Wallenberg Day

Celebration of courage

A still from the documentary Passage to Sweden, which will screen as part of the annual Raoul Wallenberg Day for Civil Courage event on Jan. 21.

This year’s annual Raoul Wallenberg Day for Civil Courage gathering, on Sunday, Jan. 21, held at Congregation Beth Israel, will explore and honour civil courage in Scandinavia during the Second World War.

Just over 80 years ago, in late 1943, Danes, Norwegians and Swedes had to confront moral choices, when Denmark and Norway dealt with military occupation by Nazi Germany. Many people defied Nazi policies that threatened the human rights and lives of their fellow citizens and residents.

In Denmark, thousands of Christian Danes risked their own lives, cooperating in the dramatic, swift and secret rescue operation. The Jews, who faced deportation and certain death at the hands of the Nazis, were ferried to safety in neutral Sweden. Their homes and properties were safeguarded until their return after the war. Sweden welcomed and aided the Danish Jews, risking its own status as a neutral nation.

In Norway, the site of significant armed attacks by Nazi Germany, hundreds of Norwegian police officers refused the orders of Nazi occupiers, a collective action that led to their imprisonment at Stutthof concentration camp in Nazi-controlled Poland. There, the Norwegian police maintained their solidarity as they acted to reduce the suffering of their fellow prisoners, including many Jews, such as the late Jennie Lifschitz, who settled in Vancouver in the early 1950s.

Finland and the Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) were also engulfed in the war, victims of the Soviet Union’s military occupation and, in the case of the Baltics, annexation and mass civilian deportations.

While Nordic peoples, like most Europeans, were not completely free of hostility toward Jews and other minorities, they offer a good example of civil courage, based on the belief that Jewish citizens and residents were their equals.

This year, at the local Wallenberg Day event, Vancouver Holocaust educator Norman Gladstone will speak about the remarkable rescue of Denmark’s Jewish population. Local researcher and author Tore Jørgensen will speak about the hundreds of Norwegian policemen, including his father, who refused to collaborate with the Nazi occupiers. Historian Gene Homel will introduce the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society and the City of Vancouver proclamation of Wallenberg Day.

As well, the documentary Passage to Sweden will be screened. The film covers the wartime courage of Scandinavians, including Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg, who acted courageously to protect civilians in Hungary, and was taken into custody by the Soviet army. His fate is unknown to this day.

The 19th annual Wallenberg Day on Jan. 21 at Congregation Beth Israel will be held at 1:30 p.m. Admission is free and donations will be gratefully accepted.

For more about the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, which organizes the annual event, visit wsccs.ca.

– Courtesy Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society

Mary Kitagawa’s civil courage

Mary Kitagawa was honoured with the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award on Jan. 20. (photo by Pat Johnson)

At a convocation ceremony at the University of British Columbia in 2012, a group of graduates stood out from the rest. Twenty-one elderly Japanese-Canadians, ranging in age from 89 to 96, were awarded honorary degrees in recognition of an historic injustice that had taken place 70 years earlier.

In the winter of early 1942, right after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, the Government of Canada ordered all Japanese-Canadians to be relocated from the coast. This included students at UBC. For the next seven decades, the injustice went unrectified and largely unrecognized by the university until Mary Kitagawa, a community leader whose own family history was ruptured by the events of the war years, took up the cause. It was her tenacity that led the university to acknowledge and make some amends for its complicity in the injustice. It awarded honorary degrees to 96 students – most of them posthumously.

For this achievement, and others, Kitagawa was honoured with the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award on Sunday afternoon, Jan. 20. This was the 14th annual Vancouver commemoration of Raoul Wallenberg Day, which, since 2015, has coincided with the presentation of the Civil Courage Award.

In her remarks upon receiving the award, Kitagawa reflected on the social conditions that permitted the internment of Canadians of Japanese descent.

“This happened because those in power in Canada at that time forgot that this was a democratic country, sending her men and women to war to preserve our freedom,” she told a packed auditorium at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. “The excuse they used for incarcerating us was that we were a security risk. However, if you read all the newspaper headlines of the 1930s and ’40s, you will find that the B.C. politicians’ hatred of Japanese-Canadians was deep and abiding. They wanted to ethnically cleanse this one small group of people from the province.”

Kitagawa said that, at a January 1942 meeting in Ottawa to address “the Japanese problem,” a B.C. representative declared, “The bombing of Pearl Harbour was a heaven-sent gift to the people of British Columbia to rid B.C. of Japanese economic menace forevermore.”

“My family was swept away from our home in this storm of hatred,” Kitagawa said. From their home on Salt Spring Island, the family was transported to Hastings Park, in East Vancouver, which served as an assembly point for dispersal to the interior of the province.

“Our journey through incarceration was brutal and dehumanizing,” she said. The family was separated from her father for six months and they feared the very worst. Eventually, the family was reunited, but they were moved from place to place around the interior of British Columbia and in Alberta a dozen times during seven years of incarceration.

When the War Measures Act, under which the internment was justified, ceased its effect at the end of the war, Parliament passed successive “emergency” laws to permit the continued incarceration through 1947, and it was April 1949 before Japanese-Canadians were granted freedom of movement and permitted to return to the coast. Her father and mother, aged 55 and 50 respectively, took the family back to Salt Spring and began all over again.

“It wasn’t just the material things that they lost,” Kitagawa reflected. “They lost the dream for the future they had planned, their community, their opportunities, education for their children, their friends, their youth, their culture, language and heirlooms. But never – they never lost their pride nor their dignity.… My parents believed in forgiveness. Like Nelson Mandela, they believed that forgiveness liberates the soul. They refused to look back in anger. Instead, they chose to continue to move forward with the same resolve that helped them to survive their terrible experience.”

In 2006, Kitagawa read in the Vancouver Sun that a federal building on Burrard Street in Vancouver was being named to honour Howard Charles Green, a longtime Conservative member of Parliament from Vancouver and a leading advocate of Japanese-Canadian internment. “Immediately, I knew that I had to have that name erased from that building. To me, no person who helped destroy my parents’ dream and made them suffer so grievously was going to be so honoured.”

With help from a quickly mobilized group of activists and sympathetic media coverage, Kitagawa successfully had Green’s name stripped from the building, which was renamed in honour of Douglas Jung, another Conservative MP, but the first MP of Chinese-Canadian heritage.

Kitagawa also led an initiative that saw Hastings Park declared an historic site related to the internment.

In her talk on Sunday, Kitagawa emotionally credited an “unsung hero,” her husband Tosh, who, among other efforts he played in supporting Kitagawa’s activism, spearheaded the reprinting of the 1942 UBC yearbook to include information about the internment and biographies of the students affected. It was also through his persistence that they were able to track down the 23 living students and the families of those who had passed away.

The Civil Courage Award is presented by the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, which was formed by members of the Swedish and Jewish communities in Vancouver.

Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat and humanitarian who became Sweden’s special envoy to Hungary in the summer of 1944, several months after the Nazi deportation of Hungarian Jews had begun. He issued protective passports and sheltered people in buildings that were declared to be Swedish territory, saving tens of thousands of Jews. He was taken into Soviet captivity on Jan. 17, 1945, and was never seen again.

Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who served as the vice-consul in Lithuania during the Second World War. Acting in direct violation of his orders at great risk to himself and his family, he issued transit visas that allowed approximately 6,000 Jewish people from Poland and from Lithuania to escape probable death.

The award presentation was followed by a screening of the 1995 film The War Between Us, which dramatizes the events of the Japanese-Canadian experience through the lives of a single family.

Councilor Pete Fry, Vancouver’s deputy mayor, read a proclamation from the city. Consular officials from Sweden and Japan were in attendance.

Praise for whistleblowers

Alan Le Fevre, president of the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, and Acting Mayor Raymond Louie, right, with the City of Vancouver’s proclamation of Raoul Wallenberg Day. (photo by Masumi Kikuchi)

“If we had a society that was free from embezzlement, free of theft, free of dishonesty, free of unethical conduct, we wouldn’t need whistleblowers. But, unfortunately, we are not a perfect society,” said Ujjal Dosanjh in his keynote address at the 13th annual Raoul Wallenberg Day event, which was held on Jan. 14 at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre.

Dosanjh, a former federal cabinet minister, B.C. attorney general and the province’s 33rd premier, was, in 2015, the inaugural recipient of the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society’s Civil Courage Award. He was recognized for “his great courage in the face of escalating violence by extremists in the Indo-Canadian community that arose from conflicts that had erupted in India,” said WSCCS board member Ana Policzer in her remarks on Sunday.

The society hosts the annual Wallenberg Day event and, this year, they honoured Vancouver-based lawyer Alayne Fleischmann with the Civil Courage Award.

Fleischmann was born in Terrace, B.C. She got her bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of British Columbia, her master’s in international and comparative law from the Institute of International and Comparative Law, Cornell Law School and Université Paris (Sorbonne), and her juris doctor degree from Cornell. In 2006, she was working in quality control at JPMorgan Chase in New York. There, she discovered and tried to stop what she described as “massive criminal securities fraud” – mortgage operations similar to those of many other financial institutions, which led to the 2008 economic collapse. Her efforts resulted in a $9 billion fine being levied on JPMorgan Chase, but no one from the bank was ever prosecuted. She moved back to British Columbia in 2008.

In a 2014 Rolling Stone article, writer Matt Taibbi goes into great detail about Fleischmann’s experiences, the difficulties she faced in bringing the truth to light and the limited impact the truth played in whatever minor justice was carried out against all the banks guilty of mortgage-related wrongdoings. In effect, Taibbi argues, the U.S. department of justice “struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called ‘statements of facts,’ which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.”

The full Rolling Stone article can be accessed via wsccs.ca/wallenberg-days/2018. At the Wallenberg Day event, organizers screened a 2014 interview with Taibbi and Fleischmann by Democracy Now! WSCCS president Alan Le Fevre also spoke briefly about Fleischmann’s actions and why she was chosen to receive the Civil Courage Award. Unfortunately, Fleischmann could not accept the award in person because of the ongoing litigation.

In his remarks, Dosanjh saluted whistleblowers. “In Canada,” he said, “we don’t know too many of our own heroes…. But we have them. One that we have amongst us in Canada is the honouree tonight, Alayne Fleischmann.”

There are monetary costs to illegitimate or immoral actions, Dosanjh said, but such actions also “jeopardize the health, safety and well-being of the employees, the customers and the society of the institutions.”

Whistleblowers like Fleischmann set out to right a wrong, he said. They are morally compelled to the point where they take the “risk of losing their careers,” “being ostracized” and having rumours spread about them to “delegitimize the truth that they’re trying to tell.”

After such individuals come forward, he said, “life is never the same. You lose friends, you lose relationships, obviously you lose a job possibly, or you’re not promoted or you’re demoted…. And, sometimes, it can be dangerous physically. People have been known to be killed, at least across the border, for trying to expose the truth. Karen Silkwood comes to mind.”

Dosanjh warned that whistleblowers aren’t always correct, however, giving the example of eight B.C. health ministry workers who were found to have been wrongly dismissed in 2012, amid allegations of wrongdoing. “It’s a risky business,” he said. “You’re playing with your own life but you’re also playing with the lives of others you’re trying to expose.” So, you have to not only have the courage to speak up, he said, but the wisdom to know when to not do so, or when to investigate further before doing so.

Several audience members gave their take on corporate and government corruption in the question-and-answer period. Dosanjh said people need to get more vocal about these issues. “There is no silver bullet to deal with any particular issue,” he said. “It’s just a matter of becoming more active politically and raising your voices.”

To an audience member who decried greed as criminal, Dosanjh said, “If you say greed is the basic urge to make more money, that shouldn’t be a crime…. You want to make money, you want to work more … that’s what keeps the world going…. Illegal greed should be a crime – and it already is! The fact is we’re not prosecuting criminals, we’re not apprehending them, we’re not investigating them as much as we should, and we’re falling down in some respects.”

The afternoon event also included the reading by Acting Mayor Raymond Louie of the City of Vancouver proclamation of Jan. 14 as Raoul Wallenberg Day. He thanked event organizers and attendees for taking the time “to remember and to also recommit … with this ongoing effort to have a better world overall.”

The WSCCS is continually “seeking to identify people who, at significant personal risk, have helped to improve or save the lives of others by going against unjust laws or conventions.” For more information, visit wsccs.ca.

A day to honor civil courage

Left to right: Andrea Reimer, Judith Guichon, Henry Grayman, Thomas Gradin, Ujjal Dosanjh and Ezra Shanken, chief executive officer of Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver. (photo by Wendy Fouks)

Ujjal Dosanjh, former premier of British Columbia and one-time federal cabinet minister, was recognized for civil courage at a ceremony at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on Jan. 18. The event marked the annual Wallenberg Day commemoration in the city, and the award was bestowed in the name of two extraordinary individuals whose actions during the Second World War resulted in the survival of tens of thousands of European Jews.

Dosanjh is the first recipient of the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award. In particular, Dosanjh was recognized for speaking out about political and religious violence in Canada’s Sikh community – notably, a warning in 1985 that Sikh extremism in India could target Canadians. A few months later, 280 Canadians were among 329 people killed when Air India Flight 182 was bombed. More generally, Dosanjh was recognized for a lifetime of contributions to British Columbia and Canada. (See story in the Jan. 9, 2015, issue of the Independent.)

The first annual award was presented at the 10th anniversary commemoration of Wallenberg Day, which honors Raoul Wallenberg who, as a Swedish diplomat in Budapest, issued visas that saved thousands of Jews. The Soviet military entered Hungary in January 1945, and Wallenberg was detained on suspicion of subversive activities. He was never seen again. The commemoration, which was initiated by Anders Neumuller, a former honorary Swedish consul to Vancouver, is now presented by the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, which, along with Wallenberg, commemorates Chiune Sugihara, a consular representative of Imperial Japan in Lithuania who, similar to Wallenberg, issued visas that allowed thousands of Jews to escape Nazi-occupied Europe.

Henry Grayman, president of the society, explained that it was founded in 2013 by Swedes and Jews to honor and encourage acts of civil courage like those exemplified by Sugihara and Wallenberg.

The impact of acts of civil courage was made evident by Grayman’s wife, Deborah Ross-Grayman, who emceed the afternoon event. She credits her life to the war-era acts of Sugihara.

“I am the breath and the face of civil courage,” she said. “My own mother, Niuta Ramm, was the recipient of such a visa…. I live each day in gratitude for what has been given to me.”

She invited others in the audience whose survival could be credited to the acts of individuals like Sugihara or Wallenberg to stand, and close to a dozen people rose from their seats.

“As you see, one person can make a difference,” she said.

photo - Ujjal Dosanjh — Ujjal Dosanjh *(photo by Wendy Fouks)*

On stage with British Columbia’s Lt.-Gov. Judith Guichon and Sweden’s honorary consul to Vancouver, Thomas Gradin, Dosanjh received the award but deflected the accolades.

“I am absolutely humbled,” Dosanjh said. “It’s a great honor to be recognized in the names of Raoul Wallenberg and Chiune Sugihara.”

In turn, he said, he accepted the recognition in the name of victims of violence in recent days at Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket in Paris. He also gave thanks to his heroes – including his grandfather, and Mahatma Gandhi, “the father of the nation I deserted to become Canadian” – and also those who have stood by him during difficult times.

“Terrorism in the name of religion is at war with us,” Dosanjh said. “The venom that moves them leads them to not understand our common humanity. These infidels are not true to our common humanity.”

The lieutenant-governor said Dosanjh has “devoted his life to standing firm against injustice and against violence … he’s served and served.”

The viceroy added that it is more important than ever to celebrate and sing the praises of heroes with at least the vigor “as that with which the deeds of villains are reported.”

Deputy Mayor and Vancouver City Councilor Andrea Reimer brought greetings from the city and read a proclamation from the mayor. She urged people to take the opportunity in 2015 to prove that actions make a difference.

“We have a choice to act, or we have a choice to regret that we didn’t act,” she said.

In addition to Sweden’s Gradin, consular representatives were also in attendance representing Japan, Switzerland and Mongolia.

After the presentation, a feature-length film was screened. The Rescuers features diplomats and government officials from diverse places whose actions saved the lives of thousands of Europe’s imperiled Jews.

Pat Johnson is a Vancouver writer and principal in PRsuasiveMedia.com.

Wallenberg Day honors heroes

Left to right, Henry Ross-Grayman, Thomas Gradin and Mayor Gregor Robertson. (photo by Wendy Fouks)

There was a full house at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre for the community’s marking of Wallenberg Day on Jan 19. Sponsored for the first time by the newly formed Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, the annual event was the natural outgrowth of the placement of a plaque in Queen Elizabeth Park in 1986. It was revived at the 20th anniversary in 2006 as a cooperative effort between the then honorary Swedish consul, Anders Neumuller, and the Vancouver Second Generation Group.

Each year, the event pays tribute to courageous and heroic actions inspired by the Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, and the Japanese diplomat, Chiune Sugihara. Both men, at grave risk to themselves, their families and their future, chose to follow their own personal moral code and save the lives of large numbers of Jews during the Second World War.

Mayor of Vancouver Gregor Robertson read a proclamation naming the day “Raoul Wallenberg Day in the City of Vancouver.” He said, “There are always heroes in our midst and elevating their place in society and celebrating and having discussion … is absolutely critical in a civil society.”

This year, the heroism of Englishman Sir Nicholas Winton was highlighted in the movie Nicky’s Family. This emotionally powerful film told the story of how Winton saved the lives of more than 600 Czech children just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The film documents how his actions have inspired young people to engage in direct acts of tikkun olam.

British Consul Rupert Potter honored Winton, saying, “I have never introduced a film to quite so full a house as this, which, I think, is testament to the content and the importance of the subject and what the film represents….”

There was an especially moving moment when members of the audience who owed their lives to the heroic actions of people such as Wallenberg, Sugihara and Winton were asked to stand. This action made the impact of these men clearly visible, showing that one person can make a profound difference in the world.

Naomi Taussig, the cantor of Temple Sholom Synagogue, spoke about the miracle of how her father and uncle were saved by Winton. She said, “Where would I be but for the actions of a single man who chose to do something when he could have done nothing at all? I feel a responsibility to live proudly as a Jew, honoring my grandparents, Emil and Irma. I try to live kindly, with compassion and intention. Nicholas himself says we must live ethically, and do whatever we can – no matter how small. We must take action rather than believe we are too insignificant to make a difference.”

photo - Deborah Ross-Grayman — Deborah Ross-Grayman is a Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society committee member.
*(photo by Wendy Fouks)*

I, too, owe my life to the actions of a diplomat. Against the orders of his government, Sugihara gave out visas to Jews, allowing them to escape certain death and travel to Japan. My mother was a recipient of such a visa. Had she not received it, I would not be here today. Last year, I traveled to Japan and had the honor of meeting with Sugihara’s granddaughter to express my deepest gratitude for the actions of her grandfather. It was a heartfelt meeting that I will remember for the rest of my days.

We need these stories to remind us of the inherent good that lives within people. We need to educate, to pay tribute, to remember and, finally, to inspire people today, as well as future generations, to act with courage and live their values in a way that contributes to the healing of the world.

The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society is passionate about wanting to leave a legacy encouraging others to engage in behaviors inspired by Wallenberg, Sugihara and people like Winton. We are looking for people who, at significant personal risk, have helped improve or save the lives of others by going against unjust norms or conventions. Over the coming year, the names of suggested individuals who meet the criteria (including being associated with British Columbia, even if their actions may have taken place outside of the province) will be reviewed. Next year, at the annual Wallenberg Day event, we hope to present an award for civil courage to acknowledge heroic acts in today’s world. For more information, contact the society at [email protected].

Deborah Ross-Grayman is an artist, writer and Sugihara survivor descendant committee member of the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society.