AUSCHWITZ: THE CANADIAN CONNECTION.

“Have you heard about Auschwitz’s ‘Kanada’?” is a question asked in a Discover Krakow tourist brochure. Krakow is the closest large city to Auschwitz and promotes visits to the site.

At the death camp, the Kanada barracks was where the Nazis stored the precious items they plundered from the prisoners. On Monday, as survivors and politicians gathered to mark the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation, Canada was unexpectedly the object of several references from one survivor, Batsheva Dagan. She recalled that as a prisoner of Auschwitz in 1944 she worked “in Kanada,” where she was tasked with sorting the belongings of the camp victims.

The now-95-year-old Dagan — who also survived two death marches — was one of four people invited to address the dignitaries, survivors and family members from around the world who attended the 75th anniversary’s commemorative ceremony.

What came to be known as Kanada I was a complex of six units where, between March and December 1942, prisoners were assigned to go through the luggage of the nearly 200,000 (predominantly Polish) Jews interned over that period.

The inmates named the barracks Kanada, as they believed the faraway country to be one of the world’s most prosperous places.

For Dagan, the good thing about working in the Kanada complex was that you could eat any food you found in the luggage. However, because the building was next to the crematorium, these inmates in Kanada also saw Nazi prisoner selections, the separation of family members, and watched as the old and the young entered the crematorium, heard their cries of despair and never saw them come out.

By December 1943, the expected arrival of 430,000 Hungarian Jews prompted the construction of a vast extension to the complex, soon dubbed Kanada II, necessitating an increase to the Kanada workforce.

Four days before the Jan. 27, 1945, liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army, the Nazis destroyed the barracks in order to hide evidence of their crimes. But they were not entirely thorough. The Soviets uncovered items around the site, representing perhaps the most perverse of tributes to Canada.

At the anniversary commemoration, World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder spoke of the world’s indifference then, reminding attendees that at the 1938 Evian conference 32 countries — including Canada — discussed the situation of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and, with the exception of only the Dominican Republic, declined to come to their aid.

Around that time, Prime Minister Mackenzie King wrote in his diary that “We must … seek to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood.”

In King’s view, nothing was to be gained “by creating an internal problem in an effort to meet an international one.”

This implied that only after the war was over could anyone who worked in Auschwitz’s Kanada ever visit the country they imagined to be filled with abundance. Now living in Israel, the ever-courageous Batsheva Dagan did indeed get to see that Canada, in her role as a teacher and lecturer on the Holocaust.