Trying to Preventing the Holocaust Again
Remembering the Holocaust tin assist forbid genocide
Young people are get-go to forget the horrific event and non understand its overpowering significance
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." These famous words, attributed to philosopher George Santayana, makes recent news that 1 in five Canadian youths practise non know about the Holocaust especially disturbing.
The survey, sponsored by the Azrieli Foundation and released in fourth dimension for this year's International Holocaust Day – the solar day mark the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazi expiry camps – revealed that 20 per cent of Canadian youths either take not heard of the Holocaust or are not certain what the word Holocaust means.
A New York Times report on a similar survey in the Usa at almost the same time showed 31 per cent of Americans, and 41 per cent of millennials (aged xviii-34), believe but 2 million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust; the actual number is three times that. The Times reported that 41 per cent of Americans, and 66 per cent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was. And slightly more half of Americans wrongly think Hitler came to power through force, the survey suggested.
Some 40,000 survivors of the Holocaust settled in Canada, many in Montreal. Most have since died; those who remain are elderly. Today'due south youngsters are the terminal generation who may accept the chance to come across Holocaust survivors. If, as many believe, Santayana was right, the need for Holocaust education has never been more urgent.
For many years, Concordia has been at the forefront of Holocaust studies in Canada. The university has offered courses related to the Holocaust and other genocides since the 1980s, but likewise now brings together academics and members of the community to work to preserve the memory of the Holocaust – and pass on its lessons.
Survey doesn't surprise
Hither's one case. In the spring of 2019, Ira Robinson, director of Concordia'due south Found for Canadian Jewish Studies and professor of Judaic Studies in the Department of Religions and Cultures, visited a grade of Grade five and 6 students at Gerald McShane Elementary School in Montreal Due north. His field of study was the Holocaust and he drew on examples to which his young audience could relate. Robinson compared what happened during the Holocaust to bullying. "Imagine," he told the form, "if someone in your schoolhouse was existence bullied, and there was no 1 to end them, and everyone thought it was OK."
Lookout: Ira Robinson, director of Concordia's Plant for Canadian Jewish Studies and professor of Judaic Studies in the Department of Religions and Cultures, visits a course of grade 5 and 6 students at Gerald McShane Simple School in Montreal Due north.
It was Krystina Gruppuso's idea to invite Robinson to the schoolhouse. A pupil in Concordia's Section of Education, Gruppuso was completing her educatee-teacher stint at Gerald McShane. "I warned the students that the Holocaust was a very heavy topic, but that nosotros demand to talk about it," Gruppuso says.
Robinson is not surprised past the results of the Azrieli Foundation study. "The principal and secondary school curricula in Canada and elsewhere don't say very much about the 2nd World War and don't give enough time for much contextualisation of what was going on. Likewise, the events are fading into the past," he says.
Robinson grew up in Massachusetts. "I kind of knew people who were Holocaust survivors," he recalls. "In the '50s and '60s, there were many people who didn't quite know how to deal with either the fact of the Holocaust or the survivors," he adds, pointing out that Raul Hilberg, a pre-eminent scholar of the Holocaust, struggled to find a publisher for his seminal work, The Destruction of the European Jews.
Robinson was deeply affected when, every bit a teen, he read the late Elie Wiesel's memoir Nighttime. Later in life, Robinson was also influenced by his parentsin- law, both Holocaust survivors. His female parent-in-police force had been imprisoned at Auschwitz; his father-in-law was interned in a Hungarian forced-labour campsite.
Robinson believes a variety of methods is needed to raise immature people's awareness about the Holocaust. "No ane arroyo volition be the magic bullet," he says. For Robinson, these approaches include publication, the evolution of school curricula, and teaching teachers. "You can publish the all-time curriculum in the world, only if the teachers aren't oriented toward it, it will be worse than useless," he says.
Robinson'due south most contempo book, A History of Antisemitism in Canada (Wilfrid Laurier University Press) includes a chapter on Holocaust deprival, another phenomenon which highlights the need for Holocaust education.
Concordia's Found for Canadian Jewish Studies has published a series of autobiographies of Canadian Holocaust survivors — available on the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Homo Rights Studies (MIGS) website — and hosts public lectures. In April 2019, Sharon Delmendo, a professor at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, Northward.Y., visited Concordia to speak about a piffling-known chapter of the Holocaust: the rescue of 1,300 European Jews by Manuel Quezon, who was president of the Philippines.
In a class Robinson teaches about modern Judaism, he includes lectures about the Holocaust and its outcome. His students – about 20 per cent of whom Robinson estimates are Muslim – represent a cross-section of Concordia. "And Concordia is a cross-section of the whole world," he says. "Some of my students take heard all kinds of wild things about Jews, Jewish history and the Holocaust. Simply I run across a curiosity. They want to know and sympathize."
MIGS is a Concordia-based call up tank with members from both the university and the community. Its best-known not-bookish member is retired general Roméo Dallaire, who led the UN peacekeeping mission during the Rwandan genocide 25 years ago.
MIGS was founded in 1986 past Concordia professors Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, both of whom had family who perished during the Holocaust. Together, the pair introduced a course in 1986 chosen "History and Sociology of Genocide." In 1990, at the request of students, Chalk developed another grade chosen "The History of the Holocaust." Jonassohn died in 2011, but Chalk continues to teach both courses. Since 1986, he has taught more than than two,000 students nigh the Holocaust.
The largest genocide
MIGS conducts research about weather that lead to genocide and crimes against humanity and advocates to prevent futurity mass atrocities. The institute also trains government and United nations officials well-nigh the prevention of mass atrocities and organizes conferences and workshops, such as a recent panel discussion about anti-Semitism online.
Though MIGS works to depict attention to and fight every form of genocide, the memory of the Holocaust guides the institute.
"The largest genocide we've seen is the Holocaust. It's an instance of how humanity tin can turn to accented atrocity, destroy millions of lives and destabilize the planet," says MIGS executive manager Kyle Matthews.
Like other members of the recollect tank, Matthews is alarmed by the rise of anti-Semitism, pointing not simply to recent events in Europe, but besides to the 2018 assault on a Pittsburgh synagogue. Anti-Semitism is coming both from the far left and far right," Matthews warns.
Matthews believes Canadian children need to learn non only about the Holocaust and genocide, simply besides about the consequences of discrimination. Together with members of the Foundation for Genocide Education, MIGS representatives take met with Quebec's Minister of Education to lobby for the inclusion in the curriculum of more information about the Holocaust and genocide prevention.
Sometimes, Matthews says, he needs a break from following globe news. "But I'thou committed to doing whatsoever I can to work toward the betterment of humanity. Hope is all we have. If nosotros don't hold on to hope, we lose our volition to modify the arc of history."
For Csaba Nikolenyi, political science professor and director of Concordia's Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies, the greatest sign of hope in a post-Holocaust world is the beingness of the State of State of israel. The Azrieli Constitute of Israel Studies was created by the Azrieli Foundation, which has offices in Montreal and Toronto. The foundation publishes a serial of memoirs of Holocaust survivors, first-mitt testimony that has become an important chief resource for Holocaust researchers. The foundation also endowed the Azrieli drove at Concordia's Webster Library, one of the largest collections in Northward America of material related to the Holocaust.
Housed in the Samuel Bronfman Edifice, the Azrieli Institute too operates a reading room that includes the 81 memoirs published to appointment in the Azrieli serial. The plant as well organizes special events such as the 2014 presentation, co-sponsored past the Azrieli Foundation and MIGS, by Francesco Lotoro, an Italian professor and concert pianist who reconstructed music written by prisoners in the concentration camps. "The fact that music was created in the camps is testimony to the resilience of the human spirit in the darkest times," says Nikolenyi.
Not a refugee camp
Growing upwards in communist Republic of hungary, Nikolenyi knew little about the Holocaust. "It was not part of the official curriculum, though information technology is now," he explains. Nikolenyi believes Holocaust education must include the report of State of israel. He points to the mutual misconception that Israel began with the Holocaust. "If you say that to an Israeli, it raises a sensitive topic. Israel didn't begin as a kind of refugee camp. The creation of Israel is rooted in the achievements of the Zionist movement which officially started in 1897, and even that builds on the ancient Jewish connection with the country of Israel," Nikolenyi says.
This summer, Nikolenyi volition over again have 13 Concordia students to Israel for a month-long seminar. The grouping will visit Yad Vashem, the state's Holocaust memorial, as well as a kibbutz established past Holocaust survivors in the Negev, a region where the salty soil fabricated farming difficult.
The kibbutznim persevered, and the kibbutz became a heart for the development of drip irrigation technology, at present used all over the world. "For the students to witness the success of State of israel is to encounter the ultimate triumph against Hitler. He did not wipe out the Jews," Nikolenyi says.
Though the numbers are shocking and vital to know – 6 million Jews, gypsies and LGBTQ people perished during the Holocaust, along with more than 5 one thousand thousand Soviets – it is always the individual stories that resonate most. This, combined with the fact Holocaust survivors are dying off, makes the work of Concordia'south Middle for Oral History and Digital Storytelling so valuable.
Initiated by history professor Steven High in 2006, COHDS'southward work includes the Montreal Life Stories Project, which focused on the stories of individuals displaced by mass violence and genocide. The project brought together various groups, including one called the Holocaust and Other Persecutions Against Jews Working Group. Composed of both academics and community members, this group collected stories from Holocaust survivors as well as their children.
"As nosotros know, there's not just 1 story about what happened during the Holocaust. People who were children, women, people from different countries had very different experiences during the Holocaust," says Cynthia Hammond, who teaches art history and is co-director of COHDS.
COHDS has shared its resources with organizations including the Montreal Holocaust Museum, the Museum of Jewish Montreal and the Canadian Museum of Clearing at Pier 21. The digital interviews collected through the Montreal Life Stories Project can be consulted at COHDS, located on the tenth floor of the J. W. McConnell Building. "The nearly consulted of these materials accept to do with the Holocaust. Since 2017, the center has seen an increase in requests for access to our archived interviews well-nigh the Holocaust. I'm glad researchers are using the collection. That's what it's there for," Hammond says.
Several members of the Holocaust working group have gone on to do related research and artistic projects. A 2018 tour chosen Survivors on the Main: A Historical Walk introduced participants to a Montreal neighbourhood where many child refugees from the Holocaust settled – and to two child survivors of the Holocaust. Hammond, who took function in the walk, institute information technology deeply moving.
Meeting their hereafter wives
"These two very elderly men were still full of life and believed in the importance of sharing their experience," she says. "They besides wanted us to know about their life as Montrealers – not merely as survivors. For example, they spoke near meeting their time to come wives at dances organized by members of the local community who had welcomed them."
Hammond believes while the report of history aims to increment our understanding of the by, oral history has a high goal. "Oral history is ofttimes undertaken with the goal of a better future – a more but, egalitarian and humane guild. If y'all make up one's mind to make your story public, it's and then that someone will be moved to come across the world differently and take action," she says.
It has been nearly 75 years since the Holocaust ended. The work that has been done and continues to be done at Concordia regarding the Holocaust is some other hopeful sign. Every lesson connected to the Holocaust shares a moral imperative – that its history and stories must be passed down to future generations
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Source: https://www.concordia.ca/cunews/offices/vpaer/aar/2019/06/18/remembering-the-holocaust-can-help-prevent-genocide.html
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