Never To Forget
The Vital Imperative of Remembrance
"It is where it all began for the Jewish community, and it has such historical significance.""It's going to be eco-friendly. It's going to have a memorial garden. It's going to be a beautiful space. It's going to be a hub of research and education. It's going to have a beautiful auditorium with 150 places." "It's going to have a gallery that can host temporary exhibits."Richard Schnurback, president, Montreal Holocaust Museum"It will transform the landscape of the area. It will help to revitalize downtown and so we feel we're really contributing to our city in a significant way as we all hope eventually to come out of this pandemic.""We expect it to be an internationally renowned, world-class institution and an architectural statement.""It will be a gathering place for other communities who have been targeted by genocide, for the local population, for students, for tourists. We are going to be a warm, welcoming, accessible space that draws people in and that transforms them and encourages them to stand up today, to act, to remember."Dorothy Zalcman Howard, co-president, Montreal Holocaust Museum renewal project
"We've outgrown our physical facilities and we have to regularly refuse school groups.""This museum will really be Canada's Holocaust Museum. It will tell the story of the Holocaust and also talk about the Montreal survivors, people who came to Canada, to Quebec, and helped to build our city."Julia Reitman, campaign cabinet president, Montreal Holocaust Museum
"[The] relocation to downtown Montreal should allow increased accessibility and that is all the more necessary, as we have seen in recent days.""Unfortunately, many people are not sufficiently aware of the Holocaust and of the consequences and the lingering after-affects of that tragedy.""Let's hope that having a museum that allows us to better understand this reality will lead people who have trivialized the use of the yellow star and trivialized certain Nazi symbols in the past few months to reflect."Benoit Charette, Quebec minister of Culture
A collection of yellow stars, worn by Jews during the Holocaust, is one of the many exhibits by the Montreal Holocaust Museum. (Simon Nakonechny/CBC) |
A
museum, another museum dedicated to the premise that to forget is to
airbrush history out of existence. Can there be too many museums and
edifices whose sole purpose is to remind humanity of its obligations to
ensure that the organized mass elimination of a people -- whose humanity
had been denigrated amidst accusations of sinister conspiracies to rule
the world, to establish themselves as an ethnic-religious-ideological
world power, subjugating all other peoples to their command -- is never
repeated?
A
criminal, deliberately purposeful campaign undertaken by Nazi Germany
to dehumanize Europe's Jews, to justify the Third Reich's carefully
staged enterprise of delegitimization of what they labelled sub-humans
belonging to a specific ethnic-religious group in preparation to launch a
program of mass slaughter, one that would not raise objections among
populations inured to compassion for the men, women and children slated
for death, because they were exposed to a lethal hatred and believed
that Jewish dominion over the globe must be stopped at all costs.
A German in a military uniform shoots at a Jewish woman after a mass execution in Mizocz, Ukraine. In October of 1942, the 1,700 people in the Mizocz ghetto fought with Ukrainian auxiliaries and German policemen who had intended to liquidate the population. About half the residents were able to flee or hide during the confusion before the uprising was finally put down. The captured survivors were taken to a ravine and shot. Photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial. |
The
cost was six million lives. The European Jew-cleansing pogrom cost
Jewish children their future, Jewish women and men their hopes, as they
were gathered up, murdered en masse, buried in mass graves, used as
slave labour, died of starvation and disease. And then the Final
Solution seeking more efficient, quicker methods thought of Zyclone B to
gas assembled Jews whose humanity had been stripped away, just as their
worldly possessions, their hair, their gold rings and gold teeth were
gathered to help the World War II effort of the Axis forces.
Jewish deportees in the Drancy transit camp near Paris, France, in 1942, on their last stop before the German concentration camps. Some 13,152 Jews (including 4,115 children) were rounded up by French police forces, taken from their homes to the "Vel d'Hiv", or winter cycling stadium in southwestern Paris, in July of 1942. They were later taken to a rail terminal at Drancy, northeast of the French capital, and then deported to the east. Only a handful ever returned. |
This
was their destiny; a giant sacrifice for their noble cause; ridding the
world of Jews for the greater purpose of elevating Aryan qualities of
physique, emphasizing the health virtues of abstaining from alcohol,
smoking, poor nutrition, and global command of lesser nations. The
golden mean of 'doing unto others as you would have them do unto you',
underpinning Jewish traditions only emphasized their suffering as they
cried out to the heavens for having abandoned them. Remembering the
atrocities, the humiliations, the suffering is integral to modern Jewish
life.
The promise made Never to Forget
was forged in blood and bone in memory of those whose lives were taken.
So, no, such places of memorial and teaching must carry the torch of
remembrance. There are far too many in today's world who doubt the very
existence of a machinery vast enough and dedicated enough to have
murdered six million Jews. And many among them feel the effort was
halted before it could properly complete its goal. The spectre of
once-hushed Jew-hatred has resurfaced with a vengeance.
The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of 1944. The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in 1980 by Lili Jacob. |
The
Montreal Holocaust Museum's current location in a building shared with
other Jewish community organizations has outlived its ability to convey
the full measure of what fascist Germany accomplished. A mere 400 of its
14,000 artifacts are displayed, reflecting a lack of room to amply and
effectively expose visitors to a fuller understanding of the Holocaust.
With a purpose-built edifice for which funding is being raised, for
construction to commence in 2023 in the expectation of the museum
opening two years later, a generous endowment by the province's Culture
Ministry of $20 million, another $15 million from the Azrieli
Foundation, as well as public, corporate and private sources see the
project on goal for $80 million.
The
museum is to move from Cote Ste-Catherine Road to what once was the
beating heart of the Montreal Jewish community, St.-Laurent Blvd., The
Main. Where a parking lot now sits, a building to house the Holocaust
Museum is to rise, with 71 percent of its funding already raised.
Destination Montreal represented the third most important city per
capita after Israel and New York, for Holocaust survivors leaving the
charnel house of Europe for a new beginning. Of the roughly 40,000
survivors immigrating to Canada after the Second World War, 9,000
arrived in Montreal.
Among
the museum's collection, there are 858 recorded survivor testimonies.
Research indicates that people who learn about the Holocaust are
likelier to be aware of and to care about other communities, to oppose
persecution and to tend to develop anti-racist values. "For
so many victims, there are no places that mark their existence. In a
way, we are their voices. We are the repository for those people who
were killed. We tell some of their stories and we encourage future
generations to care about what happened and to translate those stories
so they find expression in their own times", explained Dorothy Salcman Howard.
An urn containing ashes from the Auschwitz concentration camps sits surrounded by the names of other Nazi extermination camps at the Montreal Holocaust Museum. (Simon Nakonechny/CBC) |
Labels: Anti-Semitism, Genocide, Holocaust, Montreal Holocaust Museum, Nazi Germany, Remembering, World War Two
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