Remembrance (298/365)

Above is the drawing I doodled for my profile picture on Facebook today, and it of course refers to the fact that today is Remembrance Day in Canada (Veteran's Day to those of you in the States and Armistice Day for you all in Belgium). Every year around this time Queen's Hillel (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2202771817) does a display exhibit on campus about the Holocaust and I visit each year. Today was that day, and this year you get to visit with me.

I arrived and received my identification and "personal story". By a great act of serendipity, I got Hanne Hirsch. She is a truly amazing woman who happens to be central to my early exposure to the Holocaust and WWII in general as she was the basis for the main character of one of my favorite (if not my favorite alone) books as a child, Greater than Angels.

This is an absolutely amazing book. I haven't read it in years, but I think I will go see if I can find it at Indigo this week. It is about Anna Hirsch, and follows closely the story of Hanne Hirsch, written very well. I would recommend it for any tween (or adult!) learning about or interested in the subject (http://www.scholastic.ca/titles/greaterthanangels/).

Since it would be impossible and really rude to reproduce the whole exhibit here, I just captured a few of the things that most stuck with me this year:

Propaganda from the pre-war government.

Children starving in the ghettos.

Interspersed throughout the exhibit (which is a chronological walk-through of the story of Jews and other minorities in the war) this year was the story of a holocaust survivor, whose story was on orange panels. A few of his anecdotes really struck me:

To simply take a walk.

So many people resisted.

Some of the quotes they had up are stunning and (rightfully) horrifying:

Looking at all the photos of the children is the most heart-wrenching, because you have to think of not just their suffering but how awful it would be as a parent to be unable to help.

This, as a pre-med, just makes me furious at these doctors:

One picture from the liberation that I wanted to share was this one:

It is, if you can't read it, of the "crowded" conditions of the cars carrying liberated Jews to hospitals. Nobody would argue that it is crowded, but that just serves to through the atrocity of the journey TO the camps (of train cars packed so tightly people died standing up) in awfully sharp relief.

Finally, this one stuck with me:

It is a RECENT picture from the internet. Surely, you would like to think, that this was just made by some nutcase - surely nobody thinks like this anymore? Well, I know, unfortunately, that that is not the case. While I have no idea who made this picture, I was witness to a similarly disgusting display of antisemitism at my school several years ago. Two girls in my grade were targeted by boys at another Toronto school for requesting that the boys take down an antisemitic webpage. The boys responded that the girls "should have been put in the ovens".

I know these girls and they are some of the nicest, wisest and most involved people I met in high school. The full story is here: http://tinyurl.com/25bdpto

As a personal note, I wanted to give kudos to Hillel for the exhibit, which reminded me very much of the one I visited a few years ago while in Budapest, the Museum of Terror:

While focusing on Hungary's part of the war and the struggle internally more than globally, the exhibit is eye-opening an incredible if you are ever in Budapest.

While we were there we also saw the Dohány Street Synagogue, usually just called the Great Synagogue. I am not being romantic in saying it is one of the most gorgeous places in Europe.

Behind the Synagogue is the Holocaust Memorial, a weeping willow with leaves bearing the names of victims of the Nazis. Also there is a memorial for the Righteous Among the nations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righteous_Among_the_Nations).

My brother had the opportunity to visit Auschwitz last year on November 11th, and he took these pictures:

Finally, to end this really long post, I wanted to return to the other focus of Remembrance Day, the veterens. My late Grandpa Hugh fought in the war and was hard of hearing his whole life for it. My Nana has his medals still. She herself was a junior Fire Warden during the blitz. As a 16 year old, she ran to the tallest building in her neighbourhood while the bombs fell and radioed the fire crews to tell them where the bombs had fallen.

The staple of any Canadian Remembrance Day ceremony is the following poem, written by Canadian soldier John McCrae while sitting on the back of an ambulance after watching the burial of his best friend, who died at Ypres. Some of you abroad may or many not know it, but most Canadian schoolchildren could probably tell you it from memory:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.