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May 5, 2006
Sacred memories are shared
About 90 survivors honored by B.C. as Yom Hashoah is marked.
PAT JOHNSON
In a moving and momentous ceremony of remembrance, Premier Gordon
Campbell greeted almost 100 survivors of the Holocaust on Yom
Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, last week.
The annual ceremony at the legislature April 25 saw two busloads
of survivors from Vancouver joining survivors from Vancouver Island
in a ceremony of remembrance and a commitment to never forget.
"It's a very important day for British Columbia and it is an
important day for Canadians," said Campbell in welcoming the
guests. "We remember the most unbearable losses that millions
faced. Six million lives stolen from the world. Six million lights
extinguished by the darkest of shadows. Six million hearts and minds
and souls filled with light, laughter and love. So filled with ideas,
passions and dreams and then denied the most basic of human rights
and, ultimately, the fundamental right to live. So many faces, so
many children, so many families who now only live in faded black
and white photographs ... and in the memories of the survivors we
are so honored to welcome here today."
The premier promised the survivors that Canada would not forget.
"It is critical for them to know that those memories will carry
on," Campbell said. "Their stories will not be forgotten....
We cannot escape its legacy and, indeed, we must not try. It is
our shared duty, our shared responsibility and our shared desire
to remember."
Wally Oppal, the attorney general and minister responsible for multiculturalism,
emceed the noon-hour event.
"It's a day to remember the six million Jewish men, women and
children killed by the Nazis," Oppal said. "Holocaust
Memorial Day is also a day to remember the more than five million
people who died during the same time because of their physical or
mental disabilities, race, religion or sexual orientation."
Survivors were called forward to light six candles representing
the six million.
Rita Akselrod, president of the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society,
spoke on behalf of survivors.
"The Holocaust deprived me of my childhood," she said.
"The world was indifferent and uncaring."
She said she was heartened by the show of solidarity made by legislators.
"As a survivor, I can tell you that one of our greatest concerns
is that the Holocaust may be forgotten," she said. "This
event offers an important opportunity to ensure remembrance and
help us to reflect on the moral responsibility of individuals as
well as communities and governments."
Mark Weintraub, chair of Canadian Jewish Congress, Pacific Region,
which helped organize the event, said the lessons of the Holocaust
remain profoundly relevant.
"How is it possible for so many to refuse to see the humanity
of their neighbors?" asked Weintraub, whose organization had
distributed green ribbons to remind people of the current humanitarian
disaster in Darfur, Sudan. "A 2,000-year teaching of contempt
laid the fertile soil for the Nazi pathology, which began with the
most vile hate speech. As our own Supreme Court of Canada opined,
'the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers. It began with
words.' "
The "Final Solution," Weintraub said, was the culmination
of a longer process of dehumanization that "incubated in one
of the best educated, the most modern and the most technically competent
of all nations. Every aspect of German and other societies were
complicit, including the legal and medical professions, business
and academia, the military and civil service."
Richard Kool, president of the Victoria Holocaust Remembrance and
Education Society, raised the profound question of life after the
Holocaust.
"Our parents were not meant to live," he said. "We
were not meant to exist. How did those of the second generation,
children of Holocaust survivors, how do we live with the grief in
our past? The question, of course, is what do we do in the post-Shoah
world? How do we live in the post-Shoah world?"
Isa Millman, another member of the second generation, told the hushed
audience that she has always dreaded the inevitable day when the
actual survivors and witnesses are so few that those who came just
after the scene must maintain the memory.
"But this is how history continues and, for Jews, it is how
we have handed down our history, from parent to child throughout
all the generations of our being a people," she said.
Millman spoke of growing up in the shadow of the Shoah.
"Here's what I knew: we were alive by the skin of our teeth,"
she said. "We lived in a foreign land. We spoke a dying language.
We were very much alone. I asked my parents, what was a bubbe, a
zayde, a grandmother, a grandfather, because I had none. Now, I
am a grandmother, a grandmother who has no choice but to want to
speak about my lost family, those who were forbidden to leave a
trace. For this fleeting moment, I restore them to life by speaking
their names. Who else will remember them? And they are in the minutest
fraction of the sum of everyone murdered and they are my Holocaust."
Peter Gary, a survivor who lives on Vancouver Island, was the keynote
speaker at the first Yom Hashoah held at the legislature. He was
moved by this year's ceremony.
"It was very, very beautifully done," he said. "Everyone
was speaking from the heart. It doesn't get any easier when you're
82 years old. But it has to be done, because that lousy four-letter
word 'hate' is still ruling our little shaky planet."
Pat Johnson is editor of MVOX Multicultural Digest, www.mvox.ca.
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