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January 8, 2010
Wallenberg's legacy endures
Irwin Cotler to speak on lessons for our times at local memorial.
GABRIELLA KLEIN
My mother Eva Klein's birthday falls on Nov. 10, a chilly month in most parts and nowhere more so than in Hungary, where she spent her 13th birthday, on what should have been her bat mitzvah party, shivering on piles of bricks in a factory on the outskirts of Budapest. The infamous brick factory served as the holding station for thousands of Hungarian Jews who were deported to concentration camps in Poland as efficiently as the Nazi war machine allowed. The trains bulged with humanity as they left the brick factory but, upon their return, the boxcars echoed with a hollow emptiness, ready to be filled once again at the rate of 12,000 people a day.
A few days after that dismal birthday, my mother became ill and was taken away by ambulance along with her mother and some other prisoners. In the only photo that I have of my mother from that time she appears undernourished and younger than her 13 years. She and my quietly fierce grandmother, Yolan Hexner, had little more than their devotion to each other, as their fate appeared to be drawing to a dark impasse.
In a remarkable twist of fate, the ambulance drivers turned out to be members of the resistance working with Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and humanitarian. They took my mother and grandmother to the Swedish consulate where they were issued "Schutzpassen," and then to 13 Akacsa Utca, where a sign tacked to the front door proclaimed the building to be under the diplomatic protection of the Swedish consulate. This "safe" house became my mother's home until the ghetto was liberated in 1945.
To this day, when my mother speaks of Wallenberg, her voice takes on a wondrous tone. "He was such a good man. [Because of him] we are here now."
To mark Vancouver Wallenberg Day 2010, the Hon. Irwin Cotler will speak on Raoul Wallenberg, Righteous Among the Nations: Lessons for Our Time.
Currently serving as special counsel for human rights and international justice, Cotler is a distinguished academic and a prominent human rights lawyer, whose dedication to humanitarian causes has earned him the Order of Canada, among other awards – including nine honorary doctorates. He is co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism and has recently launched an international petition endorsed by leading jurists and genocide scholars seeking to hold
Ahmadinejad's Iran to account for state-sanctioned incitement to genocide. Cotler's efforts have resulted in his chairing, or being a member of, a number of governmental and citizens' commissions of inquiry – including being chair of the International Commission of Inquiry into the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg. In 1989, Cotler delivered the first lecture on human rights in the Soviet Union and was given contradictory versions by Russian authorities as to how Wallenberg met his death.
"In August of 1990, I participated in an investigative mission to Vladimir Prison to explore evidence that Raoul Wallenberg lived in prison for many years after his supposed death. I submitted a supplement to the original report and I concluded that there was evidence clear and compelling that he did not die in 1947," said Cotler.
"Raoul Wallenberg had a profound impact on my life; on what I do and what I aspired to be. I grew up hearing my father speak about Raoul Wallenberg as a hero. This engaged and fascinated me, that amongst all the horror this man was able to confront evil and to prevail. He is the ultimate role model. He lived the cliché of what a 'hero' is."
Cotler will speak on Sunday, Jan. 17, 1 p.m., in the Wosk Auditorium at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. Admission is by donation.
Gabriella Klein is a Vancouver freelance writer. A version of this article will appear in the 2010 issue of Zachor, the newsletter of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.
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