On the evening of January 24, my wife and I attended a Holocaust memorial concert at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa: Silent Tears, The Last Yiddish Tango.
The performance was based on poems written by elderly Holocaust survivors. The project had originated as a therapeutic exercise led by social worker Paula David with residents of a long-term care home in Toronto. It also included extracts from the memoir of Molly Applebaum, who, with an older cousin, spent almost four years buried in a wooden box on a Polish farm.
A team of musicians set the words to music, based on a style of Argentine tango that was popular in Eastern Europe in the pre-World War II period.
The music is elegant, yearning, and beautiful. The lyrics are unsparingly graphic, honest and heartbreaking.
Song titles include: Some of Us Must Survive, The Numbers on My Arm, Bitter Winter, Don’t Let Us Starve, and A Victim of Mengele.
Personification of the particular horror of the Holocaust
The last title refers to the “angel of death”, Nazi doctor and SS officer Josef Mengele, who oversaw the so-called “selections” of the thousands of daily new arrivals at the Auschwitz murder factory.
Mengele would indicate either this way to the gas chambers for children, the elderly, the disabled, pregnant women and many others, or that way to the workers’ barracks for the minority deemed fit for slave labour.
The song deals with Mengele’s notorious experiments on Jewish and Roma prisoners, and tells in excruciating detail about being administered poison and repeatedly raped, yet somehow surviving.
Mengele’s schizoid personality personifies the particular horror of the Holocaust, a crime carried out by a people who considered themselves to be cultivated and civilized.
Mengele could, at one moment, adopt the pose of a scholarly and kindly avuncular figure, giving sweets to children, especially twins, on whom he planned to conduct experiments.
The next moment he could become the most vicious of sadists, revelling in his work of dispatching thousands to an agonizing death.
After the war, Mengele escaped to South America, where the governments of more than one country protected him. He was never apprehended and died of natural causes, as a result of a stroke while swimming, in 1979.
Mengele achieved prosperity in exile, running a number of successful businesses. He lived a comfortable and respectable life, all the while claiming that he had merely been a good soldier who followed orders.
Amazingly, Mengele even dared return to Europe, in 1956. He obtained an Argentinian residence permit using his real name, and, with that, a West German passport on which he travelled.
He took a ski holiday in Switzerland with his son and returned to his German hometown of Günzburg for a week. He returned to Argentina, where he continued to live and prosper, under his own name.
It was only in 1959, almost a decade and a half after the end of World War II, that the West German government, pressured by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, issued an arrest warrant for Mengele.
From World War II to the Cold War
The lack of interest in bringing a torturer, murderer and war criminal to trial is not, in retrospect, surprising.
Those of us who grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust can well remember how the society of the time enveloped the entire subject in a kind of cone of silence.
One big reason for that deliberate turning away from those so-recently-experienced horrors was that just as World War II ended a new war started – the Cold War.
The new world-wide conflict pushed a reckoning for the crimes of the Nazis to the back burner.
There was a war crimes tribunal in the city of Nuremberg, which tried and sentenced a handful of senior Nazi leaders, some to death, but that was pretty much the end of it.
Starting in the late 1940s, we in the West had a new enemy, the Soviet Union.
And we needed the help of many who had fought and served under the swastika to keep this new enemy at bay – especially after the Soviets succeeded in establishing a buffer zone of friendly Communist governments on their western flank, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
The prevailing Western view was that it would be impolitic to dwell too much on the crimes of the Hitler regime when we faced this new and fearsome adversary.
For their part, the Soviets were equally uninterested in talking about the Holocaust and the deliberate enslavement and slaughter of millions.
The Soviet Union’s leaders did not want the suffering of the Jews, the Roma, and others who were the designated targets of the Holocaust to overshadow the Soviet peoples’ own massive, collective sacrifice.
The Soviet Union lost about 20 million people in the war, more than the entire population of Canada at the time, and about half the total fatalities of the war.
In the West, as the Cold War dawned, popular culture found a new demon in the evil Communist.
Hollywood came up with a whole genre, still studied by cinema historians: the Red Scare film.
Those B-movies – which had little artistic merit even if they sometimes starred big name actors such as Jimmy Stewart – often featured unsavory and unattractive villains, with foreign, often Jewish-sounding names.
In the real world, there were spectacular espionage trials, most notably that of a pair of so-called atomic spies, an American Jewish couple by the name of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
People who had survived the Holocaust got the message. You are yesterday’s news, if you were ever news. Get on with life and be grateful you have found a safe haven.
A cone of silence over Nazi crimes
The poems and memories that become songs in Silent Tears reflect that painful compulsion to keep silent, to bury the hurt and the trauma of the past.
Many of the songs refer to feeling almost embarrassed by the fact of having been victims of Nazi terror.
One song tells of how a survivor used to cover the tattooed numbers on her arm. The Nazis tattooed their millions of captives, and addressed them only by their numbers, never their names.
I went to school in the immediate post-war period with many children of Holocaust victims, in Montreal, a city which gave haven to a relatively large number of survivors.
Montreal, with its large garment and fur industries, needed the skills a good many Holocaust survivors had.
But the Holocaust was never a subject of study or even conversation in our schools.
There were no special presentations on January 27, or any other day, at the National Arts Centre, or anywhere else.
The prime ministers of that epoch, the 1950s and 1960s, did not make eloquent pronouncements on the enduring lessons of the Holocaust, as Justin Trudeau did this year, and other recent prime ministers did before him. Trudeau’s 2023 message was broadcast at the January 24 concert.
It took decades before anyone even coined the word Holocaust and longer before the word would enter the general discourse.
The United Nations designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance because that was the day, in 1945, when the Red Army liberated the largest of the more than 1,000 Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau, near the town of Oswiecim in Poland.
The member states of the U.N. did not do so on the tenth anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation, in 1955, nor on the twentieth, nor on its thirtieth.
They waited until the sixtieth anniversary, in 2005.
Three years ago, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation, Jack Jedwab and the Montreal-based institute he heads, the Association for Canadian Studies, organized a memorial conference in Ottawa.
Jedwab made a point of including not only Jewish survivors and those who had studied the Jewish experience, but also a representative of the Roma community in Canada, and Jean-Paul Samputu, a Rwandan musician who survived the genocide in his country.
An extremist coalition in Israel does not negate truth of Holocaust
Recognizing that others have suffered mass killings does not take away from the uniqueness of what happened to my own people, the Jews.
Nor does honouring and memorializing the unique centuries-long persecution of the Jews, which reached its apogee in the Holocaust, mean one approves of every act and policy of the current government of Israel.
The current far-right coalition in Israel has chosen to shut down any hope for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and seeks to legislatively hobble the country’s Supreme Court, in large measure in order to remove judicial obstacles to illegal occupations on Palestinian territory.
But the anti-democratic and at times violent policies of the most extremist government Israel has ever had do not take away from the fact that for many the belated recognition of the Holocaust has had scant effect.
Despite speeches by world leaders, commemoration events, and U.N resolutions, we are witnessing a frightening renewal of old-fashioned, right-wing antisemitism, in the U.S., in Canada, and in Europe.
Ironically, the Israeli far right is all too happy to make common cause with conservative- nationalist governments such as that of Viktor Orban in Hungary.
Last July, Orban shocked many when he said Hungarians were not and should not become “a mixed race”.
Much earlier, Orban’s government chose to revive the memory of Hungary’s leader from 1920 to 1944, Admiral Miklos Horthy.
Horthy had been an ally of Hitler. On one occasion he admitted to being embarrassed that so many prominent Hungarians were Jews.
“I have been an antisemite throughout my life,” Horthy wrote to another Hungarian politician, “I have never had contact with Jews. I have considered it intolerable that here in Hungary everything, every factory, bank, large fortune, business, theatre, press, commerce, etc. should be in Jewish hands, and that the Jew should be the image reflected of Hungary, especially abroad.”
In his most recent statement about race mixing, current Hungarian leader Viktor Orban appeared to have in mind refugees from Africa and Asia, and, perhaps, Hungary’s large Roma population of more than 800,000.
But that would be cold comfort to the 100,000 Jews of Hungary.
A significant number of those Jews had left Hungary for the West after the war, then returned, full of hope, following the end of the Communist regime.
Now, Viktor Orban and his government scare them. And Hungarian Jews must scratch their heads in utter bafflement when they see the Israeli government cozying up to Orban and treating his regime as something of a role model.
Here in Canada, some unruly elements of the far right have gleefully adopted antisemitic tropes and rhetoric.
Nili Kaplan-Myrth, an Ottawa doctor and school board trustee who actively promotes measures such as masking to counteract COVID, regularly receives hateful and ugly anti-Jewish messages on social media.
There has been a disturbing number of antisemitic incidents in Canada over the past few years – synagogues defaced, school children harassed, cemeteries vandalized.
No matter how much the world collectively, if belatedly, recognizes the utter depravity of the Holocaust and the race hatred that led to it, such hatred refuses to die.
And so, it is possible to, at one and the same time, support the rights of Palestinians and fight the kind of hatred Dr. Kaplan-Myrth has faced with stoic courage.
The far-right dominated government of Israel finds it perversely expedient to make common cause with a European government which honours the memory of a proud and unrepentant antisemite.
That does not diminish the searing truth of what Molly Appelbaum has to say – and what many millions of others never got a chance to say.
Such is the meaning of the words: “Never forget”.
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