[Text: Historical Reflections: Surviving Genocide]
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[Text: Dr. Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Assistant Professor of Modern Germany at Simon Fraser University]
The war ended in 1945, but for many Jewish Holocaust survivors their suffering did not end with the war. Holocaust survivors emerged to face total destruction.
[Text: Reckoning with Destruction]
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They had lost families, loved ones, communities. Indeed, their way of life had been entirely destroyed in certain parts of Europe. And the landscape itself of Central Europe reflected this having been bombed literally to pieces by the allies. Given such an environment, plus the basic difficulties in proving one's identity in the aftermath of a genocide that it essentially destroyed all forms of identification, those Jewish survivors who couldn't or wouldn't return home were often placed in displaced persons camps.
[Text: Displaced Persons Camps]
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These camps were erected by the allied armies, largely in central Europe, in Germany, to house displaced persons, people who had been dislocated by the war. Jewish Holocaust survivors were one of the largest groups of displaced persons, but they shared camp space with others, including demobilizing soldiers, POWs, forced laborers, and so on. Frequently these physical sites, these camps, were actually built on sites like concentration camps so Jews emerged often from one kind of camp only to end up having to live in another. All of this was part of the world's largest refugee crisis in modern history, and it would take many years to resolve.
[Text: Returning Home]
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Dr. Lauren Faulkner Rossi: Indeed, for Jewish Holocaust survivors, there were in some cases insurmountable difficulties in getting home. Railroads, trains, roads had all been destroyed so they faced long journeys frequently by foot. Getting home, they frequently discovered that they had no possessions to return to. Their movable possessions had been destroyed or sold and their apartments or houses had been given over to non-Jewish neighbors and those neighbors almost never gave back property even if Jewish survivors returned to contest their claims. And some Jews returned to face the threat of renewed violence, particularly in Eastern Europe, where there were several flareups of tension into outright violence between, for example, Polish towns and Polish villages and returning Jewish Holocaust survivors. In one instance, 23 Jewish Holocaust survivors were killed by their Polish neighbors.
[Text: To Stay or to Go?]
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Nonetheless, some Jews chose to remain on European soil and rebuild their lives from scratch. Still, others decided not to stay and faced choices about where to go. At this time, Palestine was a British mandate and Britain controlled very tightly immigration quotas, essentially allowing no one into this area. It wasn't until 1948 that the independent nation state of Israel would be established and open up its borders to Jewish immigration. So other Jews chose to go elsewhere, South America, North Africa, and some came to the US and to Canada.
[Text: Immigration to Canada]
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Canada has its own dark chapter in this part of its history. During the war, one of Prime Minister William Lyon McKenzie King's cabinet ministers insisted, and I quote, "None is too many," when asked how many Jewish refugees would be permitted to come to Canada. After the war, attitudes shifted somewhat and some 40,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors ultimately settled here including 1,123 Jewish orphan children who came as part of a government-sponsored program. Many of these Jews chose to settle in the large established Jewish communities in Montreal, in Winnipeg, which had the two largest Jewish communities in the country. Others went a little bit further west to Toronto with its growing Jewish community, and some even ended up in Vancouver here on the West coast. They were assisted by these Jewish communities and by the Canadian Jewish Congress in starting to rebuild their lives.
[Text: Bearing Witness]
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Some dedicated considerable time, effort, and expense in trying to track down what had happened to their lost loved ones from the war. Often these searches were fruitless even after many decades because there was simply no surviving documentation that proved definitively what had happened to them. And some remained haunted by what they had experienced between 1933 and 1945. All Jewish Holocaust survivors had to reckon with the fact that they had survived a genocide and how to carry this with them through its aftermath. And again, they did this in a diverse manner of ways. Some became involved in a growing movement in the 1970s for Holocaust education in various school curricula across Canada, including here in Vancouver. The Vancouver Holocaust Education Center was in fact founded by a group of local Holocaust survivors who had come to Canada after the war. And they made it explicit in their mission statement to combat racism, antisemitism, and intolerance, wherever it was found and to safeguard Holocaust education as a subject for teaching in schools across BC. The commitment of these Holocaust survivors and their families to bearing witness, and to find others to bear witness with them, are a seminal part of the aftermath of the Holocaust and its legacy for they stand at the forefront of those who insist "Never again" and they have dedicated their lives to making this true. Thank you.
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