we extrapolate good from so much evil?' – that's what legacy truly is, it's about looking far into the future, generation after generation."
To that purpose, the VHEC holds more than 40 events every year and regularly sends survivors, both concentration camp survivors and, increasingly, child survivors and children of survivors to schools across the province.
One of those people, Alex Buckman, was the main organizer of the Victoria event. Buckman himself survived the war by hiding in an orphanage in Belgium after his parents were murdered in the concentration camps. He is one of 20 speakers who go to schools to tell their personal experiences. Every year, he makes the trip from Vancouver to Victoria together with local survivors and their families in a rented bus and, every year, he said, the numbers making the trip dwindle. To address the problem of continuity, Buckman and others have begun coaching their children to tell their stories, in anticipation of the days when they will be too old to tell them themselves.
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