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Pacific Spirit: Kristallnacht anniversary a reminder of horror

Outlook on life changed by frank stories of Holocaust survivors

A Delta minor hockey coach was fired last week for posting to Facebook Nazi images and pro-Hitler commentary. He told media afterward that pictures of concentration camp inmates actually showed typhus patients the Germans were trying to save. The former coach said he isn’t a Nazi, just a “history buff.”

Sometimes, in situations like this, I am inclined to lay blame on public education’s history curriculum as much as the individual. Whoever is to blame for such ignorance, Vancouverites do not have to look far to find the truth. Eyewitnesses to, and victims of, Nazi atrocities still live among us.

Indeed, on Sunday night, about two dozen elderly survivors of the Holocaust lit candles in memory of the millions of Jews killed in what is known in Hebrew as the Shoah. The occasion was the annual Kristallnacht Memorial Lecture at a Vancouver synagogue.

On the night of Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, across Germany and Austria, mobs attacked Jewish people and institutions. The event was intended to resemble a spontaneous grassroots uprising, the sort of pogrom familiar to

European Jews for hundreds of years, but in fact it was an orchestrated plot from the highest reaches of the Nazi regime. Ninety-one Jews were murdered, 30,000 were rounded up and placed in concentration camps, 1,000 synagogues were set aflame, thousands of Jewish owned businesses damaged or destroyed.

Kristallnacht was the moment when the incremental threats and humiliations against the Jewish people in Germany and annexed Austria turned into the violent cataclysm that the Nazis called the Final Solution.
Kristallnacht — and indeed the Holocaust — was a direct consequence of global indifference in the face of Hitler’s unconcealed genocidal threats against the Jews of Europe. Four months before Kristallnacht, the United Kingdom and the United States assembled representatives of 32 countries in Evian-les-Bains, France, with the intent of finding refuge for the imperilled Jews of Europe. The conference had the opposite result.

The convening powers — and every other country except the Dominican Republic — outright refused to accept any more Jewish refugees than what paltry few they may have already admitted. Canada’s response, history has recorded, was summed up in the phrase “none is too many.”

The Evian Conference told Hitler all he needed to know about how far the democracies would go to challenge his explicit promise to eradicate the Jewish people.

The next year, the Nazis invaded Poland, where the largest Jewish population in Europe resided. Over the course of the Second World War, Germany would occupy the territories where almost all of Europe’s Jews lived.

In 1939, there were 9.5 million Jews in Europe. In 1945, just 3.5 million remained alive. Entire families and villages were wiped out. The lingua franca of East European Jewry, Yiddish, the vehicle of an extraordinarily vibrant culture, was for all intents a dead language by 1945. Today, there are just 15 million Jews in the world, a number that underscores the astonishing impact of the catastrophe on Jewish civilization.

In Vancouver, survivors include some hidden as children and others who were among the tiny fraction to survive the constellation of death camps. Many of the survivors kept silent for decades after their liberation before telling some friends or family and then, in acts of extraordinary courage I have witnessed several times, shared their often horrific experiences with local school and university students.

The lecturer at Sunday’s commemoration was York University professor Sara Horowitz, who spoke about mothers and daughters in the Holocaust. The narratives she shared were harrowing. Because the Nazi plan was the complete annihilation of the Jewish people, children and pregnant women arriving at camps like Auschwitz were selected for immediate death. When a woman did manage to conceal her pregnancy and come to term in the camps, the women who helped her deliver sometimes killed the infant and disposed of the body in order to save the mother’s life. In another case Horowitz related, a family was about to be betrayed by a crying baby while Nazis searched the house in which they were hiding. An uncle suffocated the infant while the mother pulled out her hair in silence. Libraries and taped testimonies are filled with millions of such horrors, including narratives of local survivors at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, in the Jewish Community Centre.

After the war, Canada changed its immigration policy toward Jews such that, after Israel and the United States, Canada is home to the third-largest population of Holocaust survivors in the world. The number dwindles by the year, but thousands of Vancouver young people are among the last generation who will hear survivors’ testimonies first-hand. And while there may be an occasional individual who denies history, there are many more whose outlook on the world has been changed by hearing the frank stories of survivors.

Twitter.com/Pat604Johnson