The Vital Imperative of Remembrance

"It is where it all began for the Jewish community, and it has such historical significance."

"It's going to be eco-friendly. It's going to have a memorial garden. It's going to be a beautiful space. It's going to be a hub of research and education. It's going to have a beautiful auditorium with 150 places." "It's going to have a gallery that can host temporary exhibits."

Richard Schnurback, president, Montreal Holocaust Museum 

"It will transform the landscape of the area. It will help to revitalize downtown and so we feel we're really contributing to our city in a significant way as we all hope eventually to come out of this pandemic."

"We expect it to be an internationally renowned, world-class institution and an architectural statement."

"It will be a gathering place for other communities who have been targeted by genocide, for the local population, for students, for tourists. We are going to be a warm, welcoming, accessible space that draws people in and that transforms them and encourages them to stand up today, to act, to remember."

Dorothy Zalcman Howard, co-president, Montreal Holocaust Museum renewal project

"We've outgrown our physical facilities and we have to regularly refuse school groups."

"This museum will really be Canada's Holocaust Museum. It will tell the story of the Holocaust and also talk about the Montreal survivors, people who came to Canada, to Quebec, and helped to build our city."

Julia Reitman, campaign cabinet president, Montreal Holocaust Museum

Eva Kuper, standing in front of the Montreal Holocaust Museum, tells how her life was saved just as she and her mother were being loaded onto cattle cars for transport away from the Warsaw Ghetto

 

"[The] relocation to downtown Montreal should allow increased accessibility and that is all the more necessary, as we have seen in recent days."

"Unfortunately, many people are not sufficiently aware of the Holocaust and of the consequences and the lingering after-affects of that tragedy."

"Let's hope that having a museum that allows us to better understand this reality will lead people who have trivialized the use of the yellow star and trivialized certain Nazi symbols in the past few months to reflect." 

Benoit Charette, Quebec minister of Culture

A collection of yellow stars, worn by Jews during the Holocaust, is one of the many exhibits by the Montreal Holocaust Museum. (Simon Nakonechny/CBC)

 

A museum, another museum dedicated to the premise that to forget is to airbrush history out of existence. Can there be too many museums and edifices whose sole purpose is to remind humanity of its obligations to ensure that the organized mass elimination of a people -- whose humanity had been denigrated amidst accusations of sinister conspiracies to rule the world, to establish themselves as an ethnic-religious-ideological world power, subjugating all other peoples to their command -- is never repeated?

A criminal, deliberately purposeful campaign undertaken by Nazi Germany to dehumanize Europe's Jews, to justify the Third Reich's carefully staged enterprise of delegitimization of what they labelled sub-humans belonging to a specific ethnic-religious group in preparation to launch a program of mass slaughter, one that would not raise objections among populations inured to compassion for the men, women and children slated for death, because they were exposed to a lethal hatred and believed that Jewish dominion over the globe must be stopped at all costs.

 

A German in a military uniform shoots at a Jewish woman after a mass execution in Mizocz, Ukraine. In October of 1942, the 1,700 people in the Mizocz ghetto fought with Ukrainian auxiliaries and German policemen who had intended to liquidate the population. About half the residents were able to flee or hide during the confusion before the uprising was finally put down. The captured survivors were taken to a ravine and shot. Photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial.

 

The cost was six million lives. The European Jew-cleansing pogrom cost Jewish children their future, Jewish women and men their hopes, as they were gathered up, murdered en masse, buried in mass graves, used as slave labour, died of starvation and disease. And then the Final Solution seeking more efficient, quicker methods thought of Zyclone B to gas assembled Jews whose humanity had been stripped away, just as their worldly possessions, their hair, their gold rings and gold teeth were gathered to help the World War II effort of the Axis forces.

 

Jewish deportees in the Drancy transit camp near Paris, France, in 1942, on their last stop before the German concentration camps. Some 13,152 Jews (including 4,115 children) were rounded up by French police forces, taken from their homes to the "Vel d'Hiv", or winter cycling stadium in southwestern Paris, in July of 1942. They were later taken to a rail terminal at Drancy, northeast of the French capital, and then deported to the east. Only a handful ever returned.

 

This was their destiny; a giant sacrifice for their noble cause; ridding the world of Jews for the greater purpose of elevating Aryan qualities of physique, emphasizing the health virtues of abstaining from alcohol, smoking, poor nutrition, and global command of lesser nations. The golden mean of 'doing unto others as you would have them do unto you', underpinning Jewish traditions only emphasized their suffering as they cried out to the heavens for having abandoned them. Remembering the atrocities, the humiliations, the suffering is integral to modern Jewish life. 

The promise made Never to Forget was forged in blood and bone in memory of those whose lives were taken. So, no, such places of memorial and teaching must carry the torch of remembrance. There are far too many in today's world who doubt the very existence of a machinery vast enough and dedicated enough to have murdered six million Jews. And many among them feel the effort was halted before it could properly complete its goal. The spectre of once-hushed Jew-hatred has resurfaced with a vengeance.

 

The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of 1944. The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in 1980 by Lili Jacob.

 

The Montreal Holocaust Museum's current location in a building shared with other Jewish community organizations has outlived its ability to convey the full measure of what fascist Germany accomplished. A mere 400 of its 14,000 artifacts are displayed, reflecting a lack of room to amply and effectively expose visitors to a fuller understanding of the Holocaust. With a purpose-built edifice for which funding is being raised, for construction to commence in 2023 in the expectation of the museum opening two years later, a generous endowment by the province's Culture Ministry of $20 million, another $15 million from the Azrieli Foundation, as well as public, corporate and private sources see the project on goal for $80 million.

The museum is to move from Cote Ste-Catherine Road to what once was the beating heart of the Montreal Jewish community, St.-Laurent Blvd., The Main. Where a parking lot now sits, a building to house the Holocaust Museum is to rise, with 71 percent of its funding already raised. Destination Montreal represented the third most important city per capita after Israel and New York, for Holocaust survivors leaving the charnel house of Europe for a new beginning. Of the roughly 40,000 survivors immigrating to Canada after the Second World War, 9,000 arrived in Montreal.

Among the museum's collection, there are 858 recorded survivor testimonies. Research indicates that people who learn about the Holocaust are likelier to be aware of and to care about other communities, to oppose persecution and to tend to develop anti-racist values. "For so many victims, there are no places that mark their existence. In a way, we are their voices. We are the repository for those people who were killed. We tell some of their stories and we encourage future generations to care about what happened and to translate those stories so they find expression in their own times", explained Dorothy Salcman Howard.

An urn containing ashes from the Auschwitz concentration camps sits surrounded by the names of other Nazi extermination camps at the Montreal Holocaust Museum. (Simon Nakonechny/CBC)