My Dad and The Holocaust

January 27 was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, as declared by the United Nations in 2005.?

The Holocaust was the deliberate, state sponsored, industrial-scale genocide of six million Jews (as well as Roma, Russian prisoners, homosexuals, people with disabilities and Christians with Jewish-born parents) by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators.? Between 1941 and 1945, nearly two out of every three Jews across German-occupied Europe regardless of social status were systematically murdered for no reason other than being Jewish.??

For the world today, and for Jews in particular, Auschwitz stands as a symbol of the Holocaust and the atrocities of World War II.? Approximately one million Jews, representing ninety percent of all Auschwitz inmates, died in gas chambers and in the crematorium.? Those who were not murdered were selected for forced labour and worked to death.? Or, they were chosen for coercive and cruel eugenics research, sterilization and medical experimentation under the supervision of Dr. Josef Mengele, commonly known amongst his victims as the "Angel of Death".?

My dad was a survivor of the Holocaust.? (He is shown in the photograph above, taken in 1946.)

He was interned at Auschwitz (in Poland) and later transferred to Mauthausen (in Austria).? He was subject to slave labour, beatings, torture, sickness, dysentery, lice, starvation, being branded like cattle (on his left arm) and near death before finally being liberated in May, 1945 by the American army.? But he was the lucky one.? Shortly after his liberation, he learned eight brothers and sisters and both parents were murdered in the Nazi concentration camps.? Their sole crime was the same as my dad’s:?being Jewish.

Shortly after the war, when Holocaust survivors were desperately searching for living family members, my dad came into long-distance contact with an uncle living in Toronto since the 1920s, whom he had never previously met.? Thanks to my dad’s quest and determination to start a new life, he came to Canada in 1948 and called it his home.? Despite his lack of English and personal resources, through sheer determination, hard work and a larger-than-life personality, he managed to open a grocery store in the early 1950s, a story not unlike some other European immigrants at the time. ?Soon, he married my Canadian-born Jewish mother and they started a family. As the neighbourhood changed, my dad changed along with it.? When the store’s customers transitioned from Jews in the 1950s to Italians in the 1960s, he learned fluent Italian (to go along with the Polish, Yiddish, German and English he had already mastered).? By the early 1970s, as local corner grocery stores were gradually giving way to the emergence of new supermarkets, my dad sold his business, purchased a tavern and learned how to run an entirely new business venture.? My dad, who passed away in 2014, age 95, became a proud and successful Canadian Jew and a valued contributor to society whose life enriched those he touched and whose experiences have shaped much of my own values.? ?

The Holocaust has proven to be history’s most extreme and tragic example of antisemitism.? And yet, history has not learned its lesson:? antisemitism and Jew-hate continue to prosper all over the world.? For instance, the FBI recently reported that nearly 55% of all religiously motivated hate crimes in America were committed against Jewish people despite the fact that Jews comprise only 2% of the total U.S. population. Most incidents involve harassment, vandalism and assaults. Occasionally, however, antisemitism turns deadly, as evidenced by the murder of 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.?

Events in the Middle East involving Israel become a triggering mechanism for the proliferation of antisemitism in Canada and around the world. ?Following the?Hamas attack on Israel, the worst on Jews since the Holocaust, the intimidation tactics towards Jews in Toronto and elsewhere, demonstrated by the bullying and harassment of Jewish students on university campuses and children in public schools, along with the increasing array of angry and coordinated demonstrations and acts of vandalism occurring in front of Jewish-related businesses, institutions, schools and synagogues have become a steady feature of Jewish life and fear.?

Perhaps the most insidious form of antisemitism is Holocaust denial.? According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust denial “is any attempt to negate the established fact of the Nazi genocide of European Jews.? Holocaust denial and distortion are forms of antisemitism, prejudice against or hatred of Jews.? Holocaust denial and distortion generally claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests.”?

One such purveyor of Holocaust denial is Mahoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority for the past eighteen years.? As a graduate student in Moscow, he wrote the following:? “It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement…is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.” (Source: The Simon Wiesenthal Centre)

The antisemitism exhibited by certain Arab and Palestinian leaders, like Abbas, has seeped into the education of Palestinian school children.? A June 2021 New York Post article reported on a study by the European Union (EU) that concluded that Palestinian text books (paid for by the EU) “are rife with antisemitism and violent propaganda.” ?Sadly, this will only contribute to ensuring that the hatred of Jews, as Jews, is guaranteed to continue for generations to come.?

During my life, I have sporadically experienced mild forms of antisemitism, largely from individuals sympathetic to Nazi ideology.? For example, shortly after starting a new job a few years ago, Nazi swastikas were found freshly spray-painted on the outside wall of the building of my organization.? These types of situations never destroyed my spirit as a Canadian Jew.? Rather, as the proud son of a Holocaust survivor, the opposite was true:? they emboldened my spirit as a Canadian Jew.

As The Montreal Holocaust Museum declared: ?“discussing and learning about the Holocaust?is important not only because it helps us gain a better understanding of the past, but because it also raises awareness about contemporary forms of antisemitism, xenophobia and hatred. Commemoration and education raise awareness about the danger of prejudice, hatred, radical and extremist movements and totalitarian regimes. They show appreciation for the diverse cultures which make up Canada.” My dad’s extraordinary life personifies the value of these lessons.? ?

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs

Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies

Elizabeth LeClair

Doris Bergen

Anna Shternshis