Jewish Independent: Sacred memories are shared

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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