Remembering The Unforgettable

"There is so much we can learn from what happened here. And you can take those lessons and apply it to the present."
"I was doing something as a Canadian, this is something that affects us all. It wasn't because of anything of my own faith, but this is something that I felt was important to us all as Canadians."
"It's so important that we pass on this history to future generations."
"A woman leaving the tennis court looked at me and my wife and said, 'Are they members? Why can't they play in the day? -- they don't have jobs."
Tim Uppal, Minister of State for Multiculturalism, Ottawa, Canada

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld    Minister of State for Multiculturalism Tim Uppal was in Poland on Tuesday to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. He headed the Canadian delegation.

 

Among the thousands of people wearing fur hats and yarmulkes in Poland last Tuesday, in commemoration the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, one visitor surely stood out from the crowd. As head of the official Canadian delegation for the ceremony of remembrance, a man wearing a blue turban signifying his Sikh heritage, the Member of Parliament from Edmonton has scant few Jews in his constituency back home. And here he was, in Krakow, Poland, before embarking on that sombre, sober visit to Auschwitz.

He is quite aware of the history of the death camps and Auschwitz in particular, where the Third Reich carefully planned and carried out the mass extermination of an estimated 1.1-million men, women and children during World War Two. For this man, the dread occurrence of the Holocaust is a bleak reminder of how racial stereotyping and bigotry lead to hatred, and eventually violence carried out by the majority against a vulnerable minority.

It is a given that the memory of the Holocaust will not soon fade from Jewish memory. It is an imperative that the memory of that dread occurrence not pass from the historical memory of non-Jews, for the entire world community must have an recognition and understanding that what occurred to world Judaism was a blot on the conscience of the globe. That a totalitarian government could carry out such an unbelievable campaign of mass extermination and succeed to the extent that six million people of a single ethnic origin were obliterated from the face of the Earth is impossible to even imagine.

Mr. Uppal's wife, Kiran Bhinder, once undertook a commitment as a non-Jew to become one of many people to embark upon a trip named March of the Living, where teenagers are taken through Holocaust sites throughout Europe, and then on to Israel, in an effort to ensure that the memory of the genocide not be forgotten. Eventually Kiran Bhinder shared her impressions of that experience with her husband. She spoke of an evolving relationship with survivors of the death camps, and he became engaged as she had, in the call to remember.

Holocaust survivors arrive for a ceremony to mark the 69th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Nazi death camp's in Oswiecim, Poland, on Monday, Jan. 27, 2014. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

In 2010, he was given the opportunity to bring forward a private member's bill in the House of Commons. Of the many and varied suggestions, one took his attention immediately; the fact that Canada had never erected a national Holocaust monument. Previous attempts to have similar legislation passed had taken place, but stalled in the effort. Mr. Uppal's bill succeeded, however. And this, possibly resulted from the fact that the current Government of Canada, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is singularly sympathetic to the memory of the Holocaust.

Mr. Uppal has himself embarked on a lecture circuit as a Parliamentarian, member of the Cabinet, and man of conscience, addressing crowds from the Jewish community, including the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee, as well as addressing groups of teenagers preparing to depart on March of the Living trips, just like the one his own wife had been part of, when she was a teen. It is his aspiration to one day expose his own very young children, aged six, four and two to the history of people so viciously and singularly victimized by Nazi racist policies.

Members of the Israeli parliament (Knesset) pass main gate of the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, on Holocaust Day, January 27, 2014. (JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

In Canada, a vaunted multicultural society, where equality of all its citizens is protected under the law, there remain incidents of racial disequilibrium, incidents that appear insignificant on the surface, but at the very least represent slights from a segment of the population toward another segment. Even on a tennis court Mr. Uppal and his wife were, as obviously visually 'different' in their skin tone and garb, treated in an insulting manner.

Minor slights hide behind the viral nastiness of major prejudices.

Holocaust Archaeology: Yahad-In Unum

"The purpose of my organization Yahad-In Unum (Hebrew "together"; Latin "One") is to look for the victims. We are not looking for the killers; we are looking for the victims."
"In many genocides, we only remember the names of the killers. The Jews have given sanctity to the names of the victims so that we remember them."
"We are now 23 full-time in my organization. I'm not alone now. All are younger than me."
"My goal is to give back to the families so they can pray and say Kaddish on the mass graves. The second goal is to give back the Jewish victims to the Jewish people. The third one is to fight the Holocaust deniers."
"We are investigating the crimes of Hitler against the Jews ... [and] we have interviewed 3,800 neighbours who were present at the killings. They could look through the window. They were not collaborators. They were teenagers who ... saw everything."
"They are now old and they want to speak before they die. For the majority of them, it is the first time they speak. We have recorded all of them and it is accessible through our website."
"I want to say to the young people, perhaps one day you will be a doctor, perhaps you will be a soldier or a journalist, and you will be in a country of genocide. You must take a photo and send it to CNN or somewhere, and that's the way you will protect humanity ... There is a Russian proverb in all these countries that says the work is over when the last victim is buried. If we don't do this, in future we will have no evidence of this crime."

 Father Patrick Desbois, head of Yahad-in Unum   http://www.yahadinunum.org

Father Patrick Desbois is a French Catholic priest. He has elected himself to bear witness to a mass atrocity, to remember and to find evidence, and to record and to memorialize. It is beyond human capacity to really understand what happened, why it happened, how it happened, that during World War II Nazi Germany strayed from the focus of world domination for the Third Reich, to perfect the world they envisioned by removing from it all traces of the presence of European Jewry as a start to eliminating Jews world-wide.

What is beyond human understanding is the capacity for some humans to demonstrate their capacity for mass slaughter, and to consider it a benefit to the world. To select an ancient people that persevered through countless millennia, to retain its faith and its cohesion as an ethnic group, with its distinct culture, heritage and religion, against all adversities. And adversity was never in short supply throughout the history of the Jewish people. And nor, since the advent of the Holocaust and beyond is it now in short supply. Father Desbois has dedicated his efforts to the memory of those who perished.

The founding of Yahad-In Unum took place in 2004, a joint project between leaders of France's Catholic and Jewish communities as a measure to bring Jews and Catholics together for a common purpose in shared humanity. The major initiative of the organization is meant to investigate and identify sites of mass graves of Jews murdered by German Fascist mobile killing units, called the Einsatzgruppen. And to look for their remains in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Moldova and Romania.

The pathological viral mental derangement more commonly spoken of as anti-Semitism had long found fertile ground and a comfortable home in Europe. Hitler and his minions felt that Germans were too civilized, would be too squeamish about having death camps positioned on German soil, so most of those concentration, labour and death camps were located elsewhere throughout Europe, where pogroms were not uncommon, and where it was less likely that any protests would arise, should anyone find the institutionalized obliteration of a people morally offensive.

Through dedicated on-the-ground research, Yahad-In-Unum has discovered evidence of mass graves in "village after village", representing the work of the Einsatzgruppen, separating the local Jewish population from their non-Jewish counterparts and eliminating them, men, women and children, in well organized operations, and in calculated cold blood. Yahad-In-Unum has signed a contract with the American Jewish Committee to ensure that revealed sites would be respected, "the graves will be protected forever and not be desecrated".

Father Desbois wears many hats, besides his anti-racist historical-humanitarian one; he is director of the Episcopal Committee for Relations with Judaism, itself connected with the French Conference of Bishops. His grandfather was a French soldier, deported to the Nazi prison camp Rawa-Ruska during the Second World War. Father Desbois himself studied anti-Semitism at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, as well as undertaking the study of Jewish religion and culture with a leader of the Jewish community in France.

Father Desbois embarked on a trip to Ukraine in 2002 to see for himself where his grandfather had been imprisoned, and while there he planned to pay his respects at a memorial he was certain he would find there. When he arrived he discovered to his amazement that there was no evidence, no kind of commemoration to the one-and-a-quarter-million Jews whose lives had been destroyed in Ukraine and Belarus. And he resolved to rectify that blatant oversight in respect and honour for the victims of morbidly destructive racism.

After founding Yaham-In Unum, he set about collecting information revolving around the mass killings of Jews and Roma in east Europe between 1941 and 1944. With the help of translators, Father Desbois along with others conducts interviews with witnesses. And with the use of metal detectors, he and his team have succeeded in unearthing German cartridges and bullets from pits where the bodies of the slaughtered were discarded, along with jewellery belonging to the victims, and other artifacts.

He has written a book outlining the immensity of the project: The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews.

Tuesday March the 4th, Father Desbois has been awarded the Crif award "in recognition of his commitment to the truth"