Pat Johnson – Page 37

MLA’s father hid past

Judy Darcy with her father, Youli. (photo from Judy Darcy)

For years, Judy Darcy’s father carried in his wallet a photo of a little girl. It was one of very few mementoes of the man’s past – a murky history that Darcy and her siblings have only partially reconstructed.

Darcy, the member of the Legislative Assembly for New Westminster, went public with her father’s story on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, tweeting: “… my heart is with my dad who lost family members & kept his Jewishness secret from us to keep us safe.”

The Darcy family had a lot of secrets. Her father had no living relatives and he never spoke of what had happened to them.

photo - MLA Judy Darcy — MLA Judy Darcy *(photo from Judy Darcy)*

“My father’s history was very murky,” she recently told the Independent. “Everything about his family and his relatives was murky and he explained it by saying that he fought in the war and there was a lot of bombing and that he suffered amnesia. I knew he had siblings; I didn’t know any details. I didn’t know how they died. I knew he’d lost track of them. And that he’d lost his memory. It was just grey and murky.”

When Darcy was an infant, the family moved from Europe to Sarnia, Ont., where her father worked in the petrochemical industry. With his wife, he raised a family and progressed in his career. Late in life, after he had retired and been widowed, he moved to Toronto, where his grown children had settled.

“And not long after he moved to Toronto,” Darcy said, “he went to Holy Blossom synagogue and met with Rabbi Gunter Plaut, because he wanted to atone for having abandoned his community.”

Darcy knows nothing of what the conversations between her father and the late, legendary rabbi involved, or whether there was one meeting or a series, but she believes her father took great strength and relief from whatever it was Plaut told him.

Her father began attending the Bernard Betel Centre for Creative Living, a Jewish seniors facility, and formed a companionship with a Jewish woman. But stories of the past came slowly, and not expansively.

“He didn’t sit us down,” Darcy recalled, “it just became part of what he talked about.”

Through snippets of their father’s recollections, shards of history they already knew and the discovery of a recording he made shortly before he died for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, the siblings pieced together as complete a story of their family’s past as they are likely to assemble.

Jules (Youli) Simonovich Borunsky was born in 1904 in Lithuania to a Russian-Jewish family. He grew up mostly in Moscow but, in the early 1920s, the family moved to France.

“He always said it was because of the revolution,” Darcy said, “which was partly true, I’m sure, because they owned a factory.” She wonders whether antisemitism also propelled them.

Youli served in the French army, was taken prisoner during the Battle of Dunkirk, in the spring of 1940, and was imprisoned in northern Germany.

“He managed to stay alive in the prisoner-of-war camp because they didn’t find out that he was Jewish,” Darcy said. While a prisoner-of-war, Youli regularly received letters from his wife, Jeanne-Helene, a Catholic Parisienne he had wed before the war.

“She sent him letters every day loaded with Catholicisms,” said Darcy. “And sometimes with little Catholic medals, in order to try to pretend that he was Catholic, not Jewish. Again, I only find all of this out much, much later.”

Through some sort of arrangement facilitated by the International Red Cross (one of many aspects of the story still cloaked in mystery), he was released and made his way back, mostly on foot, to Paris. There, he was reunited with Jeanne-Helene, as well as with his widowed father, Simeon.

Paris was under Nazi occupation and Youli convinced his father that he would be safer going to live with Youli’s sister Rosa, his brother-in-law and their toddler daughter, in Kovno, Lithuania.

photo - Judy Darcy’s father, Youli, kept a photo of his sister Rosa’s daughter in his wallet. His niece and her parents were killed in the Holocaust — Judy Darcy’s father, Youli, kept a photo of his sister Rosa’s daughter in his wallet. His niece and her parents were killed in the Holocaust. *(photo from Judy Darcy)*

Simeon took Youli’s advice. The timing, though, was catastrophic. According to what her father told her, four days after Simeon arrived in Kovno, the Nazis invaded. Pro-Nazi Lithuanians launched pogroms that, later combined with Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units), murdered almost all of Kovno’s substantial Jewish population. Youli assumed the victims included his father, sister, brother-in-law and the little girl whose photo he would carry in his wallet for years.

Youli had other siblings, Darcy discovered – a sister and brother-in-law who he believed had fled, or were relocated, to Siberia, and another sister about whose fate he had no inkling at all.

“He carried tremendous guilt,” Darcy said of her father. “The guilt of having survived when others died and the guilt of having sent his father to his death.”

Adding to his grief, Jeanne-Helene died of an illness sometime around the end of the war, leaving Youli to care for their son Pierre, Darcy’s half-brother.

After the war, Youli went to extraordinary lengths to hide his Jewish identity from everyone except his wife.

“None of my mother’s relatives knew that he was Jewish,” said Darcy. “Only my mother knew after the war.”

Youli found work as deputy director of a United Nations Refugee Agency displaced persons camp in Germany. There, he met Else Margrethe Rich, a veteran of the Danish resistance who was also working at the camp, and who would become his wife.

They had their children christened in the Russian Orthodox Church in Copenhagen. Their first daughter, Anne Helene, was followed by Judy before the family migrated to Ontario in 1951. Darcy was christened Ida Maria Judith Borunsky – “he threw in a Maria,” Darcy noted wryly – and her younger brother, who was born in Canada, was named George Christian Simeon Borunsky. The obviously Christian names were an active part of the father’s determination to erase his past.

There were the common struggles that immigrant families experience, as well as particular idiosyncrasies. The family home was filled with art and music and books. The family always had enough to eat, but costly red meat wasn’t on the table. Darcy recalled her father’s philosophy: “For the price of a few roast beefs, Judith, you can buy a good painting. For the price of a few steaks, Judith, you can buy a good book.”

photo - Judy Darcy with her father, Youli — Judy Darcy with her father, Youli. *(photo from Judy Darcy)*

When Darcy was 7, Youli took the family to the Lambton county courthouse and changed their surname to Darcy. He wanted something French-sounding, he told them.

What made her father finally open up – to an extent, at least – Darcy can’t be certain. But, in retrospect, there were a couple of hints that only made sense later. A family friend in New York City, who had known Youli in childhood, made a comment to Darcy and her sister during a visit that implied their father was Jewish, then quickly changed the subject when confronted with blank stares.

In Grade 11, when Darcy had an option of studying German or geography, she chose German because, like her parents, she has a facility with languages. Her father hit the ceiling, for reasons she didn’t fathom.

Despite christening his children and giving two of them ostentatiously Christian names, he husbanded a rage at organized religion.

“He would sometimes shake his fist at the sky and say in his heavy Russian accent, ‘If there were a God in heaven, he would not allow the things that happen on this earth,’” Darcy said.

When she moved to Toronto to attend York University, Darcy started hanging out with students who were Jewish.

“When I would go home and I would use some Jewish expressions, my father would completely freak out,” she said, although she knows this only because her mother conveyed the news.

Her father always said that he brought the family to Canada to be safe because there might be another war.

“But, in hindsight,” Darcy speculated, “he did it because he was Jewish and, even though my mother wasn’t Jewish, he wanted to protect us and that’s why he never told us.”

After Youli died in 1997, at age 93, his children found the Shoah Foundation video. The quality of the recording was poor and he was very shaky by then, his memories fading. It contained a few details they hadn’t yet known.

In addition to the video, Darcy and her siblings took notes and recorded parts of their father’s story, but he never shared it from beginning to end. Many pieces remain lost.

“It’s little glimmers of that entire history,” she said.

The photo that Youli carried in his wallet those many years is now framed and sits on Darcy’s shelf at home.

“I don’t know her name,” she says of the cousin she never met, “but her cheeks are like mine and she’s about 4 years old.”

Meaning of liberation

The Canadian military helped liberate Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps near the end of the Second World War, a fact that was omitted for decades from recorded history.

The experiences of Canadian liberators – and the meaning of the term “liberation” itself – were the subject of the keynote address at the International Holocaust Remembrance Day observance in Vancouver last week.

Prof. Mark Celinscak, a Canadian who teaches at the University of Nebraska Omaha, delivered the address Jan. 18, at a commemoration presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) in partnership with the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre.

photo - Prof. Mark Celinscak — Prof. Mark Celinscak (photo from unomaha.edu)

Celinscak’s book, Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp, was recognized as the best nonfiction book of 2016 by the Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature. In his lecture, he explained how he stumbled upon the facts of Canadian involvement in the liberation of Nazi camps.

Researching the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, he encountered multiple conflicting narratives, but none involved Canadians, he said. In archival research, he found references to Canadians encountering Nazi camps and so he consulted leading Canadian military historians, but all assured him there was no Canadian role in the liberation of concentration camps.

Through further research, Celinscak identified a few soldiers who confirmed the Canadian military’s involvement. These connections led to more and, eventually, he had identified 1,000 individual cases of Canadian military personnel who participated in the liberation of Nazi camps. Seven decades after the end of the war, this aspect of history is only now coming to light. The oversight, said Celinscak, was likely due to the general sense of chaos in Europe at the end of the war.

In introducing Celinscak, VHEC executive director Nina Krieger said: “Were it not for the tenacious scholarship of this evening’s presenter, future generations might never have known of the Canadian role in this aspect of the Second World War.”

Celinscak believes his research helps right an omission in the record. He reflected on an incident from 1997, when plans for a new Canadian War Museum included a Holocaust memorial gallery. Controversy ensued, and Senate hearings were held on the appropriateness of including the Holocaust in a museum devoted to Canadian military history.

“Upon conclusion of the hearings, the plan for a Holocaust memorial gallery was promptly abandoned,” Celinscak said. “In the view of many who testified, the Holocaust either had no place in the country’s war museum or it held no direct connection to Canada and its military.”

His research, however, indicates that the Canadian military did indeed have a connection to the Holocaust, as liberating forces.

Celinscak’s local address was related to the exhibition currently being presented at the VHEC, called Canada Responds to the Holocaust, 1944–45. The exhibition, Celinscak said, reflects “a recent growing body of research that explores how the Canadian government, Canadian organizations and average Canadians responded to the Holocaust.” Celinscak wrote the exhibition’s panels related to Bergen-Belsen, while the overall exhibition was developed by Prof. Richard Menkis and Ronnie Tessler.

Canadians helped liberate camps in the Netherlands and in northern Germany, Celinscak said, though Bergen-Belsen was not taken by military force.

“Simply put, the Allies became involved in Bergen-Belsen because the Germans turned it over to them,” he said. Recognizing that the war was all but lost and that the disease-ridden camp presented a public health hazard to the surrounding German population, a representative from the German army crossed British lines and said that inmates in a nearby concentration camp were ill. The Allies entered Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945.

“In the ensuing days, weeks and months, British and Canadian forces from the surrounding area arrived at Bergen-Belsen to assist, to witness and to document,” said Celinscak. “Clearly, military personnel were unprepared for what they were to find in the camp.”

The “liberation” removed the Nazis from the scene, but life improved slowly for the survivors of the camp.

“The war, of course, still continued,” he said. “As a consequence of that, supplies were limited, personnel were largely unavailable and many resources were occupied elsewhere. Those who remained to work in the camp were left with monumental tasks.”

The victims of Bergen-Belsen continued to die. In the two weeks after the Allies took over, 9,000 people died of disease. The next month, 4,500 inmates succumbed, and another 400 perished the following month.

“In total, approximately 14,000 people died in the camp after its transfer to Allied control,” said Celinscak. “In other words, nearly a quarter of the total number of prisoners still alive when the British and Canadian forces first arrived in the camp ultimately met their demise.… While the situation slowly improved, the conditions in the camp remained grim even weeks after its surrender.”

This reality is partly why Celinscak’s research also focuses on the meaning of the term liberation.

“Liberation was an experience that transformed the lives of both liberators and survivors,” he said, noting that this is another newly emerging field of academic inquiry.

“What does that word mean in relation to the Holocaust?” he asked. “If we consider some popular representations of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, we often see it framed as a jubilant event, one that brought to an end the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust. In films such as Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, in history books and in some museum exhibits, liberation is frequently depicted as a homogenous, joyful moment in time. But how accurate is this portrayal?”

Liberator narratives, he said, “are overflowing with shock, grief, confusion, disgust and rage.” For survivors, life did not turn for the better instantly. Public health considerations meant the camp inmates were effectively quarantined.

“The prisoners remained behind barbed wire,” he said. “Initially, the survivors were not given autonomy to leave the camp whenever they saw fit. Instead, in the weeks – and, for some, in the months and even years that followed – they continued to live behind the barbed wire of these camps. Places like Bergen-Belsen became displaced persons camps. The survivors were still guarded, only by men in different uniforms.”

In extensive interviews with many survivors, Celinscak came to realize the nuance in the concept of liberation.

“Liberation was a highly ambivalent experience,” he said. “They understood that they were no longer prisoners of Nazi Germany, but many would remain in displaced persons camps long after the war, learning that many of their friends and family had not survived what we now refer to as the Holocaust. For both survivor and liberator, they would contend with these experiences for the rest of their lives.”

Phil Levinson, president of the board of the VHEC, welcomed visitors and introduced a procession of Holocaust survivors carrying Yahrzeit candles. David Schaffer led the Mourners’ Kaddish. Councilor Raymond Louie read the proclamation from the City of Vancouver.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was designated by the United Nations in 2005, is officially on Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Pat Johnson is a communications and development consultant to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

Garfinkel aims for Victoria

Gabe Garfinkel is running for the B.C. Liberal nomination in Vancouver-Fairview. (photo from Gabe Garfinkel)

Gabe Garfinkel says he has the combination of youth and experience that makes him an ideal candidate for the B.C. Legislature.

Garfinkel recently announced his candidacy for the B.C. Liberal nomination in Vancouver-Fairview. The 31-year-old former assistant to Premier Christy Clark added that representing the Jewish community is an important part of his reason for running.

Garfinkel attended Vancouver Talmud Torah elementary (as did both his parents) and Prince of Wales secondary before obtaining a BA in political science at the University of British Columbia. During his time at UBC, he did a semester at Hebrew University and says Middle East issues have long been an area of interest.

His first job after university emerged out of a volunteer position. The Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC), for which he had volunteered as a student, hired him as outreach coordinator, based in Toronto. CJPAC is a national, independent, multi-partisan organization that aims to engage Jewish and pro-Israel Canadians in the democratic process and to foster political participation.

“I was the guy that was going into community groups, to community centres, to high schools, to summer camps, to campuses, to Hillels across the country and essentially telling them why they should get involved in politics,” Garfinkel told the Independent. “I was selling a few different programs, but what I was really doing was [building] up an army of hundreds of Jewish community members across the country that were in most cases in high school or university and giving them a voice and a vehicle to represent their own community’s interests in government.”

When he returned to Vancouver, Garfinkel followed his own advice. He walked into the campaign office for federal Liberal candidate Joyce Murray and volunteered. After the election, the MP hired Garfinkel to work in her constituency office.

“I saw firsthand how hard an MP can work and how an MP can make a difference in their constituents’ lives,” he said.

Garfinkel volunteered on the successful campaign of Margaret MacDiarmid, who was elected MLA for Vancouver-Fairview in 2009. She went on to serve in several portfolios in the B.C. Liberal government, including labor and education. MacDiarmid was defeated in 2012 by New Democrat George Heyman, who Garfinkel will be up against if he wins the Liberal nomination. (The Independent will invite all Jewish candidates in the election, which includes Heyman, to be interviewed and profiled.)

Garfinkel also volunteered on the leadership campaign of Clark, who went on to become premier.

“I was drawn to her because I saw the energy and charisma she could bring and the care she had for people,” he said. “I helped put together her youth campaign and young professional team. I played a small role in helping her win and it was great.”

When Clark became premier, Garfinkel served as executive assistant and advisor to several cabinet ministers before being called to the premier’s office and offered a job by Clark. He was the premier’s executive assistant until the 2012 election, when he left government to work for the party. He was on the campaign staff that oversaw the B.C. Liberals’ stunning come-from-behind victory that gave Clark her first full four-year mandate. His role in the election was working with multicultural communities and media.

After the election, Garfinkel returned to the premier’s office as director of community and stakeholder relations.

“The government does so many things and my job was to bring along stakeholders in all these decisions, and making sure that the decisions were being made not from the lens of the government, but from the lens of the people they affected the most,” he said.

In 2013, Garfinkel joined FleishmanHillard, an international public relations and marketing firm. He developed a particular interest in health policy and worked for health-care clients in the nonprofit and private sectors at FleishmanHillard and, since leaving that company, as a self-employed consultant.

He also has gained experience in small business.

“Just over a year ago, I realized that my dad’s business needed some help,” he said. Both his parents, Sandi Karmel and Larry Garfinkel, are social workers, but his father left social work to start Native Northwest, which creates products featuring the works of local First Nations artists.

“It’s been a really great experience helping him run a small business,” he said. “I have such a great time because you never know what’s going to hit you every day and you never underestimate the sheer amount of small hurdles you need to get by in running a business.”

While his new candidacy has required him to take a leave, Garfinkel was until recently on the allocations committee of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver and also sat on the Local Partnership Council for the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. He still volunteers for CJPAC, speaking to groups, usually young people, about the political process, and he is a longtime volunteer for Cystic Fibrosis Canada.

“It’s been important to me because we have a very close family friend who has the disease and for years I’ve been fighting internally for government to help make changes, and now I took that advocacy outside of government,” he said.

In addition to general awareness, advancing the cause of cystic fibrosis includes promoting organ donation and access to life-saving medications.

“Christy Clark’s government has been able to make a lot of positive changes on the organ registry,” Garfinkel said. “There are more avenues for people to sign up and be an organ donor.… It’s a lot easier now than it used to be.”

Nonetheless, he said, there remains a long way to go to increase the number of donors.

Garfinkel was formed by the Jewish community, he said, and has been deeply influenced by his grandmothers. While both his grandfathers passed away when he was young, Garfinkel cites his grandmothers as models of community engagement. His late paternal grandparents, Marsha and Israel (Izzy) Garfinkel, were members of Schara Tzedeck, while his maternal grandparents, Ethel and the late Jonah (Johnny) Karmel, were Beth Israel members. Ethel Karmel was a leader in the preservation of the Cambie Heritage Boulevard, lobbying successfully to have the Cambie Skytrain route go underground, and is an artist with an upcoming exhibition (see Community Calendar for details).

His grandparents’ and parents’ models of community service, he said, helped make him the person he is.

“You understand the interest of looking out for other people, you understand the importance of tikkun olam,” said Garfinkel, who also credits summers at Camp Miriam for building his Judaism and social conscience.

In his race for the nomination, Garfinkel said he is relying on his experience drawing people into the political sphere.

“My background’s in engaging people into the political process so they can have a voice,” he said. “In many cases, it’s been the Jewish community and young people, but also multicultural and new Canadians, where there is some kind of disconnect between them and the government that’s supposed to represent them.”

His candidacy is resonating in particular with young people, he said. In many cases, young people are asking him basic questions about the political system, which indicates to Garfinkel that they feel alienated from it.

“People don’t feel represented,” he said. “First and foremost, I want to make sure people have a voice and I want to fight for them in Victoria.”

His own experience is similar to that of many his age, he added.

“I have a small apartment in the riding and I’m afraid that a bigger place nearby is already out of reach,” he said. “I see transportation and transit as really important because it allows people to spend more time with their families and it protects the environment.”

The riding of Vancouver-Fairview runs from False Creek to 33rd Avenue between Main and Granville, and also includes areas west of Granville from Cornwall to Fourth Avenue east of Burrard, and east of Arbutus from 4th to 16th.

“I think there’s a general consensus that this is a great neighborhood to live in, but it’s not always easy to live here,” said Garfinkel. “If you look at things like housing affordability, it’s something that affects a lot of people here and a lot of future generations as well.”

The election is slated for May 9, 2017, but first Garfinkel has to win the B.C. Liberal nomination. The date for the nomination meeting has not been set and, therefore, neither has the deadline for joining the party in order to vote at the meeting. Garfinkel expects the meeting to be called for January, which means the membership cut-off will be in the coming few weeks.

He believes his comparatively young age combined with his experience in government is good preparation to be an MLA.

“I thought maybe I should wait until I’m older and have more money in my bank account and a longer resumé, but I realized that I have energy now, I have the desire now and have some really great experience I can bring to the table,” he said. “I’m ready.”

Letters connected families

A trove of letters between Jewish children and their parents separated by the Second World War and the Holocaust gives insight into the way families communicate in times of crisis.

Debórah Dwork, Rose Professor of Holocaust History and director of the Strassler Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Massachusetts, has been studying the letters. On Nov. 1, she delivered the Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture, an annual event presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in partnership with Congregation Beth Israel.

During the Second World War, postal service between belligerent or occupied countries ceased, but an individual in neutral Switzerland could convey messages between people in countries on either side of the conflict. Largely by happenstance, Elisabeth Luz, a Swiss woman living outside Zurich, helped many Jewish families maintain contact. After Luz, an unmarried woman who became known to many as “Tante Elisabeth,” had forwarded messages for a few families, word of mouth led to unsolicited requests from children who had been sent to presumed safety in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Britain.

“News about the aunt who forwarded letters spread quickly and Tante Elisabeth gained many nieces and nephews,” said Dwork. “She soon became their counselor and confidant, although nearly none ever met her.”

“Please pardon us that we write you without having permission to do so,” wrote Robert Hess and his brother. “Adolf is 12 years old and I am 14 years. We live in an OSE [Jewish philanthropic organization] home and have been selected for immigration to America. We write to you because we would like to write to our mother and have no other possibility. Please write our mother that she can write us via you. We must ask our mother permission to travel to America.… Can you also send us a photo of her?” The boys provided their address, their mother’s address in Vienna and a photograph of themselves.

“She did not disappoint,” Dwork said of Luz, “and they were included in that transport to America.”

Although she was poor, Luz sent writing paper, envelopes, international reply coupons and reply-paid postcards to the children and parents. She transcribed each letter, believing this would reduce the likelihood of attracting the attention of wartime postal censors, and kept the original. After Luz passed away in 1971, the original letters were discovered by her nephew, who passed them along several years later to Dwork, who has written about children’s experiences in the Holocaust.

At the Kristallnacht commemoration, Dwork shared stories and correspondence of several families, including Wilhelm and Adele Halberstam. In 1939, their daughter Kathe and son-in-law Heinrich Hepner obtained visas for themselves and their three children and eventually made their way to Chile.

“Wilhelm and Adele decided not to emigrate,” Dwork said. “They stayed in Amsterdam with their son Albert. Thus began the parents’ long-distance relationship with their daughter and grandchildren, which depended upon letters.… They sought to weave a web of letters, to hold each other tightly and to assure each other that, notwithstanding the pressures of their radically changed circumstances, their relationships endured.”

Adele Halberstam wrote to her daughter: “I really live from letter to letter.”

As the occupation continued, the parents grew increasingly silent about developments at home, mentioning nothing of the expanding repression they were experiencing, including the imposition of the requirement to wear the yellow star.

“Out of consideration for you, I will not allow my pen to overflow with what fills my heart,” the mother wrote her daughter. “Why should you become as sad as I am?”

Regular mail service between Europe and Chile took longer and longer, then eventually ceased. The family came to rely on the Red Cross, which conveyed messages of 25 words or less. This limited means of communication continued after the Halberstams were deported from Amsterdam to the Dutch transit camp of Westerbork.

“The pattern of Adele’s messages remained consistent,” said Dwork. “Little discussion of the hardship, humiliation or fear and always an emphasis on family ties, love and longing.”

Eventually, some truths could not be withheld. An abrupt Red Cross message told the Hepners of Wilhelm Halberstam’s death by heart attack. Adele and Albert were deported to Auschwitz on Nov. 16, 1943. Adele was murdered on arrival. Albert survived until March 1944.

In another case, a son shared with Luz his fears for his parents’ survival, but did not convey that fear in the letter to his parents. In reply, the mother, writing from the Warsaw ghetto, wrote only of her yearning for her children and not of the horrors she was experiencing.

“Her last letter, written in November 1942, said not a word about the mass deportations to Treblinka that the Germans had just unleashed on the ghetto,” said Dwork.

Luz also helped Hanna Ruth Klopstock, another of the children in the care of OSE, correspond with her mother Frieda and brother Werner in Germany. When the girl had not heard from them in some time, she wrote to Luz expressing her fears.

“Every day I tell myself, today I must certainly get a letter from Mutti. And still nothing. I do not know what to think about this silence,” she wrote. “Maybe the letters have been lost. I hope so.”

The girl’s fears were well-founded, said Dwork. By the end of 1942, Werner had been sent to a forced labor camp in Germany, detailed to heavy agricultural work. The mother wrote to Luz: “I foresee nothing good and must hold myself together.” In the letter, Frieda Klopstock thanks Luz for everything she had done and makes a final request that Luz help and console Hanna Ruth when the inevitable occurs.

“Frieda was deported to Auschwitz six weeks later,” said Dwork. Luz and Hanna Ruth learned this news in a letter from Werner, who himself would follow his mother to the death camp a month later. Luz assumed the worst when a letter to Werner in the labor camp was returned with the address crossed out and the words “Zuruck” and “retour, parti” – return to sender, addressee departed – written on the envelope.

In a shocking twist though, Dwork added: “Remarkably, this is not the last sign of life from Werner.”

A postcard from Werner came some time later.

“Written in block letters,” Dwork said, “his message ran, ‘Dear Tante Elisabeth and dear Hanna Ruth, I inform you today that I am healthy and remain here for the future. Sadly, I have no news from you but I hope you are well. For today, very hearty greetings from Werner.’”

The message was just six lines, Dwork noted, not the full 10 permitted.

“What we know now is that the Nazis, too, recognized the importance of letters,” she said.

In his Nuremberg testimony, a Nazi official described the letter program of the Reich Security Main Office. Jews brought to extermination camps were forced, prior to being murdered, to write postcards that were then mailed at long intervals, in order to make it appear as though these senders were still alive. “And thus,” said Dwork, “letters that seemed a sign of life served as markers of death.”

Dwork’s remarks were preceded by a candlelight procession of survivors of the Holocaust. Cantor Yaacov Orzech chanted El Maleh Rachamim, a memorial prayer for the martyrs. Heather Deal, deputy mayor of Vancouver, read a proclamation from the city. Nina Krieger, executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, introduced Deal and the keynote speaker. Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld thanked Dwork and reflected on his own grandparents’ history of relying on letters from Europe to learn the fate of family left behind.

In his opening remarks to the program, Prof. Chris Friedrichs compared the situation of refugees today, who are fortunate, in many cases, to have access to technology that allows instant communication with loved ones left behind, while also acknowledging parallels across time.

“Nothing we say or do can bring back to life the six million Jews who perished, along with so many millions of others, during the darkest six years of the 20th century,” Friedrichs said. “But now, in the 21st century, the world is still full of desperate human beings longing for rescue or hope. There are things we can do to help bring families together, or to help build bridges of contact and connection. What we learn from the past must ever be our guide for the present and the future.”

Pat Johnson is a communications and development consultant for the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

Letters offer insights

Prof. Debórah Dwork (photo by Jonathan Edelman)

Nearly two decades ago – and a full half-century after the end of the Second World War – a man in Switzerland cleaning out the apartment of his deceased aunt came across a stash of more than 1,000 letters. The discovery disclosed the aunt’s comparatively simple but valiant acts during the Holocaust and provides new insights into the lives of Jewish children and parents separated during the Holocaust.

The aunt, Elisabeth Luz, was an unmarried Protestant woman living near Zurich who appears to have stumbled into a role as the sole connection between hundreds of divided Jewish families. Because postal service between belligerent nations was restricted during the war, neutral Switzerland provided a potential channel for communication. Through what appears to have been happenstance aided by the compassion of a single devoted individual, thousands of letters made it to their intended recipients – and the record they provide demonstrates what families chose to say, and not say, in furtive missives in times of crisis.

The nephew knew that he had stumbled upon something important. He was familiar with the book Children with a Star by Prof. Debórah Dwork, a definitive study of the experiences of Jewish children under Nazism and the adults who helped them. He contacted Dwork to ask if she would like the letters. Dwork, Rose Professor of Holocaust History and founding director of the Strassler Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, in Massachusetts, now possesses the letters and has studied them for years. She will be in Vancouver in just over two weeks to speak at the community’s annual Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture about what they tell us about families during the Holocaust.

Dwork cannot be certain how Luz came to be the intermediary for hundreds of families.

“From what I can piece together – and this is what I believe is the case – there was a refugee camp, sort of an internment camp, not a concentration camp, for refugees that had been established by the Swiss government in that town,” Dwork said. Luz went to the camp to give voluntary aid, Dwork believes, “to show with her presence that she cared about their plight.”

One of the men in the camp asked Luz whether she would be so kind as to send a letter to his wife.

“From there, it snowballed,” said Dwork. “Some of the letters that I have from the children, for example, say, ‘you don’t know me but Susie told me that you are an auntie who is willing to write to our mothers,’ and so on.”

The parents were mostly in “Greater Germany” – Germany and the areas it occupied. The children had mostly been sent to places thought to be safe, including Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Remarkably, the letters do not end in 1945. In the course of being a conduit between hundreds of parents and their children, Luz became a confidant to many of them – “Tante Elisabeth” – and remained in contact with several who continued their correspondence. The fact that the collection of letters exists at all is due in part to the fact that Luz hand-copied each one, believing that this would be less likely to catch the attention of war-era postal censors. She maintained the originals.

“Parents sent their letter to her, she copied every letter and then sent it on to the children and the children did the same in reverse,” said Dwork.

Some of the children were on the Kindertransport, the effort to transfer Jewish children from Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe to the United Kingdom, while others were sent by their parents to places considered safer for Jewish children.

“There were a number of children who were sent to family members or to friends or to religious organizations by their parents independently, individually,” she said, adding that there is much to be learned from the letters. “It tells us an enormous amount about family, the importance of family and the way in which family members use letters as thread to bind the family together. I think also it tells us about how children absorbed, adjusted, adapted – or did not adjust or adapt – to their ever-changing lives.”

What the letters do not always indicate is the fate of the families who sent them.

“We know a lot about the children who went on the Kindertransport to Britain, because they survived,” said Dwork. Less is known about the children sent to Belgium, the Netherlands and France. “Many of them did not survive as the Germans conquered and occupied those countries,” she said.

Of those who continued corresponding with Luz long after the war, many had lost their parents.

“Because of the relationship that developed between the children and Elisabeth Luz, those who continued to write, by and large, were now young adults whose parents did not survive and she, Elisabeth Luz, was the last tie to their prewar and wartime life,” explained Dwork. “So, she had become their confidant and that’s very important, the way Elisabeth became a confidant to the parents and the children.”

Vancouverites should join her in November not only to hear specifics about the contents of the letters, but also to reflect on some of the broader issues raised by a collection of this sort, which is a focus of Dwork’s academic work.

“The larger question, I think, is how do people keep in contact?” she said. “What do parents in Greater Germany say to their children? And what do children tell their parents about their daily lives?”

While the letters represent voices from the past, they have much to say to people today. “This is a very human story,” said Dwork. “And, as we are looking at refugees today far-flung from one spot to another, it may help us to think about how each one is a member of a family.”

The Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture takes place Nov. 1, 7 p.m., at Congregation Beth Israel.

Pat Johnson is a communications and development consultant for the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. This article first appeared in VHEC’s Zachor.

Some battles need fighting

Author Deborah E. Lipstadt, right, with actor Rachel Weisz, who portrays Lipstadt in the film Denial. (photo by Liam Daniel/Elevation Pictures)

In 1996, Deborah Lipstadt, an American historian and author of Denying the Holocaust, was sued by British Holocaust denier David Irving. Unlike in the United States, British courts put the onus on the defendant to prove they did not libel the plaintiff. But this trial had larger stakes than whether Lipstadt (and her publisher, Penguin Books) were guilty of libeling Irving by characterizing him as a denier of the Holocaust. To media and many in the general public, the case put the Holocaust on trial.

A major motion picture scheduled for release Oct. 7 in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, is a retelling of the events around the trial. The film, Denial, starring Rachael Weisz as Lipstadt, captures the contending forces inside and outside the Jewish community as the trial burst onto the global news cycle.

Lipstadt told the Independent in a telephone interview Sunday that the film focuses emphatically on actual events. Insubstantial details may have been changed – a meeting portrayed as taking place in a restaurant actually took place elsewhere; she didn’t own a dog at the time of the trial – but the substance of the film was subject to absolutely no dramatic or artistic licence.

“Every word that comes out of David Irving’s mouth is exactly as he said it,” Lipstadt offered by way of example. In fact, the film opens with remarks Irving made in Calgary and every statement he makes throughout the film seems intended not to convince but to rub salt in historical wounds.

The film captures Lipstadt’s frustration with the strategy of her British legal team, which refused to allow Lipstadt or survivors of the Holocaust to testify. Lipstadt thought she would be seen as a coward for not speaking in court and, in a poignant scene in the film, she promises a survivor of the Holocaust that the voices of survivors will be heard. Her lawyers stood firm, however. This was not to be a trial about the Holocaust, they insisted, nor was it a trial about Lipstadt. It was about whether Irving was what Lipstadt had said in her book: a denier of the Holocaust.

She sparred with the legal team throughout but, in retrospect, she is completely happy with their strategy.

“Absolutely 110%,” she said. “First of all, we won. Second of all, not only did we win, but we got the most damning judgment, one of the most crushing libel judgments against anyone that has ever been issued, certainly in recent years, against anyone in England. [The judgment] calls the man a liar, a falsifier of history, his version of history is mendacious, that no sane, thinking historian could ever doubt the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz. In fact, everything we needed. Obviously, the lawyers’ strategy was precisely the right one. It would not have added anything to have me go in on the stand. It would not have added anything to have survivors go on the stand. This wasn’t an emotional excursion to make me feel good that I can stand up there and challenge Irving or could give survivors a modicum of comfort that they could stand and confront him. This was to win a major case and that was what it was about.”

In fact, of the whole experience, which on film appears to be a horribly emotional and wrenching multi-year battle through arcane legalities and unanticipated notoriety, Lipstadt would only change one thing if she could.

“I might have learned to trust the lawyers faster than I learned to trust them,” she said.

The trial and the events around it did not affect her academic career – she was then and is now a professor at Emory University in Atlanta – but it allowed her a bigger stage.

“It gave me a far higher profile than I had before,” she said. “I don’t think it’s changed me, but it’s changed the size of the megaphone I happen to have to speak out on things.”

While Lipstadt was not formally involved in the making of the film, she credits the filmmakers and Weisz, who depicted her, for their willingness to engage her.

“No film will be made if the author of the book is going to be meddling,” she said. “They would never go ahead with that. But the filmmakers were exceptionally generous with wanting my input … passing the script by me, meeting with me, the director coming to Atlanta to meet with me, the screenwriter coming to meet with me, and Rachel Weisz asking for my help … in my spending time with her and hanging out with her and talking with her. Not just about the role, but about myriad things. They gave me far more input than is normally the case.”

When she saw a pre-final cut of the film the first time, it was with a test audience in a multiplex, and it left her “sort of speechless,” she said.

“You can buy your popcorn and your oversized Coca-Cola and go into your reclining chair and there was my story on the screen,” she said. “It was very weird. It was very, very stunning and very, very weird.”

She hopes the film helps people understand that not everything is subject to opinion.

“There are facts,” she said. “There are not two sides to every opinion. Not everything is up for grabs. There are facts, opinions and lies. I could say to you, it’s my opinion that the earth is flat. Well, just because it’s my opinion that the earth is flat doesn’t make it flat. Not all opinions hold water. Some opinions are based in ridiculous, nonfactual … claims.”

She also encountered, particularly in Britain but elsewhere as well, Jewish individuals and groups who believed that by not settling with Irving and instead going to trial, Lipstadt was giving Irving a platform he did not deserve. Similar to the way she came around to see her legal team’s strategy as the right course, Lipstadt believes those who thought she should settle now realize that going to trial was the right course.

“You can’t fight every battle, but there are certain battles you cannot turn away from and certain battles you have to take on,” she said. “There were lots of people who didn’t want me to fight this and I did and I’m glad I did. And I think they are glad I did, too. Lots of those people came around and recognize that we were right and they had been wrong.”

Saga of hunting Nazis

Andrew Nagorski will talk at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre on Nov. 29, as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival. (photo by Andrew Rudakov)

The night before the legendary operation that captured Adolf Eichmann, Isser Harel, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, told the small cadre of men set to accomplish one of the most storied espionage missions ever: “For the first time in history, the Jews would judge their assassins.”

Harel articulated the historical momentousness of what was, in reality, a surprisingly mundane capture. Eichmann, one of the foremost masterminds of the Holocaust, had been living in Argentina under an assumed name but, apparently confident of his security, had sloppily left breadcrumbs that allowed professional and avocational Nazi hunters to track him down. Eichmann was also a creature of habit, descending from the bus each evening near his suburban home reliably around the same time. For an action with such monumental consequences, the capture was barely more dramatic than a typical mugging.

The story of Eichmann’s capture, extra-judicial extradition to Israel, trial and execution is retold in The Nazi Hunters, a book by author and former Newsweek journalist Andrew Nagroski, who will be in Vancouver this fall as part of the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival.

Harel’s words to the agents who captured the SS leader apply not solely to the Nazi hunters’ greatest catch, but to the larger phenomenon of the quest to bring the perpetrators of the Shoah to justice. The concept of the Jewish people being in a position to judge those who perpetrate antisemitic terror is a uniquely post-Holocaust phenomenon, made possible because of the existence of the state of Israel and its judicial and intelligence mechanisms.

At the same time, hunting down Nazi war criminals was not a priority of the young state of Israel, as a senior Israeli official told Nagroski. Israel’s early governments had plenty on their plates coaxing a country from the desert and looking to the future without devoting resources to tracking down the Hamans of the recent past.

As a result, as Nagorski illustrates engagingly, pursuing the perpetrators fell to an assortment of figures, some official, others self-appointed, who made up a curious collection of personalities.

There were the government investigators and prosecutors, like Fritz Bauer, a German jurist whose attention to Nazi war crimes helped the German people confront and address their past. But others among the most famous Nazi hunters, including Simon Wiesenthal and Tuvia Friedman, were lone wolves (or, at least, started out that way before recruiting their teams) to do the job that governments did not.

The Nuremberg trials, Nagorski notes, were crucial not only for bringing Nazis to justice but in helping create the initial repository of eyewitness testimony and the first draft of what would become Holocaust history. Even so, after that major initiative, which captured the attention of the world and set the Holocaust apart as an event concurrent to but separate from the broader carnage of the Second World War, official interest in the subject waned.

Europe was rebuilding, Israel had plenty of challenges, the countries of the Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc were happy to distance themselves from the events of the Shoah by imagining their socialism as the diametrical ideological opposite of the fascism that had nearly erased Jewish civilization in Europe. Canada, the United States and other Allied countries began looking ahead to a cold peace and the economic prosperity of the 1950s, the sad past being something best left behind.

Thus, it fell to some self-appointed individuals to do the work. This book shares their often gripping, diverse and idiosyncratic stories.

A rise in Holocaust denial during the 1970s spurred a renewed attention to the facts of the Holocaust. A new urgency was driven both by the need to remind the world of the truth but also the reality that time was running out to bring the perpetrators to justice.

VHEC looks at past, future

Éloge Butera, a survivor of the genocide against the Tutsis of Rwanda, and Robbie Waisman, a survivor of the Holocaust, at Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s gala event on May 26. (photo from VHEC)

For the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, the first half of 2016 has been a time of intense activity, though the pace of contemporary events has been accompanied by a very conscious reflection on both the past and the future of the organization.

The VHEC held its first gala-style event in more than a decade on May 26, a dinner and program titled “Looking Back, Moving Forward.”

“The event was very deliberately intended to recognize that the organization is at a moment of profound significance,” said Nina Krieger, VHEC executive director. “We took the opportunity to reflect on the past, show our gratitude to those who founded and led the organization, and to take pride in the achievements we have had. But the program was also quite emphatically focused on the future. The VHEC began as a small organization and we have grown dramatically in size and impact, in the depth and breadth of the programs we deliver, and it was our intention to illustrate both of these profiles to the nearly 500 people who attended.”

Co-chaired by Marie Doduck, Helen Heacock-Rivers and Shoshana Lewis, “Looking Back, Moving Forward” intended to give guests a taste of what more than 25,000 British Columbia students experience every year through VHEC programs. Annually, a symposium on the Holocaust takes place at the University of British Columbia. An additional 12 symposia take place in school districts throughout Metro Vancouver. Each of these is an opportunity for students to learn about the Holocaust from an historical perspective, view a film on the subject and then meet and hear the testimony of a survivor.

“The symposia are undoubtedly the most impactful thing we do,” Krieger said.

“We have thousands of letters from students telling us about the life-changing impact meeting a survivor has had on them,” she explained. “We have classes brought to our symposia by teachers who chose their profession because of the impact of a symposium they attended years earlier.”

In a moving moment at the gala event, Caden Dorey, a Grade 11 student from Surrey, read aloud a letter he had sent to survivor speaker Lillian Boraks-Nemetz after he met her at a symposium.

“I have never been so moved in my life,” he wrote. “You have changed my perspective on the Holocaust, and life itself.… I will never forget you, and thank you for letting me share this moment with you. I’m forever impacted by this day.”

The centrepoint of the evening was a joint presentation by Robbie Waisman, a survivor of the Holocaust, and Éloge Butera, a survivor of the genocide against the Tutsis of Rwanda. Both spoke of the importance of sharing their survival stories and the influence it has had on students and others.

Waisman explained that it is difficult to help young people comprehend the idea that 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust, so he tells the story of his nephew, Nathan. Waisman was only 8 years old when his older brother Haim and his wife Golda had Nathan. Waisman spoke of his pride on being an uncle, but the Holocaust destroyed their family.

“Nathan was not yet 3 years old the last time I saw him,” Waisman said. “His mother Golda could have easily gone to work in the ammunition factory after the Nazis established the ghetto, but she would have had to give up her little Nathan. She refused to be separated from her little boy and so was sent to the Treblinka gas chambers with him.”

Butera credited Waisman for inspiring him to speak up about his experiences and devote himself to confronting racism and the potential for genocide.

The evening, which was emceed by Dr. Art Hister, also represented the increasing engagement of younger members of the community in VHEC’s work. Children and grandchildren of survivors, as well as others of their generations, were involved in the planning committee and Katia Hessel, a granddaughter of four survivors, spoke about the obligation she feels for carrying on the memory of her family’s history.

While not lining up exactly with the calendar, the VHEC gala event marked three significant milestones. It is more than 40 years since the first symposium on the Holocaust for high school students took place. It is about 30 years since the society that created the centre was founded. And it is more than 20 years since the centre first opened its doors as a teaching and research museum. Honorary chairs of the event were the four past-presidents of the organization: Robert Krell, Waisman, Rita Akselrod and Jody Dales.

Passing the torch of Holocaust memory from one generation to the next has been central to the Holocaust centre’s work recently.

“The greatest single challenge we face is continuing to maintain the relevance of our mission and mandate in a post-eyewitness survivor era and I think we are well-positioned to do that,” said Ed Lewin, who retired after six years as president of the VHEC board at the annual general meeting a week after the gala.

The centre is undertaking a major project of digitizing the archival collections, which will make them accessible worldwide. The process of digitization will also allow the centre to integrate historical materials seamlessly into pedagogical materials for use by teachers locally and wherever educators are seeking supplementary classroom resources.

“We are finding a way to keep the students, who are our audience, enthused and energetic and interested in hearing about stories without actual eyewitness survivors to tell it to them,” Lewin said.

For visitors to the centre, planned upgrades will make artifacts and some of the archival materials more accessible, including through interactive electronic kiosks and visible display units.

Lewin was honored at the AGM with a life fellowship in the VHEC, as was Jack Micner.

Phil Levinson, who succeeded Lewin as president, said he intends to continue to ensure that the VHEC’s mission is met as the number of eyewitnesses to the Shoah declines.

“We have to plan for the time when we don’t have someone standing on the stage who was there,” he said. “It’s going to be easier to deny [the Holocaust] and it’s going to be harder to have an impact live. I would see that, for me and the president after me, as the biggest challenge and the most important challenge.”

While there may be a perception that working in the field of Holocaust remembrance and education is a sad or depressing vocation, people associated with the Holocaust centre say it is quite the opposite. Levinson said watching the reaction of students, who frequently mob survivor speakers and hug them at the end of a symposium, is uplifting. Such reactions demonstrate the power of the program, Levinson said.

“You see what’s happening in that room over the few hours of the symposium, and you look at all the different types of people that are in there that leave unified,” he said. “There are 1,000 people who have a better chance of going out in society now and not being racist and not tolerating it and not turning the other way. That is super-rewarding. That is why I do it.”

Pat Johnson is a communications and development consultant for the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

Connecting local food fans

With the Tangoo app, Paul Davidescu, centre, brings together restaurateurs, social influencers and diners. (photo from tangoo.ca)

Food is more than nourishment, says Paul Davidescu, it builds community. The Vancouver entrepreneur is behind an app that aims to unite people over food.

“We are passionate about creating community,” said Davidescu, whose company, Tangoo, is connecting local food fans. “The way that we believe you create community is over the dinner table, where you get people together for dinner, brunch, what we call breaking bread, because that’s when the big ideas get created, that’s when people find love, that’s when people really get together.”

For restaurateurs, Tangoo promises to “attract the perfect customer by sharing your business story through social media influencers, our pocket concierge app, and integrated marketing solutions.” For diners, Tangoo offers “the pulse of the city’s best dining experiences, exclusively recommended by foodie influencers featured on the app.” And, for social influencers – a relatively new but increasingly powerful demographic – Tangoo offers a front row seat to emerging food trends in the city.

Davidescu, who graduated from the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business in 2012, explained that businesses are having an increasingly difficult time connecting with young consumers through traditional media.

“Nowadays, PR [and] social media are turning into one, especially if you’re looking at targeting millennials,” he said. “They don’t really watch TV anymore. They’re on social media.”

Tangoo’s approach is to provide information through their mobile app that helps potential customers get a sense of a restaurant’s personality. Part of the experience includes the opinions of local figures like chef Vikram Vij, record label founder Ari Paunonen and lifestyle expert Natalie Langston on their favorite meal destinations.

While the Tangoo app has about 20,000 users, Davidescu’s vision is to leverage the existing audiences of influencers. By inviting well-known figures and social media bigshots to be the first to experience, say, a new summer cocktail or a dining room’s revamped menu, Tangoo helps restaurants get their news out to the people who most closely follow such things.

“We started to actually connect these influencers who we already have on our app with the actual restaurants directly,” he said. “Not to the point where they’re just recommending them on our app, but they’re actually going into the restaurant and they’re tasting the food and actually posting on their own Instagram.”

Influencer marketing, as it is known, is Tangoo’s bread and butter.

“Think of it as more informal PR,” he said. For businesses with tight budgets – and restaurants tend to operate on narrow margins – conventional media can be very expensive and social media can be a time-consuming gig.

“You resort to either not doing social media or giving it to your manager at the bar who is multitasking and will never, ever do a very good job on that,” said Davidescu.

Tangoo aims to do the work for the restaurant by connecting them with social media figures with foodie followers.

“It’s kind of like getting guaranteed press through a very targeted channel,” he said. “We are trying to make PR really affordable for restaurants, that’s the core. They’re the ones that nurture community by being alive and keeping things interesting.”

Right now, Tangoo is busy with the Vancouver food scene, but Davidescu said it could grow organically to other cities in future.

“There are a lot of restaurants in Vancouver,” said Davidescu, who was born in Mexico and came here as a child. He was a camper and counselor at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, Camp Hatikvah and Camp Biluim in Quebec. When he was a student at UBC, he helped organize an interfaith discussion group. As part of his co-op studies in business school, he had placements in Germany and Barcelona.

Davidescu said there is a connection between his Jewishness and his devotion to food and connecting over a meal. Community is built across the table, he said.

“Food is cultural,” he said.

“It’s a way to just bring people together.”

Stop negotiating, says Pipes

Gina Faigen, daughter of the late Dr. Morris H. Faigen, who founded the annual Faigen Family Lecture Series, with this year’s speaker Daniel Pipes. (photo by Jocelyne Hallé)

Israel should stop trying to find a negotiated solution that provides a mutually agreeable resolution to the conflict with Palestinians, says Daniel Pipes, and instead declare victory and force the Palestinians into the realization that they have been defeated.

Pipes, a commentator and historian who is president of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, made the comments in Vancouver May 9 at the fifth annual Faigen Family Lecture.

The idea of land for peace, in which Israel gives up concrete real estate for the “ephemeral idea” of peace, has failed, he said.

“We can all agree that the Israelis do not have more peace for giving up Gaza and parts of the West Bank,” said Pipes. “It’s not working.” Instead, he said, Palestinians view Israeli concessions as a sign of weakness and this has led not to increased peace, but to increased hostility.

“Rather than mediation and compromise and painful concessions, such has been the case, how about something different?” Pipes asked. “How about Israel wins and the Palestinians lose? How about Israeli victory?

“Victory is not a term you hear much,” he continued. “People talk about a peace process, negotiations, but this is a conflict, this is a war. It’s been a war for a century. And an end comes to a war when one side acknowledges that it’s lost, that the gig is up, that it cannot win.”

Germany lost the First World War, Pipes said, but they didn’t feel defeated. They wanted another round and they got it in 1939. After 1945, the Allies realized they had to demilitarize Germany and Japan, to demonstrate that they had been conclusively defeated.

“Defeat is sanitary,” said Pipes. “Defeat allows you to move on.… I think that’s what the Palestinians need. Not only for Israel’s sake – obviously for Israel’s sake – but also for the Palestinians’ sake. Only by being defeated can the Palestinians stop obsessing over harming Israel and instead start building their own polity, culture, society. It’s good for everyone, Palestinians as well.”

Pipes clarified: “I’m not calling for killing Palestinians.” The idea is to impose on Palestinians the sense that they have lost.

“There’s no point in getting into the details,” he added.

He would like to see Western governments adopt policies that would urge the Israelis to win the conflict.

“We don’t go to the negotiating table. It doesn’t work. We need to win,” he said. “Let’s give up on this failed, decades-old effort to have the Israelis give more and the Palestinians take more and give nothing in return.”

Questioned by an audience member on what victory would look like, Pipes said: “You’ll know that Israel has won when the Jews of Hebron have no more need for security than the Arabs of Nazareth … when an irate Palestinian writes a strongly worded letter to the editor.”

Pressed on how such a victory would be achieved, Pipes at first demurred.

“I did not talk about how to get there because I would encourage you to see things this way,” he said, before giving some examples.

“The other day there was shooting out of Gaza. The Israelis replied with shooting back into Gaza,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be more effective to cut off the water and electricity for a day? The next time two days? Wouldn’t that send a signal? Why don’t the Israelis do that? Because they don’t have a plan for victory.”

Until 1993, Pipes said, Israel strove for victory.

With the Oslo process that began in 1993, and after, Pipes said, Israel adopted a policy of appeasement. When that failed in about 2000, they adopted a policy of unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza.

“And, since about 2006, there’s been no policy at all,” he said. “I think we should return – it’s not my idea – return to the old ways.”

Palestinians need to realize that their strategy isn’t working, he said.

“They’re engaging in suicide stabbings and other atrocities because they think this will help the Palestinians win,” he said. “If you can convince them there’s no chance of this working, why would a sane individual – and these are, they’re perfectly normal – why would they give up their lives? They believe that they are on a path to victory. Convince them that they are not on the path to victory and I think they will be less likely to engage in this kind of violence.”

Pipes acknowledged that people say the Palestinians will never accept defeat.

“But I say, the Germans did, the Japanese did,” said Pipes. An audience member noted that the Palestinians have an international support network that the Germans and Japanese did not.

“They do,” Pipes responded. “All those professors of English.… In the end, what really counts is, for example, water and electricity.”

While Israelis and Americans are trying to find creative ideas to hasten peace, “Palestinians aren’t playing around with creative ideas,” he said. “They’re killing.”

If the Palestinians can be convinced to give up the fight against Israel, Pipes believes that the rest of the Arab and Muslim world will similarly give up. He called Palestinians “the tip of the spear,” saying it’s hard to be more anti-Zionist than the Palestinians.

Though Pipes believes Arab and Muslim states may be tiring of losing to Israel, “I don’t see any fatigue at all” among leftists who are rallying against the Jewish state.

About the United States, Pipes said President Barack Obama seems to think that U.S. foreign policy before him has been a force for ill rather than for good in the world. Obama is making overtures to the traditional enemies of the United States, including Cuba and Iran, and paying less attention to allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, said Pipes.

Were Donald Trump to find himself president of the United States, Pipes worries that the “consummate dealmaker” would, like all his predecessors, fail at facilitating an agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

“He would call them in, he would give them his instructions, they would reject him and he would blame guess who?” Pipes speculated. “I suspect he would turn against Israel.”

The Faigen Family Lecture Series – which is held in partnership with Vancouver Hebrew Academy – was founded by the late Dr. Morris H. Faigen, who passed away in 2012. The evening was introduced by his daughter, Gina, who said her father wanted a forum for conservative perspectives on Israel but also one where people with a more liberal perspective, like her, could engage.