Hamilton’s Jewish community gathers to honour Holocaust victims
We are marking the 30th anniversary of the March of the Living. An extraordinary event that sees Jewish students and adults from all over the world gather in Poland to see, hear and feel what can only be described as the living hell that was the site of the largest mass murder in history.
We call it The Shoah. The biblical word for destruction. It is an unspeakable horror. A chapter in the story of humanity that can easily be taken as an exception to the rule. The rules of who we are as people.
The March takes place at Auschwitz. It is an act of redemption. In 1945, as World War Two neared its end, Jews and others were marched out of the camps, starving, freezing. The walking dead. Indeed, many died along the way, some summarily executed as they struggled to keep up. Today, although the majority of students who take the march are Jewish they are joined by others. Polish Friends of Israel, Japan’s Bridges for Peace and others.
As Hamiltonians gather at City Hall on April 12 in a ceremony they will honour those that were slaughtered, an exhibit will be unveiled. It will be open to the public, schools will come. Why? Because, as Claude Helvetius the French philosopher once said. “Truth is the torch that gleams though the fog without dispelling it.”
Together the Hamilton Jewish Federation and the City of Hamilton are saying that we should never forget. Never forget that our history as human beings is not one of perpetual progress. Without remaining vigilant, without stopping to hear these stories we cannot hope to make a better future for ourselves and our children, now, and as our Indigenous brothers and sisters teach us, seven generations on.
We are privileged that some who were not butchered or enslaved. Some who were not among the six million Jews and millions of others, Poles, Slavs, the disabled, homosexuals and perceived enemies of the dictatorship who were taken, are still alive to tell their stories.
The lessons of the Holocaust are not secrets to be held by the few, they are not the property of those that suffered. They are teachings about, as Hannah Arendt called it, the banality of evil. That out of what would appear to be an ordered society murder and inhumanity can fester, then flourish as we stand by.
In Rwanda, just years after the March of the Living began, in a manner of days a million people were slaughtered, mostly by machete, one by one.
We can do something about this. We as Hamiltonians. We can pass the torch. But why you might ask. Can’t we just move on. Samuel Johnson the English writer and poet put it well, “The torch of truth shows much of what we cannot, and all that we would not see.”
To claim our full humanity, the challenge is to keep our eyes open when others would turn away. To reach out with our hearts to all that suffer today under the murderous reign of petty dictators and hateful lies. This city has always been home to those that stand for social justice and human rights. We have opened our arms to many.
The first reform synagogue in Canada was founded here and still thrives, Anshe Shalom. Hamilton had Canada’s first Jewish Community Centre. In the last two years we have welcomed Syrian refugees fleeing war and destruction.
While we can still hear from survivors, and through the recordings of their stories, let us learn together from those who would pass us the torch. The survivors that can bless us with their wisdom, fortitude and love.