The Ottawa Gathering

An unique happening took place in Ottawa from April 28th to the 30th, 1985, marking the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany's infamous death camps. This momentous occasion, the first of its kind in Canada, was produced under the auspices of the Canadian Jewish Congress in recognition of the 40th anniversary of the Liberation. The Canadian Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors - and Their Children was meant to be a recognition of the unforgettable, a re-affirmation of the tenacity of individual endurance and collective memory, and a shout to the world that such events can and have happened and that we must all pledge ourselves to ensure that this may never ever happen again.

The only way in which we can be certain that such a cataclysmic horror would never again occur, it is recognized, is to evoke the memory, and with it the pain, of the past. The memory and the pain must never be permitted to dull with the passage of time. Like a precious object, this jewel of our anguish must come to the public light time and again and the facets of its many dimensions polished by whatever means at our disposal to shine the ineffable light of truth and justice in the eyes of the unbelievers.

The Gathering began on a rainy Sunday in this capital city of Canada. About two thousand Jews gathered to celebrate memory and perseverance and to honour the dead. A two-hour remembrance ceremony evoking the past and honouring those who survived began on Parliament Hill and proceeded from there to the War Memorial where wreaths were laid in recognition of Jewish soldiers who fought alongside their peers in Germany.

Without doubt Elie Wiesel was the eloquent luminary of this opening session and the passion of his words kindled both fears and resolve in the hearts of his listeners. Six death camp survivors lit torches from the Eternal Flame burning before the Centre Block of Parliament in commemoration of the six million who perished in the agony of the Holocaust. They were assisted by children of survivors, and the symbolism of the ceremony could have been lost on no one.

The Gathering was meant to provide a forum from which those who attended (and those many who were there in spirit but at a remove, reading the reports in their daily newspaper) could experience a manner of re-dedication, where all could derive sustenance from the proceedings and one another, and be energized and re-imbued with the will to continue the struggle for recognition and for justice and above all, for assurance that truly never again could such a dreadful tragedy occur.

The theme of the Gathering actually summed up its purpose: "From Awareness to Action". this is hardly to say that those who attended were not acutely aware in every fibre of their being. Many, however, resonated a kind of painfully individualistic awareness, that of a wound refusing to heal and in some manner perceived by the self to be a shameful wound to be hidden. Through the forum of the Gathering and the opportunities which it presented to meet with others, to discuss through halting and then strengthening purpose of dialogue, it became possible to relinquish and bury for all time the sense of personal shame. Pride replaced the covert injury, and people embraced both physically and metaphorically in a union of shared grief and understanding bolstered by the determination to influence all people of good will in the struggle for world peace through understanding.

While there as a participant, as an onlooker, as someone who intended to report on the proceedings, it was possible to be at one and the same time involved and detached. The detached part of me wrote down ceaselessly every impression, every observation articulated by the speakers, and each summation of the workshops. The involved part kept recalling how, as a child, my father never tried to 'protect' me from the realities of existence as a Jew - kept recalling the words of the song Zog nit Kainmohl - kept recalling the volumes devoured detailing the savage activities of the fascist Third Reich. And too I remembered tattered sepia prints and one in particular of a young man with a moustache who was my father's older brother who, like all my father's other relatives and my mother's, were slaughtered.

I remembered too my shock as a child on encountering another young girl in the cloakroom of our classroom at school forty years ago and this weeping child was bemoaning the cruel fact that she was born Jewish. How anyone could deny their Jewishness was beyond me, then as now. And the thousands of people who came out to Ottawa for the Gathering were there not in mourning as much as in proud affirmation of their Jewishness which has blossomed throughout the millennia despite unspeakable persecutions, and has never diminished to this day.

But the true value of such a gathering is not so immediately perceived. It is later, re-thinking the event, one's exposure to passionate, brilliant speakers; the milling crowds where on occasion one soul finally meets another after a long separation; the poignant riffling of faded photographs from another, now vanished world in a sandbox-like display; of the mutely beseeching baby shoes, the tattered remnants of clothing in another display; the proud affirmation of strength in the contemporary sculpture illustrating the mother-figure in fierce protection of the young. These are all emotion-laden images, designed to evoke the gut response that they did, and in the end, recall the onlooker to his future through the past.

On Monday, April 29th, thousands of Jews gathered in the huge Main Hall of the Ottawa Congress Centre for the opening Forum on Hate Propaganda. Chairman Les Scheininger (Canadian Jewish Congress, Ontario Region) reminded the gathering that they were all duty-bound to eradicate any fomentation against minorities, any kind of racism or discrimination against those pinpointed in some way as being 'different'. And he reminded the audience in the words of Emil Fackenheim that the Holocaust was no war, but a deliberate plan to eradicate a group made unpopular by a public appeal to the ugliest emotion in human nature. And, he went on, Jews are a living monument of what humanity can aspire to; dignity of existence, tolerance for all ... that racism is a virulent pestilence which has the capacity to destroy all that is civil in man and society.

Manuel Pritschi (National Director, Community Relations, C.J.C.) spoke on Holocaust Denial. The term 'holocaust' itself having been coined to describe the deliberate and systematic destruction of European Jewry. Denial, he maintained, was the point at which Nazism and neo-Nazism converge; denial is an unabashed attempt to rehabilitate the Third Reich. The process of denial is to excel in the perversion of language; semantic athleticism whose end result is a kind of sordid doubt of the undoubted, by focusing on absurd innuendo to shift attention away from reality, by declaring incriminating documents to be forgeries, by total illogicality of the argumentative process. The complete dissolution of logic; a desecration of truth and the memory of the victims, and of democracy.

Alan Shefman (National Director, Field Services, League for Human rights, B'nai B'rith) who assisted during the Zundel trial) explained that to understand denial one must try to understand Hitler - looking to the history of Genghis Khan as a great conqueror and that history would handily 'forget' mass atrocities and recall only the romanticism of the conqueror. And the way to deal with these impossible historical slurs is to seek recourse in law to battle libel, racist defamation, and the contempt of ethnic and other minorities. Western democracies have enacted laws to deal with hate propaganda, but incredibly the United States has no such laws. Canada has responded with such a law as a result of Alberta's Keegstra affair. We must challenge by any means possible through the media, to the general public, the courts, any such re-writing of history. The Zundel trial and its accompanying publicity, Shefman maintained, did more to undermine denial theory than any previous attempts. Each such success is a major impediment to Nazi rehabilitation.

Dr. Irving Abella (Professor, Glendon College, York University), co-author of None is Too Many, pointed out that the serenity of the myth of Canada being a home for the needy, the immigrant, was punctured irremediably by historical fact-finding. That Canadian immigration authorities did everything within their powers to keep Jews before, during and after the Second World War from entering Canada. Immigrants from any other background were preferred, no matter their political affiliation, no matter how suspect their past. And these barriers were erected to keep out Jews, Blacks and Asians, those most despised members of the human race, those traditionally most in need of succour.

He spoke of the many heart-rending letters from European Jews pleading for admission to Canada, contained in the Public Archives of Canada - our national shame. Jews simply did not fit into the public concept of 'what a Canadian should be'. Jews were seen as urbanites, not loggers, farmers, fisherfolk; Canadians feared the impending possibility of a 'Jewish invasion' and hence no Jews, not even Jewish orphan refugees were welcome and were sent instead to their deaths. Lies that go unchallenged, Abella reminded the audience, may become public policy - and silence is mistaken for acquiescence. Distortion of truth, and of history creates the atmosphere for future disasters.

Following the Plenary Session of the opening forum, Bernard Ostry (Deputy Minister, Ministry of Citizenship and Culture, Province of Ontario) chaired the forum "Holocaust Denial on Trial: Marshalling the Evidence". Ostry reiterated the need for vigilance, for everyone to be involved to ensure that history would not be rewritten. Yet we must see ourselves as neither avengers nor victims. Those who portray themselves as victims tend to be treated as victims. Our search is for Justice; that is a universal, never-ending preoccupation.

Serge Klarsfeld (President, Association des filles et Fils des deportes juifs de France, Paris, France) spoke of his and his wife Beate's activities in tracking down Klaus Barbie and their struggle to uncover unacceptable evidence which would be recognized by a court of justice to bring Barbie to trial and finally, to justice. He described how, at one point in their joint activities, the prosecution was merely a symbolic act as no one really knew where Barbie was - and then went on to describe the slow methodical tracking down of the war criminal and his eventual deportation to France where he now awaits trial. The successful search and location of a key document, the original telex in the Archives of the International Court of Justice, used in the Nuremberg trials, presented the final irrefutable evidence in the case against Barbie.

Robert Menkes, a doctoral student in Jewish history, Brandeis University, reminded the gathering that once survivors are no longer with us, Holocaust deniers will become more bold and more vocal. History, he asserted, provides the ammunition to bring the truth to light through the rational and methodical work of documentation by accredited historians. Yet revisionists like Faurisson and Keegstra and Zundel should be taken seriously as it is necessary to familiarize oneself with their theories to be able to adequately refute them. One must bear witness as one can, but always with dignity and commitment.

Sol Littman (Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Canada) spoke on "Searching out Canada's War Criminals; The Rauca Case" and reminded the audience that Canada was a major haven for war criminals, and has been since 1945. Despite this, only one extradition took place, that of Helmut Rauca. Rauca 'disappeared' in 1945 and 'reappeared' again in 1982, living in obscurity in a 35% Jewish suburb of Toronto. Currently, war criminals and collaborators of Yugoslavian, Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian, Slovakian and Hungarian background are experiencing a sense of disquietude, for there will be additional cases of actions against criminals and criminal collaborators. There will, certainly, be a movement to derail the momentum in war crimes prosecutions, but we all must make an effort to keep this particular struggle alive.

In between the workshops there was opportunity to view films such as The Revolt of Job, Breaking the Silence, Raoul Wallenburg - Buried Alive, Charlie Grant's War, and Genocide. I managed to view the film Breaking the Silence which focused on Holocaust survivors and their relationship with their families, primarily their children. The anguish of the parents is writ large on the psyche of the children.

Parents are exceedingly reluctant to speak to their children of their death camp experiences. Much resentment and bitterness erupted between the generations because of this lack of communication ... the parents desperately wanting to shield their children from knowledge of their unspeakable experiences ... the children badly wanting to know of their parents' experiences, wanting to help in their own way to diminish their parents' grief. Through a gradual breaking down of the barriers of silence, understanding and a keener appreciation of the needs of one another is finally expressed.

In actual fact, however, there never really was time to do or see everything. The forums and films and other activities were congruent one upon the other. One had of necessity to scrutinize the program and try to arrive at an intelligent deliberation.

Finally, the words of Professor Irwin Cotler (Professor of Law, McGill University, Montreal) placed the whole matter in a cogent perspective. There are things in Jewish history too terrible to be believed - but they were not too terrible to have happened. Elie Wiesel told us that "Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims". There are no words sufficient to describe the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet Canada was the world forum of denial of the existence of the Holocaust [i.e, the Zundel and Keegstra trials - Ed.]. The anti-human description of Jews, and the wide acceptance of those calumnies paved the way for the Holocaust.

(President Ronald) Reagan equated the suffering of the victims with the suffering of the oppressors prior to his Bitburg wreath-laying; an obscene and immoral observation. The uniqueness of the Holocaust has an especial resonance; the Holocaust could never have occurred without the silent acquiescence of the world. The crime of indifference led to the success of the Holocaust. But the work of a handful of righteous people gave mankind back its dignity. In a world which is not safe for Jews, there is no safety for the existence of democracy. It is the survivors who have redeemed humanity by their very existence. We have learned not to despair, for that would be a denial of Jewish future.

Dr. Victor Goldbloom (President, Canadian and International Council of Christians and Jews, Toronto) should perhaps have the last word in this report. He said that, to commemorate is to mourn - and to teach. We face the challenge of communicating with a new generation. It would represent a compounded tragedy after the Holocaust if nothing had changed. We must be the conscience of the world and work to make the world "more human". We must strive to work with people of good will with respect and harmony and good faith. We must work together forthrightly and with humility, patience and an open mind. To this we must all dedicate ourselves.