Survivors speak up against hatred
MONTREAL — Although it has been 74 years since the Holocaust ended, the duty to remember the Holocaust remains as poignant as ever, said Montreal Holocaust Museum president Dorothy Zalcman Howard.
“As survivors and descendants of survivors, our hearts break with every indignity imposed by one group on another,” Zalcman Howard told roughly 1,000 people who gathered at the Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem synagogue on Wednesday night to mark the Jewish Holocaust memorial day, also known as Yom HaShoah.
This year's ceremony came four days after a 19-year-old man opened fire in a San Diego synagogue killing one woman and injuring three others.
Zalcman Howard said it isn't enough merely to remember the Holocaust, or to say ‘Never Again', but rather to stand up in the face of hatred perpetrated in any form against any people.
“Each despicable act attack on a synagogue, a church, a mosque or a temple brings a tear,” she said. “They are us, and we are them and we remember.”
The annual ceremony was attended by members of the Jewish community, politicians, and the consul general of Israel, and was marked by six memorial candles, each lit by survivors and their descendants. Each of the survivors told their recollections, though many were through foggy memories because most were children when the Holocaust occurred.
“I have a few photos from that time, one of them from my first birthday with a few young friends, and I learned later that they were all murdered,” survivor Judith Nemes Black said in a pre-recorded statement that was played at the ceremony. “We stayed in a very small apartment (in Budapest), with 10 other people. I remember being very hungry.”
She later hid for the duration of the war, as her mother obtained false papers, so the family took on different identities.
Charlotte Wexler, who lived in Zagreb after the war broke out, lost her father in a concentration camp, and she was later captured, deported to Italy, and later separated from the rest of her family and taken to concentration camps.
“In 1945, the Russians were approaching, and the Nazis were retreating. The prisoners were sent on a death march. Somehow, I managed to survive. I was liberated on May 5, 1945, one day before my 16th birthday, weighing 65 pounds.”
Rachel Abish, who also lived in Budapest during the war, recalled that it was very difficult for her to find food.
“My sister and I were very hungry. We searched for food in a garbage heap. There, we found a dead baby dressed in pink. We just moved the body, hoping to find something edible under her,” she said. “I feel I was robbed of my childhood. I had no schooling; I only knew hunger and suffering. The war lasted only nine months in Budapest, but it was still traumatic enough that it changed my life.”
She said her baby sister died of starvation while in her mother's arms after weeks of food depravation.
“She never saw sunshine,” Abish said.