"He Overcame Trauma By Becoming a Witness"

Elie Wiesel:  Israel advocate 1928 – 2016

"I wanted my language to be a monument to my people -- especially those who died."

"I wrote it [And the World Remained Silent ... Night] -- for the other survivors, who found it difficult to speak and I wanted to tell them, Really ... you must speak."

"I have tried to fight those who would forget."

"Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices."

"We must always take sides Neutrality helps the oppressed, never the victim." 

Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor 

 

"My father clearly articulated that the antisemite will always hate, even if they mask that hate as anti-Zionism -- as though it were something separable from antisemitism."

"Our object as Jews is to keep embracing our Jewish faith and heritage and our connection to our over seven million Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel."

Elisha Wiesel, businessman, activist, philanthropist

Jewish survivors in Buchenwald concentration camp, after the liberation of the camp in 1945  AFP/Getty 

 

Holocaust Remembrance Day is held each year on January 27. This year, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, premieres at the Montreal Holocaust Museum. Elisha Wiesel, 53, will speak of his father and his mission to ensure the world 'never forgets'. Elisha Wiesel is chair of the board of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Along with his mother, Marion Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, the Foundation was launched after the death in 2016 of father-and-husband, to continue the work Elie Wiesel dedicated his life to.

 

Directed and written by Oren Rudavsky the 90-minute film addresses the personal story and legacy of a man known as one of the world's most respected Holocaust survivors, known as well as a prolific author, humanitarian, passionate educator and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

 

Eliezer Wiesel was a boy of 15 when he was deported from Sighet, Romania with his parents and three sisters in May of 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau where his mother and younger sister Tzipora were killed on their arrival at the death-and slave labour camp. Elie and his father were selected to go to the slave labour component of the notorious death camp. 

 

By early 1945, as Germany was losing the war and emptying the camps by forcing starving, skeletal inmates on death marches, Elie and his father were sent on a march to the Buchenwald concentration camp where his father later died. In April of that year the camp was liberated by American soldiers. The Jewish orphans in the camp, Elie among them, were transported to France, where his sister Hilda recognized him in a French newspaper photograph.

 

The siblings reunited, along with their sister Beatrice who moved eventually to Montreal. Working as a journalist in France, Wiesel studied at the Sorbonne. "He overcame trauma by becoming a witness", noted a family friend. His memoir of a young boy's reaction to Auschwitz, originally published in Yiddish in 1945 was a 846-page recollection of pain, loss and suffering. Abridged and translated to French, it was published as La Nuit in 1958, and in 1960 as Night, in English.    

 

Night sold over six million copies in 30 languages, and he went on to write many more books. Moving to New York in 1956, Wiesel became a writer, teacher and academic, teaching at City College of New York, then at Boston University in 1976, as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities. "Your suffering is not what defines you, but it can inform you. It shapes you and then it is your job to make it the best tool you can", a former student added of her own mental journey under his tutelage.

 

Having suffered the most inhumane circumstances and losses in his young life, Elie Wiesel matured a determined human rights upholder, refusing to stand silent in the face of immoral human rights abuses, speaking up and bringing attention to some of the modern world's most shameful human rights atrocities. His trauma led him to undertake action of moral outrage against wrongs committed against the vulnerable. Human rights violations that took place in Rwanda, Cambodia, the Sudan and the former Yugoslavia engaged his moral outrage and his propensity to speak loudly, publicly, determined to move others to do the same.  

"[My father] never failed to stand up for Israel, asserting that only Israelis can best decide how to reach their goals of living in peace and security in an extremely hostile neighbourhood."

"And lastly, he insisted that we never relinquish our desire to have a positive impact on the world as a whole."

"He strongly resisted isolationism as a principle."

Elisha Wiesel  

 

The Deadly Flood of Hamas Terror

 Burnt Vehicles Compound  YNet News

In southern Israel, in close proximity to the site of the Nova music festival where an  unspeakable massacre took place on October 7, a monument has been arranged  known as the Burnt Vehicles Compound. Over 800 vehicles were hauled to the field that now holds them all. These were the hundreds of vehicle blocking roads into areas of southern Israel that had been destroyed by the terrorist Hamas invaders when their drivers and passengers were confronted by terrorists who shot them to death, leaving the vehicles as a barrier. One that prevented other victims from escaping, and served as well to hinder the entry of rescuers whose arrival was geared to saving lives and rescuing survivors.

"It's actually designed to turn the human body into ash. We actually pulled out of here more than 300 bags, big bags, of ash."

"Human ash. Our brothers and sisters."

"We find ourselves, 78 years after the Holocaust, collecting ash of Jews once again."

Captain Adam Ittah, spokesman, Southern District, IDF Home Front Command

(Photo: Yaron Sharon)

The cars were meticulously searched and examined, human remains collected to enable the victims of the October 7 carnage to be buried in accord with Jewish funeral tradition. The vehicles, all 800 of them, have been arranged into a wall that forms a semicircle around a temporary memorial. Captain Ittah explained that a chemical compound was brought along by the terrorists in their dreadful invasion, enabling them to quickly set the vehicles on fire, and everything within them turned into ash.

Not far from the memorial is Kfar Aza, a hard-hit community that sits a mere eight hundred metres from the Gaza border, where less than 15 seconds is all the leeway given to access bomb shelter when air raid sirens sound, even yet, with rockets sent into Israel from Gaza. The community of Kfar Aza is gated. On that fateful day, terrorists hid in foliage close to the Kibbutz gate to ambush vehicles that pulled in. Drivers and passengers gunned down, then terrorists entered to flood the kibbutz, shooting wildly at anything that moved.

 

Members of ZAKA identification, extraction and rescue team search through the destruction in a Gaza Envelope community following the Oct. 7 attacks. (photo from ZAKA)

It is where babies were murdered while in their beds, where parents were tortured and murdered, their children forced to witness the atrocities before they too were slaughtered. It's where those members of the kibbutz who rushed to come to the aid of others who were wounded and crying out for help, were picked off by sharpshooters. And where families of kibbutz members sheltering in their safe rooms, were burned to death when the terrorists set fire to their homes.

These are not only narrations of witnesses who survived the massacres, but actual live video footage that the terrorist horde were proud to record as great achievements to be posted on social media as victory trophies, along with private security footage of the kibbutz. In Kfar Aza today, the kibbutz and its burnt-out homes sit frozen in time as a record of that horrible day in southern Israel; a deliberate effort to preserve the evidence of Hamas atrocities.

The body of a Hamas fighter lies on the ground outside a burned home in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz near the border with Gaza.  Photograph by Peter van Agtmael / Magnum 

The Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau -- Never Again

"[The Russian military has committed war crimes in Bucha and Mariupol comparable to Nazi crimes; inspired by a] similar sick megalomania [free people must not remain indifferent]."

"Being silent means giving voice to the perpetrators."

"Remaining indifferent is tantamount to condoning murder."

Piotr Cywinski, state museum director, Auschwitz

 

"Standing here today at this place of remembrance, Birkenau [Auschwitz-Birkenau], I follow with  horror the news from the east that the Russian army which liberated us here, is waging a war there in Ukraine."\

"Why? Why?"

Survivor Zdzislawa Wlodarezyk

Zvika Karavany, 72, a Yemeni-born Israeli, wipes his tears in front of the Death Wall in the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz during ceremonies marking the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the camp in Oswiecim, Poland, Friday, Jan. 27, 2023. (AP Photo/Michal Dyjuk)

"So I was hiding out in the heap of dead bodies because in the last week when the crematoria didn’t function at all, the bodies were just building up higher and higher."

"So there I was at nighttime, in the daytime I was roaming around in the camp, and this is where I actually survived, January 27, I was one of the very first, Birkenau was one of the very first camps being liberated."

"This was my, my survival chance."

Bart Stern, Voices From Auschwitz,  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Liberation of Auschwitz, USHMM

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a horror, a dreadful example of a state under the control of a tyrannical aggressor hungry for power and prestige, willing to sacrifice Ukrainian and Russian lives to achieve his goal of the re-domination of Ukraine. The Russian military, under orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is committing war crimes. The indiscriminate bombing of civilian enclaves, hospitals, apartment blocks, theatres, shopping malls -- in the process killing civilian populations and destroying civil infrastructure, depriving millions of heat, light and water in the dead of winter, annexing territory and obliterating historical landmarks -- criminal acts of war.

Yet to compare the Holocaust, the systematic state annihilation through organized mass butchery of an ethnic-religious population is unparalled in the annals of modern history. What is happening to Ukraine is tragic, immoral and disgusting beyond words, but it is not a genocide, even while the nation's culture, tradition and heritage sites are threatened. Murder on a mass scale, the scheduled obliteration of a people, sparing none, remains unique to the German Nazi plans of the Final Solution.

Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff, left, visits the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp KL Auschwitz during ceremonies marking the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the camp in Oswiecim, Poland, Friday, Jan. 27, 2023. (AP Photo/Michal Dyjuk)

The emotionally passionate recall of the genocide has no equal in Ukraine. Ukraine is a state, it is a vast country, it has a military which nations surrounding it and others from the Western world of democracy have trained and armed, in the process supporting an effective fighting force determined to save their nation, their heritage and their population from Russian vandals. Jews had no nation, they were a diaspora, a nation in ancient historical exile yearning to return to their ancestral lands. No military supported their right to live, no mass outrage rang through the corridors of power among the Allied nations.

And now that the Jewish nation has been restored to its legendary homeland by an act of universal remorse it remains continually challenged by the vicious intransigence of neighbours who violently dissented against the presence of a Jewish state and in the lifetime that followed Israel's return, deadly assaults have never ceased, and the international community's post-war sympathy has evaporated, left a cynical, critical, jaundiced eye unmoved by the ongoing plight of a tiny nation struggling to contain the hatred and violence still threatening its survival.

People place candles at the former crematorium as they attend a ceremony in the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz during ceremonies marking the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the camp in Brzezinka, Poland, Friday, Jan. 27, 2023. (AP Photo/MiBchal Dyjuk)

Remembering and recalling the dread fate in numbers too steep for the human mind to cope with -- the death of Jews, Roma, Homosexuals, Mentally and Physically handicapped, political dissenters, Jehovah's Witnesses in staggering numbers, as fascist Germany focused on disinheriting the lives of those considered to be enemies of the Third Reich and unsuitable to live among Aryans -- still reels the mind. The vast complex of annihilation  took the lives of 1.1 million people, young and old, mostly Jews, during World War II.

The complex stands in ruins, a mute and grisly symbol of the most degraded stage of humanity's fall from grace, reeking of evil in the horrors that were perpetrated there. At the commemoration of the78th anniversary of its liberation, when the world could no longer avert its eyes to the mass tragedy, and was faced with the reality of living corpses in striped garb shuffling to meet their liberators, it represents the supreme irony that the very army that liberated the camps was that of the Soviet Union, once part of the Axis, then with the Allies when Germany turned on Russia, marking the turn of its fortunes.

The very country whose troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau was persona non grata at the memorial to the liberation it had achieved. Unlike previous years when a Russian delegation was present and honoured to pay its respects to the innumerable victims of Nazi ideology, the successor to the Soviet Union and its current president whose actions mirror in many respects that of the Nazis, received no invitation to attend. Russia's reputation is now as black in most people's estimation as their recall of Nazi Germany.

What is happening in Ukraine struck Bogdan Bartnikowski, a 91-year-old Pole, as he saw news coverage of Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russian troops invading their country, among them a small girl in a crowd of refugees, her mother holding her hand and the child holding her teddy bear, "It was literally a blow to the head for me because I suddenly saw, after almost 80 years, what I had seen in a freight car when I was being transported (at age 12) to Auschwitz. A little girl was sitting next to me, hugging a doll to her chest". 

People walk next to the ''Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Sets You Free) gate at the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023. Survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau are gathering to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp in the final months of World War II, amid horror that yet another war has shattered the peace in Europe. The camp was liberated by Soviet troops on Jan. 27, 1945. (AP Photo/Michal Dyjuk)

The Martyr's Revenge

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi delivers a speech during a ceremony in the capital Tehran, on January 3, 2022, commemorating the second anniversary of the US drone strike in Iraq that killed Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. (Atta Kenare/AFP)

"If Trump and [former Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo are not tried in a fair court for the criminal act of assassinating General Soleimani, Muslims will take our martyr's revenge."

"The aggressor, murderer and main culprit -- the then-president of the United States -- must be tried and judged under the [Islamic] law of retribution, and God's ruling must be carried out against him."

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi

 

 Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani AP

The death of General Qassem Soleimani by missile strike in 2020 relieved the world of yet another psychopathic monster entitled to slaughter those whom the Islamic Republic of Iran viewed as an enemy of its theocratic rule and its plans to subject the Middle East, its Arab Muslim Sunni majority countries to the inevitable conquest that the Shiite Persian state was carefully crafting in its annexation of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen as independent countries becoming vassals of Iran, under the stewardship of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

 

As head of the al-Quds branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Soleimani was the influential mastermind of all the activities of  his segment of the corps assigned to perform the training and supply of weaponry for terrorist groups loyal to Iran, including Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, as well as tribal Shiite militias under Iran's thumb. Their commander's death was a tragedy for their cohesive purpose in spreading violence and terror in the region and abroad, but a relief for those countries and governments his command targeted.

At the second-year anniversary of Soleimani's assassination by order of then-U.S.President Donald Trump, the Iranian Republic and its allies in other countries have held memorial events in honour of the late commander of the Quds Force representing the overseas arm of the elite Revolutionary Guards. In the immediate aftermath of Soleimani's death, Iran ordered its IRGC command to avenge his death, and rockets were dispatched into Iraq to hit two U.S. bases there. Anticipating a U.S. response, Iran was on high alert.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards shot down a Ukraine International Airlines plane near Tehran, evidently mistaking it for a possible U.S. rocket attack. All aboard the airliner, 175 people, died, on Flight 752. Many of those who died were Iranian Canadians, many more Iranian students heading to Canadian universities on study visas. At first denying it shot down the plane, when evidence indicated otherwise, Iran finally admitted the airliner was shot down through a "disastrous mistake" by forces on high alert during confrontation with the U.S.

 

Iranians lift national flags during a ceremony in the capital Tehran, on January 3, 2022, commemorating the second anniversary of the killing in Iraq of top Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani (portrait) and Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in a US raid. (Atta Kenare/AFP)

 

Now, while negotiating in Geneva with the United States over the resumption of the 2015 Nuclear Agreement, Iran threatens repercussions against the U.S. unless it brings the former president to trial as an assassin. In that case, a clear-eyed assessment of a man in military authority of a country guilty of terrorism on its own account who authorized the obliteration of a state assassin. Under the new U.S. administration, Iran has become bolder and more arrogant, prepared to risk another encounter with the U.S. which it doesn't believe will materialize.

But it does believe that in issuing a threat of this magnitude that it has given fair warning that it has the will, the intention and the capacity to launch strikes against the U.S., likely  by one of its proxies to avenge the death of its elite commander, depriving the country of a merciless, brilliant tactician whose thirst for provoking fear in the nation's adversaries, and in ordering death and destruction to those same adversaries could be slaked only by incapacitating him permanently.

 

As a warm up to vengeance implied, Monday saw an opening salvo: two armed drones targeted a Baghdad airport site used by the US-led coalition against the Islamic State group. "Two fixed-wing suicide drones, or improvised cruise missiles, attempted to attack Baghdad Airport this morning at approximately 4:30 a.m." A counter-rocket, artillery and mortar, or C-RAM, system “engaged them and they were shot down without incident", stated a coalition official. 

Israel, of course, is held by Iran to be equally guilty in the death of Soleimani, against whom the Ayatollahs have issued threats of annihilation as the 'little Satan' to the U.S.'s 'big Satan'. Iran has been dabbling in cyber warfare, just as China and Russia have been. It frequently issues threats to Israel, to wipe it from the face of the Middle East. Monday came another threat proposing to destroy its Dimona nuclear reactor. The Jerusalem Post website was hacked with a contrived photograph of the reactor being hit by a stylized missile, with a very special message of destruction.

An image showing a missile being fired from the ring of Qassem Soleimani toward Israel's nuclear reactor in Dimona is used to hack the Jerusalem Post website on January 3, 2022, the 2nd anniversary of Soleimani's killing (Screenshot/ The Jerusalem Post)

Poland ... Begs To Differ....

Poland ... Begs To Differ

US Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen Pence, right, stand with Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and his wife Agata Kornhauser-Duda, left, under the gate during their visit at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, February 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

"[Poland is waiting in] expectation that the Israeli side will say in a clear way what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meant when he said the words that were quoted by the Israeli media."
"[Explanations from Israel are] unclear, [leaving Warsaw awaiting clarification]."
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Szymon Szykowski vel Sek

"The Prime Minister's comments concerning Poland were misquoted by the Jerusalem Post, which quickly issued a correction clarifying that an error had been made in the editing of the article."
"Netanyahu spoke of Poles and not the Polish people or the country of Poland. This was misquoted and misrepresented in press reports and was subsequently corrected by the journalist who issued the initial misstatement."
Office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

"I am a son of Holocaust survivors and I was even born and grew up in a community made up of Holocaust survivor. The memory of the Holocaust is something we cannot compromise about; it is clear and we won’t forget or forgive."
"In diplomacy you try not to offend, but nobody will change the historical truth to do something like that. Poles collaborated with the Nazis, definitely. As Yitzhak Shamir [former Israeli Prime Minister] said, 'they [Poles] suckle anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk'."
"No one will tell us how to express ourselves, or how to remember our fallen."
Israel Katz, recently appointed acting Israeli Foreign Minister 

Holocaust survivors hold banners and wave an Israeli flag during a protest in front of the Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv, on February 8, 2018. (Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP/Getty Images/File)

Nazi Germany set up its death camps in every European country it occupied. Poland's concentration camps and death camps held and destroyed half of all lost Jewish lives; three million people. In all occupied countries nationals of those countries as citizens, along with their national police and military became voluntarily complicit with the Nazi killing machine, from France to Ukraine, Lithuania to Poland, sometimes with great helpful enthusiasm going beyond what their S.S. over-masters anticipated in usefulness in rounding up and dispatching Europe's Jews.

Some, but not all of those European countries have admitted their complicity while some, like Poland, stuck with the historical record it doesn't much care for, goes out of its way to try to exonerate itself and its citizens from claims it and many of its citizens were unusually helpful to the extermination work of the Final Solution. Last year, when Poland officially passed a law making it unlawful, a criminal offence, to speak of 'Polish death camps', rather than 'German death camps', an outcry from Israel and Holocaust survivors forced Poland to withdraw.

The killing camps located in Polish territory were often the last stop where Jews were collected from holding camps in other countries; the crematoria in Polish death camps were kept extremely busy. The European rail system transported Jews from across Europe -- from Greece and Holland, France and Italy -- into Poland where they were gassed, their bodies incinerated, the particulate matter that ensued up the smoke stacks and scattered around the countryside, enriching the soil for agricultural purposes.



Israel often goes out of its way to diplomatically placate the injured feelings of countries like Poland and Ukraine when the issue of death camps and the willingness of their populations to deplete their countries of Jews led them to volunteer their help, in service to the Final Solution. This time around Poland once again making an effort to distance itself from the horrors of the Holocaust points out that it too lost millions of its people killed by the Nazis. As did Russia, when they turned against one another, Russia opting out of the Axis pact.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his wife and retinue were on a visit to Poland to take part in the commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Vice-President Pence and his wife were there for the solemn ceremony, as were Polish officials. The Warsaw Ghetto saw Polish Jews gathered within a geographic square in the city, off-limits to any but Jews, crowded together, living in squalor awaiting their final disposition. And when the transports began, and the rumours of death camps began circulating, the knowledge of their future in death camps spurred young Jewish men and women to rise against their oppressors.

Using the underground sewer system young Jews had for years smuggled themselves out of the ghetto to bring back food, medicine, and whatever arms they could find. Of the tens of thousands of Jews still left in the ghetto out of their total of 300,000 who had been steadily deported to death camps, an estimated 500 representing two defensive groups armed themselves and plotted the uprising. They built bunkers where the resistance could hide, they contacted the Polish underground which supplied them with some guns. Then they mounted their resistance and stopped the deportations temporarily.

Instytut Pamieci Narodowej 

Entrance to the gas chamber in Auschwitz IThe entrance to the gas chamber in Auschwitz I, where Zyklon B was tested on Soviet prisoners of war. The building in the background is a hospital for SS members. Auschwitz, Poland, date uncertain. 

Most of the resisters were killed by the Germans who had been forced out of the Ghetto. Individuals held on, refusing to surrender, until they were all killed, the rest of the Jews placed on transports to death camps, and the Warsaw Ghetto was demolished and razed, the uprising over; 1943. But they had managed to keep fighting for a month against the mighty German S.S. troops, a rag-tag band of desperate Jews using old, dilapidated weaponry and sacrificing themselves to restore hope and dignity to others.

Photograph from SS General Juergen Stroop's report showing the Warsaw ghetto after the German suppression of the ghetto uprising. Stroop, commander of German forces that suppressed the Warsaw ghetto uprising, compiled an album of photographs and other materials. This album later came to known as "The Stroop Report." The right of this image from the album shows a column of Jews being transported out of the ghetto for deportation. Warsaw, Poland, April–May, 1943.

• National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD

"To symbolize the German victory, Stroop ordered the destruction of the Great Synagogue on Tlomacki Street on May 16, 1943. The ghetto itself was in ruins. Stroop reported that he had captured 56,065 Jews and destroyed 631 bunkers. He estimated that his units killed up to 7,000 Jews during the uprising. The German authorities deported approximately another 7,000 Warsaw Jews to the Treblinka killing center, where almost all were killed in the gas chambers upon arrival."
Holocaust Encyclopedia

While in Poland for the memorial ceremony, Netanyahu commented that "Poles co-operated with the Nazis", meaning that some Poles were invested in killing Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. While the Prime Minister specifically did not indict all of the Poland, the Jerusalem Post article that has so enraged Poland, quoted him as saying "the Poles", a sweeping condemnation of all of Poland and its people. Mr Netanyahu, of course, is quite aware that over 6,800 Poles have been recognized for their help to Jews at risk of their own lives, recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial.

Poland's underground resistance fought the German occupation, and some Jews fought with them. The truth and reality are never clear-cut, however. The indisputable fact is that there has always existed anti-Semitism of a virulent, brutal and violent nature in Poland. Pogroms occurred as regular as clock-work over hundreds of years in Poland against Jews whose homes were established in Polish towns and villages. And that some -- a large enough number to be in the majority -- Poles approved of Jews being rounded up and shipped out, considered unwanted, foreign elements.

Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki, left, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at a conference on Peace and Security in the Middle East in Warsaw, Poland, February 14, 2019. (AP/Michael Sohn)

Poland was sufficiently affronted by these declarations from Israelis in their views of Polish action during the Holocaust years, to threaten to pull out of a scheduled meeting of Central European leaders, the  Visegrad Group representing an alliance of nationalistic countries within the European Union supporting Israel; Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia more strenuously supportive of Israel than countries of Western Europe. That meeting was to have taken place today, Monday, but was cancelled when Poland withdrew.

"Accusing all Poles of anti-Semitism offends the Righteous; it also offends all those who today want to see in them the true representation of Polish society. And it also offends us, Polish Jews, who are a part of that society."
"One does not clarify lies by another set of lies. It is not honest [and] it is not moral to fight lies with another set of lies. What do you want? [Katz] functionally said that all Poles are anti-Semites. So how do you expect the Poles to react? There are irresponsible people on both sides and when an irresponsible statement is made it empowers other irresponsible people to react. This in no way justifies anti-Semitism in Poland, just as it does not justify distortion of the truth by Israeli leaders."
Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Union of Jewish Communities in Poland

Implausible Denials of Festering Anti-Semitism

"I was in Tunisia at a Palestinian conference. I laid a wreath to all those that had died in the air attack that took place on Tunis, on the headquarters of the Palestinian organizations there. And I was accompanied by very many other people who were at a conference searching for peace."
"A wreath [in memory of Atef Bseiso, planner of the PLO Black September assassins of eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics] was indeed laid by some of those who were at the conference for those who were killed in Paris in 1992. I was present when it was laid."
"I don't think I was involved in it."
"I do acknowledge there is a real problem that Labour is working to overcome."
Anthony Corbyn, leader, Labour Party, Britain

Jeremy Corbyn was pictured at a wreath-laying ceremony in 2014  
Palestinian embassy in Tunis/Facebook

"Being present is the same as being involved."
"When I attend a memorial, my presence alone, whether I lay a wreath or not, demonstrates my association and support."
"There can also never be a 'fitting memorial' for terrorists. Where is the apology?"
Luciana Berger, Jewish Labour MP

"The laying of a wreath by Jeremy Corbyn on the graves of the terrorists who carried out the Munich massacre and the comparison he made between Israel and Nazis deserves unequivocal condemnation from everyone – from the left, the right and across the entire political spectrum."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

In responding to Israel's Prime Minister's condemnation of the Labour leader's blatant anti-Semitism and his links with Palestinian terrorist groups whom he has referred to as 'friends', Corbyn lashed back with a condemnation of his own: "What deserves unequivocal condemnation is the killing of over 160 Palestinian protesters in Gaza by Israeli forces since March, including dozens of children", a typical interpretation by Israel-bashers and Jew-haters, taking Israel's efforts at defence against a Hamas-driven martyrdom program referred to as a 'protest' to accuse Israel, as usual, of killing innocent Palestinian Arabs.

A year ago, it became known to the public that Corbyn had attended a ceremony to honour the leaders of the Black September terrorist group responsible for the abduction, torture, mutilation and murder of eleven Israeli athletes and coaches participating in the 1972 Olympics held that year in Munich, Germany. Corbyn has steadfastly denied any conceivable involvement in such an event, perish the very thought. And then, incriminating photographs of the event came to light, clearly illustrating not only his presence but his active participation in memorial wreath-laying in memory of the murderers.

Jeremy Corbyn making the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Symbol ‘Rab’aa’.

Yet, in the political interests of presenting himself as a champion of peace, dedicated to justice for all, completely neutral and objective in his outlook, favouring none and presenting himself as a moderate, balanced leader of the British Labour Party, he is now in no position to deny the obvious. It was, indeed, obvious for quite a long time that Corbyn's toleration for anti-Semitism and his own state of comfort with it, has enabled other members of the leading British political party to release their own symptoms of the pathology with ease, knowing their leader would never seek to still their views.

He still equivocates, and cavils at the wording, hoping to elude the severity of the accusations against him, by commenting he didn't "think" he was "involved", photographs notwithstanding in their damning reality. There is Corbyn, with a large wreath in his hands standing beside the grave of Munich mastermind Aalah Khalaf and another photo standing beside that grave and and that of three others, all considered the massacre's ringleaders.

Many members of the Israeli Munich Olympic team had directly suffered from Nazi atrocities. They visited Dachau concentration camp as a symbol of their everlasting mourning.

Labour went on overdrive in support of their leader, denying everything; simply a matter of distorted perception, a tempest in a teapot soon to be forgotten, totally irrelevant and misunderstood. The public has been "misled" to believe that Corbyn would lend himself to such an alliance with murderous terrorists since in fact he "did not honour those responsible for the Munich killings". He had simply attended a "peace conference" that took place in Tunisia.

Where he was indeed present, according to his aides, was a ceremony commemorating the deaths of 47 people when an Israeli air force strike hit a PLO base in 1985 in Tunisia. Not all in British politics have remained on the sidelines over these revelations. British Home Secretary Sajid Javid spoke of the need for Corbyn to resign for having led a proud old British party to become a fount of anti-Semitic sentiment. The "leader of any other major political party" pointed out Javid, would have been sacked for responsibility of any similar disgrace.

A line of thought with respect to honour in politics that might have been appropriate back in 2010 when a panel he hosted compared Israelis to Nazis, all the while denying a scintilla of anti-Semitism resides in his heart of hearts.

National Holocaust Monument, Ottawa, Canada -- "Never To Forget"

"I am gratified to be a witness today to this momentous occasion when Canada unveils a striking and evocative monument to the Holocaust."
"It is a fitting tribute to the victims, the survivors, and to the Canadians who took part in defeating the Nazis."
Eva Kuper, 76, Holocaust survivor  

"It has been an exercise in patience, which is something we've [Jews] learned over the course of the centuries [to endure]."
"It has always hurt me as a Canadian when I would go somewhere and be asked why we [Canada] don't have a Holocaust memorial in the capital [in comparison to other western democracies]. I no longer have to apologize and say, 'It's a lamentable thing'."
Rabbi Rueven Bulka

"Having this place to go to is so important. I think about all of the survivors who still now carry the burden of remembering and telling the story."
"Now, finally, there's this monument that will talk for them when they're not here [no longer alive]."
Mina Cohn, director, Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship, Carleton University 

A man stops to take a photograph of the Canadian National Holocaust Monument following its official opening ceremony on Wednesday Sept. 27, 2017. Adrian Wyld, The Canadian Press

Canada, lauding itself under the current Liberal-led government, as a bulwark against racism, and boasting under current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that "Canada is back" as a bastion of human rights and a champion of equality and multiculturalism, has a deeper, darker history of discrimination and offences against human rights in the not-so-distant past. Its rejection of a ship full of Sikhs on the Komagata Maru in 1914 represents one of its shameful episodes of failing to respond to the need of desperate people seeking haven.

The incarceration of Japanese 'enemy aliens' who were in fact loyal Canadian citizens, when during World War II they were deprived of their material possessions, all their properties, businesses, homes, and placed in holding camps for the duration of the war lest they somehow give aid and comfort to wartime Imperial Japan was yet another event of shame. As was the head tax imposed on Chinese seeking a stable home in Canada, where it was fine to use them as virtual slave labourers building vast and hazardous cross-country rail lines, but not to honour them as citizens.

Perhaps the country's most infamous and wretched event of dismissing the desperate attempts of targeted people to escape death, was the country's rejection of the pleas of an estimated 900 Jewish men, women and children attempting to escape Nazi Germany's reach as they tried to find haven in Cuba (which had initially agreed to land them, then refused), and then sailed to the United States where they were similarly rejected. Canada too saw fit to have these Jews return to Europe to face their deadly fate. Some were accepted by the U.K., Belgium, France and Holland; 500 were returned to Germany.

That the Holocaust memorial was built at all resulted from the activism of an 18-year-old public administration student at the University of Ottawa, Laura Grosman, back in 2007, whose outrage when she found that Canada's lack of recognition of the suffering of Jews during the holocaust led her to lobby federal politicians that legislation be enacted to have such a memorial built. Tim Uppal, a Conservative Member of Parliament, a Sikh from Edmonton, launched a private member's bill and it became law in March 2011.

A campaign to raise the funds, fifty percent from public subscription and fifty percent from government coffers was undertaken. A selection jury in 2014 awarded the monument's design to a team including architect Daniel Libeskind, landscape architect Claude Cormier, photographer Edward Burtynsky, and University of Toronto historian Doris Bergen, whose winning design held the title: Landscape of Loss, Memory and Survival, which features six triangular concrete structures creating the points of a star.

Eventually, post-war, an estimated 40,000 European Jews, survivors of the Holocaust, were accepted as refugees to Canada. Their numbers are now fast-dwindling, and it is their children and their grandchildren who carry the memory of what the survivors experienced. Eva Kuper was only two years old when she and her mother were ordered onto a train  from the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, where a cattle car was to take them to Treblinka. Her mother was put to death within an hour of her arrival at the extermination camp.

Two-year-old Eva Kuper was plucked from the cattle car parked on the rails before it left, returned to her father in the Warsaw Ghetto where eventually both escaped through the sewer system, and Eva survived to tell of what she had witnessed and to live a haunted life of dreadful memories. Monochromatic photographs of Holocaust sites where six million Jews were systematically exterminated by Nazi Germany along with Roma, homosexuals and the physically and mentally handicapped, form part of the memorial.

Jews, world-wide, pledged, post-Holocaust "Never to Forget".

National Holocaust Monument, Ottawa, Canada