Elie Wiesel:  Israel advocate 1928 – 2016

"I wanted my language to be a monument to my people -- especially those who died."

"I wrote it [And the World Remained Silent ... Night] -- for the other survivors, who found it difficult to speak and I wanted to tell them, Really ... you must speak."

"I have tried to fight those who would forget."

"Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices."

"We must always take sides Neutrality helps the oppressed, never the victim." 

Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor 

 

"My father clearly articulated that the antisemite will always hate, even if they mask that hate as anti-Zionism -- as though it were something separable from antisemitism."

"Our object as Jews is to keep embracing our Jewish faith and heritage and our connection to our over seven million Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel."

Elisha Wiesel, businessman, activist, philanthropist

Jewish survivors in Buchenwald concentration camp, after the liberation of the camp in 1945  AFP/Getty 

 

Holocaust Remembrance Day is held each year on January 27. This year, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, premieres at the Montreal Holocaust Museum. Elisha Wiesel, 53, will speak of his father and his mission to ensure the world 'never forgets'. Elisha Wiesel is chair of the board of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Along with his mother, Marion Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, the Foundation was launched after the death in 2016 of father-and-husband, to continue the work Elie Wiesel dedicated his life to.

 

Directed and written by Oren Rudavsky the 90-minute film addresses the personal story and legacy of a man known as one of the world's most respected Holocaust survivors, known as well as a prolific author, humanitarian, passionate educator and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

 

Eliezer Wiesel was a boy of 15 when he was deported from Sighet, Romania with his parents and three sisters in May of 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau where his mother and younger sister Tzipora were killed on their arrival at the death-and slave labour camp. Elie and his father were selected to go to the slave labour component of the notorious death camp. 

 

By early 1945, as Germany was losing the war and emptying the camps by forcing starving, skeletal inmates on death marches, Elie and his father were sent on a march to the Buchenwald concentration camp where his father later died. In April of that year the camp was liberated by American soldiers. The Jewish orphans in the camp, Elie among them, were transported to France, where his sister Hilda recognized him in a French newspaper photograph.

 

The siblings reunited, along with their sister Beatrice who moved eventually to Montreal. Working as a journalist in France, Wiesel studied at the Sorbonne. "He overcame trauma by becoming a witness", noted a family friend. His memoir of a young boy's reaction to Auschwitz, originally published in Yiddish in 1945 was a 846-page recollection of pain, loss and suffering. Abridged and translated to French, it was published as La Nuit in 1958, and in 1960 as Night, in English.    

 

Night sold over six million copies in 30 languages, and he went on to write many more books. Moving to New York in 1956, Wiesel became a writer, teacher and academic, teaching at City College of New York, then at Boston University in 1976, as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities. "Your suffering is not what defines you, but it can inform you. It shapes you and then it is your job to make it the best tool you can", a former student added of her own mental journey under his tutelage.

 

Having suffered the most inhumane circumstances and losses in his young life, Elie Wiesel matured a determined human rights upholder, refusing to stand silent in the face of immoral human rights abuses, speaking up and bringing attention to some of the modern world's most shameful human rights atrocities. His trauma led him to undertake action of moral outrage against wrongs committed against the vulnerable. Human rights violations that took place in Rwanda, Cambodia, the Sudan and the former Yugoslavia engaged his moral outrage and his propensity to speak loudly, publicly, determined to move others to do the same.  

"[My father] never failed to stand up for Israel, asserting that only Israelis can best decide how to reach their goals of living in peace and security in an extremely hostile neighbourhood."

"And lastly, he insisted that we never relinquish our desire to have a positive impact on the world as a whole."

"He strongly resisted isolationism as a principle."

Elisha Wiesel  

 

The Cynical Hypocrisy of the International Community

"Relatively many people survived, which for example barely happened in sites which didn't have such a forced labour component."

"[As testimony to the past purpose of Auschwitz, maintaining the death camp as a memorial site has its value]: You have the gate [Arbeit Macht Frei], you have the wagon [transport]. You have the incredibly long railway platform which leads to the former crematoria and gas chambers."

Thomas Van de Putte, scholar specializing in Holocaust memory, King's College London

"I saw thousands of tortured people whom the Red Army had saved -- people so thin that they swayed like branches in the wind, people whose ages one could not possibly guess."

Boris Polevoy, Pravda correspondent, eyewitness to Soviet liberation of Auschwitz Jan.27, 1945

"This is the anniversary of liberation. We remember the victims, but we also celebrate freedom."

"It is hard to imagine the presence of Russia, which clearly does not understand the value of freedom."

Auschwitz Museum director Piotr Cywinski

The entrance gate to the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz pictured on January 10.    Kacper Pempel/Reuters

 

The world is set to mark the 80th anniversary of the most dreadful mass atrocity that a country at war designed in an orgy of hatred against an ethnic population drawn from the countries of Europe whose citizenry included millions of diaspora Jews forced in antiquity from their ancestral homeland for exile abroad by a Roman occupation of the holy land that implacably put down an insurrection of Judean origin in a paroxysm of violence that millennia later was replicated with more modern and equally savage technological means of broader dimensions.

It is highly doubtful that Romans of the period felt it incumbent upon themselves to harvest the hair, skeletal remains, attire, gold dental fillings, marriage rings, to enrich themselves and produce stuffing for pillows, the production of soap from the remains of their victims as Nazi Germany felt disposed to do. The slaughter of children, women and men of all ages may be a casualty of war anywhere at any time when civilian populations bear the brunt of conflict that uproots and victimizes them in loss of home, necessities of life and life itself, but Nazi Germany brought its obsession with the extermination of Jews to a fine art.

This photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier shooting a Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, sometime between 1941 and 1943. This image is titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa", the text that was written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier

 

It took an orgy of mass dementia to organize round-ups, persuade populations that a nest of vipers lived amongst them that German authorities prepared to save them from, infesting those non-Jewish citizens with a suspicion and loathing of Jews they had lived among for centuries to convince them that the goal of extermination would make for a more refined, pure society once the presence of Jews was eliminated. People adapted nicely and deliberately turned their faces away from the putrid agonies of exclusion and humiliation their fellow Jewish citizens suffered, glad when they suddenly vanished into slave labour camps since out of sight, out of mind was a great relief,

Now, generations after the Holocaust for most people inhabiting our familiar world the memory of mass annihilation is beyond faint and growing fainter. Just as the thousands of Jews who managed miraculously to survive have grown old and are growing older, their witness status soon to fade itself, in and out of history. To be sure, others besides Jews died; political prisoners, Poles, Roma, Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, but it was Europe's Jews that comprised the target focus.

 

This year, on the 80th anniversary memorializing the Holocaust, an estimated 50 survivors are expected to be present, and they will speak to the world once again of their loss, their ordeal, their endurance, their unforgettable memories. Two-thirds of the Jews of Europe perished in that orgy of hate and demonic destruction of human life. They were murdered in the death camps established all over Europe, places like Treblinka, Majdanek, Stutthof, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen among a plethora of others. 

There were survivors at Auschwitz for the simple reason that though it was a death camp it also was a labour camp. Where those who survived the journey to Auschwitz in crowded train transports were separated on arrival into groups deemed sufficiently healthy to work, the others directed to groups who would enter the 'shower rooms' where they were gassed to death with Zyklon B, their remnants cremated in giant furnaces, their ashes belched out of massive chimneys to nurture the surrounding soil.

Presidents, royalty, ambassadors, politicians, rabbis and priests will be among those in attendance to memorialize the fixation of a nation and a continent on the destruction of a tiny ethnic/cultural/religious group that had lived among them for  generations, enriching those countries with their presence as artists, scientists, teachers, factory workers, lawyers, doctors, justices, soldiers, entertainment figures, industrialists, bankers and journalists, bakers and cobblers.

 

The royalty, presidents, ambassadors, politicians and priests of the time who failed to exert their moral outrage over the persecution, then the demonization, then the isolation, then the ghettoization, then the imprisonment and finally the murder of six million Jews were in a very real sense complicit with the perpetrators of the vast act of genocide. Their present day counterparts are in a very real sense not much different than those during the Holocaust who couldn't be moved to make an effort at prevention and deterrence.

The rising tide of antisemitism which bears such an uncanny resemblance to that of the 1930s and 1940s and the growing calls of accusations against a tiny Jewish state established in its ancestral geography to restore pride in Judaic heritage but above all to give strength to the cry of "Never Again!" by its pledge to protect and guide Jews into the future is once again under existential threat. Collegial nations of the West, supporters of the Jewish state, have managed to remain on the sidelines once again, leaving Israel and Jews to their own defense.

The ruins of the sprawling Birkenau site stretch far into the distance

Righteous Among The Nations

"Why did Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma become martyrs for solidarity with the Jews? After their deaths, the Ulma family's Bible was discovered. The Good Samaritan passage was underlined in red ink. Jesus told that parable in response to the question: 'Who is my neighbour?' That question was put in response to Jesus teaching that the two great commandments were love of God and love of neighbour." 

"Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma applied that lesson in the most harrowing and heroic circumstances. They taught their children that their Catholic faith demanded their resistance, and invited them to sacrificial solidarity."

"That lesson was soon learned beyond their family home. Their story was known, preserved and treasured by their fellow villagers."

"In 1994, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance centre, declared Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma to be 'righteous among the nations', the recognition granted to those who saved Jews during the Shoah."

"Since 2018, the anniversary of the murder of the Ulma and Goldman families has been declared in Poland as a 'National Day of Remembrance of Poles Who Saved Jews under German Occupation'."

Father Raymond J. de Souza, Academic, Priest, Journalist

This undated photo shows Polish farmer Jozef Ulma with his wife Wiktoria. The Ulmas were killed with their seven children by the Nazis in 1944 for having sheltered Jews during World War II. (Mateusz Szpytma, Deputy head of Poland's IPN history institute via AP)

 

A lifetime ago, almost 80 years past, on a farm in southeast Poland in a matter of stark, horrendous minutes pf savagery, 17 people were murdered in Nazi-occupied Markowa, Poland. All these years later, the Polish family central to the story of honouring and caring for others at risk of death, a ceremony took place of deep emotional and historical significance with the beatification of an entire family, signifying the penultimate step prior to canonization in the Catholic Church.

The war began in 1939 and by 1942 the Nazi regime prepared its Final Solution to the 'Jewish problem', the plan to organize the systemic murder of Jews in Europe, enlisting the aid of other ethnic groups that were occupied by Nazi forces, to volunteer for positions with SS divisions tasked to obliterate Jewish lives. There was no shortage of volunteers eager to join the killing battalions, but at the same time there were those among whom Jews had lived for countless generations who felt empathy for their neighbours.

This undated photo shows Polish farmer Jozef Ulma with his pregnant wife Wiktoria and their six children. (Mateusz Szpytma, Deputy head of Poland’s IPN history institute via AP)

 

The Ulma family was among the latter group, who strove to help their Jewish neighbours escape the fate in store for those for whom a genocide had been planned, even at risk of losing their own lives. To give any kind of assistance to Jews was to risk immediate death, well known in the greater population, but set aside as inconsequential by Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma, a farm family by no means well off, but prepared to absorb into their humble farmhouse eight Jews from two families, to give them shelter.

The Jewish neighbours of the Ulma family were accustomed to their children being playmates. Like any other rural community, neighbours knew one another. And Jozef and Witkoria also knew that Jews in their village were being rounded up and taken away. They decided to act, and in December of 1942 they took into their household an extended Jewish family. Saul Goldman and his four adult sons, Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Moses, became a temporary part of the Ulma household.

But it didn't end there, the Ulmas soon welcomed two sisters, Golda Gruenfell and Lea Didnet, daughters of a relative of Saul Goldman's, along with Lea Didner's daughter, Reszia. The little household became crowded indeed. And the Ulma family with their own six children accepted that they would endure living in such crowded conditions in a house with two bedrooms and an attic. They viewed it as their neighbourly responsibility to house and feed not only their own family but eight others.

To complicate matters, Wiktoria was pregnant with her seventh child. They lived together, miraculously, for a year. Until the presence of Jews living in a Polish home was revealed to police by someone who felt it their duty to be an informer, knowing what the outcome would be. On March 24, 1944, the Nazis arrived to the humble farmhouse, lining up the Goldmans and the Ulmas. First the eight Jews were shot and killed in the presence of the Ulmas.

 

Soldiers stand guard at the flower-covered grave of the Ulma family, a couple with six small children, who were killed by the Germans in 1944 for sheltering eight Jews, who were also killed with the family, during remembrance ceremonies at the cemetery in Markowa, Poland, March 17, 2016. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

 

The soldiers then turned to Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma, shooting and killing them in front of their screaming, horrified children. The children were soon silenced as Stanislawa, eight,  Barbara, seven, Wladyslaw, six, Franciszek, four, Antoni, three, and Maria, two followed their parents into death's dominion. And there was a seventh child -- for in the trauma that resulted before their deaths, Wiktoria had gone into labour.

Her seventh child was a little boy, discovered dead alongside his parents and six siblings. When all had been murdered, the Nazis set the house on fire, and celebrated a job well done. Later, on their departure, the neighbouring villagers arrived to exhume the bodies and bury them. 

At the beatification ceremony, the program included the chief rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, attending in honour of the "Good Samaritans of Markowa". Prayers were to be offered at the cemetery where the Goldman family is buried.

Clergy at the beatification ceremony of the Ulma family, who were murdered by Nazis for sheltering Jews in Markowa in south-eastern Poland.   Reuters

The Emotional Passion : Loyal Nationalist Fighting for Ukraine

"We trampled this land with our bare feet and breathed into our souls and hears its its magical aromas, and our eyes, like memory tapes, forever recorded the beauty of the cities, villages and landscapes of our native land."

"[As the Polish army and civilian population fled, Hunka's village looked toward the west and] the hope that those mystical German knights who give 'bullets' to the hated Poles will appear."

"[Instead of Germans], a column of horsemen with red stars on their caps arrived."

"This was the first demonstration of 'father' Stalin's guardianship over us -- the first echelons of 'enemies of the people' sent to Siberia. More and more new ones followed."

"Friend to friend and brother to brother could not speak sincerely for fear of betrayal. At school, we had to sing praises to our executioners, and the monthly printed murals that each class had to create praised Father Stalin and the communist party to the heavens."

Yaroslav Hunka, 98, former member WW2 Nazi Waffen-SS Galicia

"Ukrainian nationalists faced an impossible choice during the war, but we definitely shouldn't celebrate their Sophie's Choice in the chamber of the Canadian House of Commons."

Joe Roberts, Jewish activist with Ukraine's Jewish community

 

"...The SS Galician Division helped the Germans murder Galician Jews and participated in anti-Polish massacres."

"...It is hard to imagine that Hunka would have been unaware of the region's brutalities and the SS Galician Division's crimes against Poles and Jews; Heinrich Himmler gave a speech to the Galician Division, praising them for removing the 'dirty blemish' of the Jews and 'liquidating' the Poles."

"...In his memoir, not a word of recognition given to these victims."

Adam Zivo, journalist, Odesa, Ukraine

Yaroslav Hunka, right, waits for the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the House of Commons on Sept. 22. It later emerged Hunka was once part of a notorious Nazi unit during the Second World War. (Patrick Doyle/The Canadian Press)

Last week in Ottawa, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was present in the House of Commons to be received in respect by Canadian Parliamentarians and invited diplomats. He was to address the House. The Speaker of the House introduced the presence of an invited Ukrainian-Canadian patriot, a war hero, an introduction that saw all present rise in two ovations for the presence of this 98-year-old hero of World War Two. Several days later, the venerable Jewish journal the Forward revealed that the invited man, Yaroslav Hunka, had fought with the Germans as a volunteer, against the Soviet Union.

 

The Battalion he fought in was notorious as a foreign arm of volunteers fighting alongside Nazi German battalions. Enlistment in the SS Galicia Division came with an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. And service to the battalion involved voluntarily assisting Germany in its dedication to slaughtering Jews. This man was no patriotic hero as far as any Allied-nation country was concerned; his presence in the House was an insult to the Canadians who died defending the world against Nazi Germany and its Axis allies.

 

The trigger-words for the adulatory reception given the elderly man who wrote of his years fighting with the SS Galicia Division as the happiest years of his life, came in the introduction of a Ukrainian fighting Russia. Not as a Ukrainian fascist allied with Nazi Germany fighting against the Soviet Union which by then had turned against its former Axis membership when Germany marched on its former Axis ally leading Stalin to throw in his lot with the Western Allies. The Division of Ukrainians, under direct German orders, was declared a criminal organization by the Nuremberg war trial investigators.

 

The quotes above citing words that Yaroslav Hunka had written were extracted from a 2,000-word memoir published in News of the Combatant in 2011, a blog managed by an association of Ukrainian veterans. The brutalities of Soviet rule were memorialized as it were, in the memoir alongside efforts by Ukrainian partisans to establish an independent state. The mind-confusing Ukraine-Russia conflict of today where Moscow has invaded Ukraine, claiming its territories to be part of Russia, and the war crimes committed by Russia at the present time may echo those of the Second World War, but they are different worlds.

Before the war in 1939 Stalin imposed a famine on Ukraine, which caused countless Ukrainians, including Ukrainian Jews, to perish from hunger, when Ukraine, an agricultural super-power then and now, saw its grain yields confiscated and sent to Russia during a time of grain shortage, leaving Ukraine to fend for itself, its harvest maintaining life for Russians, while its absence to feed Ukrainians dealt a near-genocidal blow to the nation; that was the historical Holodomor. 

Mr. Hunka was born and raised in the village of Urman, Eastern Galicia, ruled at that time by Poland. In 1939 when war began Hunka was 14.  Initially under Soviet occupation Hunka, from an impoverished family, was sent to a Polish 'bursa' in Berezhany where many of his classmates were Jewish refugee children. Which puzzled Hunka and his Ukrainian coevals, why Jews "were running away from such a civilized western nation as the Germans". Preparations underway to murder millions of Jews were not long in coming.

Soon people began disappearing, deported to Siberia, including Hunka's family members. Students suddenly disappeared from school and were never seen again. Anyone deemed to be anti-Soviet became part of the deportations. Finally, two years on, in 1941, the Soviets were turned out and Nazis occupied the region. Villagers "welcomed the German soldiers with joy"; ethnic Ukrainians could sleep in peace without fearing "there would ... be that dreaded knocking on the door in the middle of the night".

Soon, their 'liberators'  changed and a new wave of arrests occurred. "The Fuehrer immediately revealed his plans for Ukraine: liquidating the provisional Ukrainian government in Lviv and imprisoning Ukrainian leaders in concentration camps", Mr. Hunka wrote in his memoirs. The Germans spoke a foreign language, he wrote, and "did not permeate our society with informers as the Muscovite did". Soon enough Hunka described the next two years of "charming girls, carelessly cheerful friends and fragrant evenings in the luxurious castle park", the happiest two years of his life.

Ukrainian nationalists imagined Poland's return to control the region, concluding a solution existed; an autocratic ethnically homogeneous Ukrainian state they would create. Whose intention led to atrocities as Jews and Poles, comprising a large minority in East Galicia were being massacred. From 1943 to 1945, Ukrainian Insurgent Army actions and their collaborators aided the Germans in hunting down and exterminating Jews so that an estimated 1.5 million Jews perished ultimately, during the Holocaust in Ukraine.

Zelenskyy and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appalud Hunka. Trudeau has since apologized for the diplomatic disaster. (Patrick Doyle/The Canadian Press)

 

Ethnically cleansing Galicia, collaborating with the Nazis' campaigns of extermination saw favour in the aspirations of the Ukrainian nationalists of this time in history. The impression was given with this man's introduction to Parliament last week that the current battle for Ukraine's sovereignty bears similarity to the WWII situation. Except that now, at the present time, it is a Jew that leads Ukraine in its existential conflict with Russia. And the Parliament of Canada, feted both that Jew, and a Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian guilty of at the very least voluntary association with the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews.

Errors of judgement can be monumental in their revelations, and the judgement of their peers consequential to those who pay insufficient heed to history.

Heinrich Himmler, one of the top Nazi officials, inspects a line of troops with the 1st Galician Division, also known as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, in an undated photo. (Polish State Archives)

Canada, a Harbour For Nazi War Criminals

"Canada has a really dark history with Nazis in Canada."

"There was a point in our history where it was easier to get in [immigrate to Canada] as a Nazi than it was as a Jewish person."

"I think that's a history we have to reconcile."

Immigration Minister Marc Miller 

"What little we know of their [SS members] war record is bad."

"We're still hoping to get rid of the less desirable Ukrainian PoWs either to Germany or to Canada."

British Home Office official Beryl Hughes, 1948

Ukrainians dressed in SS Galicia Division uniforms march past graves during a re-burial ceremony at the SS Galicia Division cemetery near the village of Chervone, Ukraine, in 2013. Photo by Efrem Lukatsky/AP/File

Documents compiled by a commission set up in the 1980s to scrutinize Canada's record in permitting members of the Nazi SS into Canada through government-sanctioned visas, including members of the Ukrainian collaborationist special ethnic SS-linked divisions meant to work with German SS units in

rounding up Jews in massive pogroms of shooting deaths -- part of the Holocaust's 'Final Solution', a priority with Nazi Germany while it was prosecuting World War I --, have never been made available for public scrutiny.

 

In the wake of a public scandal where a North Bay Ukrainian military veteran was invited to parliament to meet with visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who was to address the House of Commons, where the entire House inclusive of parliamentarians and diplomatic guests rose on the introduction of the 98-year-old, a former volunteer serving with a Ukrainian SS division, Jewish groups in Canada are now demanding the release of the documents, unredacted.

 

The 40-year-old report along with allied documents that contain details relating to Nazi war criminals residing in Canada remains in a 'secret' category. It represents a second portion of a 1986 government-commissioned report on Nazis who were permitted to enter and settle in Canada. Another 1986 report was heavily censored, one that examined how it was that Nazis were enabled to enter Canada to begin with, post World War Two. That commission was struck in the wake of years of Jewish groups urging the government to investigate and extradite Nazi war criminals known to be living in Canada.

Over 600 pages of the document finally obtained through the country's Access to Information law, was censored. B'nai Brith is now demanding the release of RCMP and Department of Justice files on Nazi war criminals in Canada. "We've run up against a brick wall", commented David Matas, counsel for the Jewish advocacy organization ... in view of the government's ongoing decision to withhold such records from public view. A ray of hope shimmered briefly when Canada's Immigration Minister Marc Miller allowed that the government might reconsider whether the records could be released.

Canada's track record, he commented pointedly, with Nazi criminals was notoriously poor. B'nai Brith pointed out in a submission to the House of Commons committee on Access to Information in February that the government's approach to Nazi war criminals reflected its "intentional harbouring of known Nazi war criminals" along with "deliberate inaction".

And that historical puzzle has now been resurrected since MPs in the House of Commons a week ago honoured a Canadian-Ukrainian who had served in a Nazi SS division. Two standing ovations from those present were awarded Yaroslav Hunka, sparking outrage on social media, prompting the resignation of the House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota on whose invitation to the man living in North Bay, arrived at the House of Commons, with no one apparently aware, despite that House security and Canadian intelligence services were to have scrutinized the man's background prior to his entrance.

 

Yaroslav Hunka, right, waits for the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the House of Commons in Ottawa last Friday. Photo by Patrick Doyle /The Canadian Press

 

The now-98-year-old had volunteered to fight with the 14th Waffen-SS Division Galicia, a Nazi military unit recruiting Ukrainians to fight alongside German SS groups, and more to the point, help in the extermination of Europe's Jews. Poland, along with Jewish groups denounced the infamous division, citing its role in killing civilians in grouped massacres during the war. Poland, in fact has petitioned Canada for the man's extradition as a war criminal.

Large numbers of SS soldiers and other Nazi collaborators from eastern Europe settled after the war in Canada. Jewish refugee-survivors who had also come to Canada, spoke in shocked whispers to one another when they recognized on the streets of Toronto, German SS members they had last seen in the ghettos and death camps. Many of the records sought have links to the 1986 war crimes commission that was led by Justice Jules Deschenes.

The International Military Tribunal had declared the SS a criminal organization, including units of the Waffen SS, like the Galicia division that Yaroslav Hunka had fought with. There are nationalist Ukrainian-Canadians today, who view the 14th Waffen Division as heroic for battling Soviet forces who at that time were allies with the US, Canada and Britain after Russia was invaded by Germany despite Russia having begun the war as part of the Axis group.

The release in Britain in 2005 of documents from British archives outlined concerns relating to the members of SS Galicia along with intentions to ship them to Canada. "The Division was an SS division and technically all of its officers and senior NCOs are liable for trial as war criminals", noted one report for the British government. In another report dated 1948 there were discussions on sending SS members to Canada. And they did.

Righteous Among The Nations

 

"They brought their factories of death to the Polish lands."

"In Poland, even if you gave a glass of water or a slice of bread [to a Jew during the Nazi occupation] that was considered help and was punishable by death."

"The Polish state has a special obligation, a special duty to make sure that remembering the Holocaust is preserved. We need to make sure that this remembrance is passed on to the future generations."

Wojciech Kolarski, Polish culture minister

"The government tries to impose a certain narrative showing Poland as the most pure nation of the world. Many governments do this; it is not a very original idea."

"There's no doubt whatever that the Ulma family were heroes and what they did was absolutely heroic. We should remember them."

"The problem is that using the righteous people for an electoral campaign is very low."

Piotr Wrobel, history professor, University of Toronto, Konstanty Reynert Chair of Polish Studies

"Jews were generally accepted in Poland when they weren't necessarily accepted in other places in Europe."

"Most of the Holocaust survivors are people who survived in hiding, either because they went east [fleeing to Russia], or because they were given out by their family members to non-Jewish families [to hide and give Polish names and backgrounds to]."

"What we try to do is we try to expose people to the idea that war is complicated and it brings out the best and the worst in people."

"Did Poland perpetrate the Holocaust? No. Were there Poles who contributed to the suffering of the Jews? Yes."

Sebastian Rudel, deputy director, Jewish Community Centre, Krakow, Poland

People stand at the Ulma grave during the beatification of the family in Markowa on September 10, 2023. Photo by BARTOSZ SIEDLIK/AFP via Getty Images

The Catholic Church in Poland earlier this month beatified Wiktoria and Jozef Ulma, along with their children and their unborn child, in what is potentially the first step on the path to sainthood in the Church for the family. It will represent the first time in Catholic history that an entire family will have been so honoured. Poland holds this family in the highest regard, memorialized in postage stamps and coins. A museum is even dedicated to the family and to hundreds of other Polish families who stepped into the lethal danger zone of aiding Jews during the Holocaust.

 Ulma Family, circa 1943

In the case of the Ulmas, an indigent rural family with a stern moral outlook on life that committed them unequivocally to face danger in exchange for self-respect and empathy for the plight of their neighbours, they undertook to shelter two Jewish families, eight people in total in their modest home close to the village of Markowa in the war years. Jozef was 44, his wife Wiktoria 31, their daughters Stanislawa, 7, Barbara,6, Maria, 18 months, and sons Wladyslaw, 5, Franciszek, 3, and Antoni, 2.

The Jews they sheltered and who were summarily slaughtered by the Nazis in the crowded little farmhouse were 70-year-old Saul Goldman, his sons Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Mojzesz, along with Golda Grunfeld and her sister Lea Didner with her young daughter Reszla, according to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance which documented the Ulmas’ story. The family was previously memorialized as 'righteous among the nations' by Yad Vashem in Israel in 1995.

On March 24, 1944 when German police --  responding to an informer who became aware of the family's involvement in sheltering Jews and then reported them to authorities -- raided the home. Not only were the eight Jews being sheltered by the Ulma family murdered, but the murder spree included Jozef and Wiktoria, pregnant at the time, and their six children. During the violence, Wiktoria went into sudden labour and the Ulma family's youngest was briefly introduced to the world. None survived.

 

 

A nun views a display about the Ulma family outside the presidential palace in Warsaw.  Photo by Ryan Tumilty

 

The family has been recognized as an important symbol of national honour for Poles, fitting right in with the national narrative that Jews and Catholics lived a peaceful co-existence before the German occupation shattered the status quo and produced the Holocaust, drawing Poland into Germany's state-sponsored genocide through its orchestrated mass extermination of Europe's Jews.

Before the advent of the Second World War, an estimated 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, 90 percent of Polish Jews were murdered, along with hundreds of thousands of Poles whom the Nazis also considered to be a sub-human species. It was not only Polish Jews that were annihilated in the many death camps established in Poland by Nazi Germany; Poland became a gathering-point for Jews transported from other parts of Europe.

The six most-infamous extermination camps were established in Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Treblinka. Although Jews felt more accepted in Poland than in many other countries in Europe, particularly in the east, there was ample persecution and antisemitism along with deadly pogroms carried out against Jews in the country. Violence by Poles, stoutly religious Catholics where the church itself acted in promoting antisemitism, was not uncommon before the war.

There were many Jew-hating Poles who took their hate out in persecution and violence against Polish Jews. The Ulma family was an exception, among even the thousands of Poles who sacrificed their security in favour of trying to help neighbours frantic to escape mass death. Postwar, when Communists ruled Poland, they encouraged the Jews that remained to leave the country, continuing the old tradition of antisemitism. In fact, Jews who survived the Holocaust, returning to their towns and villages were met with threats from former neighbours now living in their homes.

Relations between Jews and the Polish Law and Justice party government in 2018 became strained when the country's Holocaust denial law made it illegal to publicly claim Poland or the Polish nation to have been involved in Nazi atrocities. The changes were withdrawn under outraged protests, including from the government of Israel. What remains is the potential of civil penalties for anyone implying Poles had any element of an active role during the Holocaust. Which, in certain documented instances they did have.

 

Jan Gross, Polish American history professor, has received opprobrium and has been investigated for libel, criticized by the current Polish government in relation to his work identifying a number of pogroms carried out in Poland against Jews by Poles themselves in the early period of the war. As Piotr Wrobel, University of Toronto history professor points out, Poland's view of history and Jews is accurate enough, albeit politicized by the government Law and Justice party.

The estimated 16,000 people comprising the Jewish community in today's Poland is small in a country of close to 38 million, yet the many synagogues that serviced Poland's large pre-war Jewish population have been protected and preserved. Sebastian Rudol, deputy director of Krakow's Jewish  Community Centre, states that the contemporary community views the debate surrounding responsibility as more nuanced in view of various aspects of the past in Polish-Jewish relations.

His centre caters to their small Jewish community. And it has  reached out to respond to the war in neighbouring Ukraine to help the conflict's refugees. Its agenda is also to help people whom ancestry searches identify their families' hidden backgrounds as Jews. When their forbears sought to protect themselves from antipathy to and persecution of Jews, by hiding their Jewish identity and assuming a Christian background in its stead.

Clergy attend the beatification ceremony of the Ulma family, who were murdered by German Nazis for sheltering Jews in Markowa, Poland September 10, 2023. Patryk Ogorzalek/Agencja Wyborcza.pl via REUTERS

The Learned Scholar of Hate Dissemination

"They say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews."

"No. It was clearly explained that they fought them because of their social role and not their religion," 

"These people were fought because of their social function related to money, usury."

"From Hitler's point of view, they were sabotaging, and therefore he hated them." 

"The truth that we should spread to the world is that European Jews are not Semites. They have nothing to do with Semitism."

"As for the Eastern Jews, they are Semites [Mizrachi Jews from the wider Middle East]."

Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas

The Holocaust-denying Palestinian president ... Reuters

All this and more from the scholarly research undertaken by a man who received an academic doctorate from the Patrice Lamumba University in Russia for his investigative thesis examining the extent of the Holocaust at the hands of Nazi Germany during World War II. Germany's meticulous record-keeping of its state-sponsored elimination of Jews in its genocidal determination to rid Europe of what its propaganda arm cited as subhumans living among the Aryan elite of humanity verifies the extent and inhumanity of the extermination, but Abbas reached an 'unbiased' different conclusion.

 

In 1982, the Soviet Academy of Sciences under a special branch established for the coordination of what they held to be a global Zionist conspiracy to combat communism would grant doctoral status to Mahmoud Abbas, upon the defense of his thesis The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945. A dissertation in which he wrote of -- "Israel’s ruling Zionist regime—appears today in its most crude, expansionist and racist form. Violence, terror and extremism are becoming Zionists’ main methods of action". An apt-enough descriptive of Palestinian Fatah and Hamas terrorist groups today.

 

"All honest people of the planet must fight 'the hateful ideology and practice of racism … against racial and national discrimination, Zionism and antisemitism, which are fomented by capitalist reactionary forces'", he wrote. As for the Holocaust, he wrote, Zionist leaders had a choice: "Either declare a war against Nazism and throw all of [the movement’s] resources into the war in the name of saving hundreds of thousands or millions of Jewish lives, or use the annihilation of the Jewish population in European countries occupied by Nazi Germany to implement the Zionist ideal of mass colonization of Palestine and create a Jewish state on its territory. And Zionist leaders chose the latter."

 

Ergo, Jewish 'collaboration' with the Nazi regime was responsible for the outcome of the Holocaust. To be used as a cudgel against the world conscience on the extermination of six million Jews, to justify the Zionist drive to 'occupy' Judaean ancestral lands in a rebirth of Israel, and in the process these modern-day imperialist colonists wrenched the land from its 'rightful' owners, the migrant Arabs from Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East seeking opportunities to prosper. And just coincidentally imposing bloody pogroms on Jews who never left their ancient homeland.

On this more recent occasion, President Abbas set about distorting history and promoting his usual antisemitic stereotypes in a speech to senior members of his Fatah movement. In essence, defending Adolf Hitler for killing European Jews, not as an act of antisemitism but entirely related to their "social functions" within society, naming money-lending as a leading trait of Jewish infamy, a hoary old trope that never fails to resonate with Jew-haters. And this, from a man who has hived off millions in his personal bank accounts from international funding meant to improve the lives of Palestinians.

The Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington think tank founded by Israeli analysts -- famous for interpreting into English a multitude of speeches made in Arabic demonizing and condemning Israel and Jews and inciting to violence against them -- translated this speech as it does others to inform Western audiences. The U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism was appalled by what she named Abbas's "hateful, antisemitic remarks". Abbas maligned Jews and distorted the Holocaust she said, calling for an apology.

Germany's ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, spoke of Abbas's speech as "an insult to the memory of millions of murdered men, women and children. The Palestinians deserve to hear the historical truth from their leader, not such distortions", he said. The comments "trivialize the Holocaust and thereby fuel antisemitism", noted the European Union's statement in response to the Palestinian Authority President's hateful speech. None of which will stop them from funding this verbal terrorist who uses that funding to reward the Palestinians he incites to murder Jews.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz last year condemned Abbas for accusing Israel of committing "50 Holocausts" against the Palestinians; presumably by defending itself from violent Palestinian assaults against Jews in Israel. In 2017 following a speech where Abbas claimed Jewish money lending caused animosity toward them in Europe, while dismissing Jewish connection to the Holy Land, he was similarly censured. His statements currently in lock-step with his 1980s doctoral thesis where he questioned the extent of the Nazi genocide.

This photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier shooting a Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, sometime between 1941 and 1943. This image is titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa", the text that was written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier.  AP Photo/USHMM/LOC