Survivors' fears being revived

PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

When she was a child incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto, Lillian Boraks-Nemetz experienced a life-altering walk from certain death to a chance at life, when she was smuggled through a breach in the ghetto's wall and delivered into the arms of a Christian woman whose own death-defying act would save Boraks-Nemetz's life.

Speaking to the premier of British Columbia, several members of cabinet, much of the legislative press gallery and about 50 fellow survivors of the Holocaust, Boraks-Nemetz described what it feels like to watch anti-Semitism, which optimists had left for dead, re-emerge as a potent force in the world. She made a direct parallel between events in 1930s Europe and the world situation today, comparing her experience escaping the Nazis to the Palestinian boy who was recently disarmed at an Israeli checkpoint. The teenager had been paid a small sum of money to blow himself up in the presence of Israelis.

"Here I draw an ironic parallel," Boraks-Nemetz said Monday during a solemn ceremony at Victoria's legislative assembly marking Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. Recalling her own childhood experience, she noted: "The young Palestinian boy was walking from life to death."

Events in the Middle East, Europe and here in Canada, have made Holocaust survivors wonder whether history could repeat itself.

"Today, my sense of security is diminished," she said. "I fear for the lives of our children and our grandchildren."

Boraks-Nemetz recalled the summer of 1939, when she was playing under the veranda of her family's summer house in Poland, listening to her father and grandfather argue whether they should liquidate their assets and flee. "It won't happen here," insisted the grandfather. But within days, Germany had invaded and Boraks-Nemetz's childhood idyll was ended. Anti-Jewish posters and graffiti proliferated, freedoms were eliminated, education halted and daily life upended.

When she watches the news today and sees anti-Semitic firebombings, physical assaults and cemetery desecrations, the old images are revived.

"It's as if there were a video player in my head," she told the crowd at a noon-hour event at the legislature. "What is happening to the phrase 'Never again'?"

Still, Boraks-Nemetz said, she is heartened by acts like the ceremony, which marked the first national commemoration of Yom Hashoah since the federal government declared it an officially recognized day of remembrance, and she credited the government of Premier Gordon Campbell for inviting survivors and their families to the capital to mark it.

Campbell committed himself to the survivors, promising to fight against bigotry and prejudice with law enforcement and education.

"You have our pledge that we will fulfil our duty," Campbell told survivors.
He reiterated a commitment to returning funding for the British Columbia Hate Crime Team, which has been eviscerated by budget cuts. But, pressed later by the Bulletin, Campbell could not provide timing or a price tag on the promise.

Nisson Goldman, chair of Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), Pacific Region, told the audience that Yom Hashoah has a two-fold purpose: to remember and mourn those lost and to remind Canadians and the world that atrocities can happen even where personal security seems secure.

Rita Akselrod brought greetings on behalf of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Society, which co-sponsored the day-long visit to Victoria in conjunction with CJC. After the ceremony, the survivors visited the legislative gallery, where they were each introduced by name by the premier at the opening of the house sitting.
A day earlier, Sunday night at Temple Sholom Synagogue in Vancouver, the annual Yom Hashoah Commemorative Evening was the forum for similarly worried words.

"How many of us thought 59 years after liberation we'd still be facing anti-Semitism," asked David Ehrlich, a survivor, in the evening's opening remarks. "We must ... ensure that the world remembers what happens when racism goes unchecked."

The shul's Rabbi Philip Bregman led a moment of silence, but noted the paradox of such an act in memory of people for whom silence was a death sentence.

"There were moments of silence that killed six million of our individuals," he said.

Jolene Fehler, a young woman who participated in the March of the Living a decade ago, spoke publicly for the first time about her participation in the annual program, where Jewish young people visit the sites of shtetls and death camps in Europe, marching from Auschwitz to Birkenau in a defiant testament to life, then travelling to Israel to see the revival of Jewish life that has taken place since the Final Solution.

Fehler promised the survivors she and the others who participated in the march would carry the memory of the Shoah into the future.

"We honor your memories and we vow to never, ever forget," she said.

Robbie Waisman, president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Society, said the revival of anti-Semitic violence and terror have particular resonance to survivors like himself. Waisman, who was one of the storied "boys of Buchenwald," said recent disturbing events are happening at an alarming pace. He called on good people to replace good words with good deeds, to bring the perpetrators of anti-Semitism to justice and to make anti-Semitism truly a thing of the past.

One of the survivors in the audience Sunday night was Marie Doduck who, with three siblings and three other children, were the first child survivors settled in Vancouver from the displaced person camps of Europe, in 1948. Doduck had been a hidden child in her native Belgium during the war, lived for a time in a convent and never went to school until she arrived in British Columbia. She went on to the University of British Columbia, however, raised a family, honed eight languages and, only after the war, added English to her repertoire. She went on to become one of the Vancouver Jewish community's most committed volunteers and she will be the honoree at this year's Negev Dinner.

"My volunteerism is really to pay back the community," she said.

At the Temple Sholom event, the Vancouver Jewish Men's Chorus performed, 12 Hungarian survivors lit candles of remembrance to mark the 60th anniversary of the liquidation of that country's Jewish community, as well as the larger Shoah, and soprano Gisele Kulak sang selections from "Ani Maamin: A Song Lost and Found Again." The chorus closed the evening with the haunting words of the Partisan Song.

Pat Johnson is a native Vancouverite, a journalist and commentator.

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