'We are making the same mistakes': Alberta Holocaust survivor condemns violence in Charlottesville
Abraham Silverman fears that one of the most horrific chapters in history may be destined to repeat itself.
For the Holocaust survivor, the deadly violence in Charlottesville evokes painful memories of his family's persecution at the hands of the Nazis.
Throngs of men and women marching openly in the streets of Virginia, rallying for an Aryan state, is proof the white supremacist movement has never been defeated.
"It's no less despicable and unacceptable but it's nothing new," said Silverman, 75, in an interview with CBC Radio`s Edmonton AM. "We are making the same mistakes over and over again.
"Anti-semitism and racism is alive and well."
'They were shot on the spot'
Silverman's has fading memories of the war. But his story is inextricably intertwined with the atrocities of the Second World War.
He was born in 1942 into deplorable conditions in a Jewish ghetto in Jasi, Romania, a year before the bloody massacre of the city's Jewish population.
By the time the ghetto was liberated by advancing Russian troops in 1944, only 11,000 of 35,000 residents had survived.
Those who evaded deportation to deaths camps often died of disease or starvation. Others were killed indiscriminately by Nazi soldiers.
One Sunday morning in June 1941, officers rounded up neighbours like cattle, and forced them into the streets before executing them en masse.
In all, 8,000 Jews were shot, stabbed or beaten to death. Five thousand were murdered in a public square. Seven thousand more were herded onto trains.
Silverman's parents evaded the firing squads.
They had married on June 10, 1940, at a time when marriage was strictly outlawed for the Jewish population.
Their wedding day ended in bloody tragedy when the Gestapo learned of their secret ceremony.
"When the rabbi and his 12-year-old son who attended at the wedding stepped out of the little house where the wedding canopy was set up, they were both shot by the Nazis," Silverman said.
"And the Nazi officers stepped into the house, and said, 'This is what happens when you break the law.' They were shot on the spot."
Silverman's father was captured and taken to a brutal slave labour camp with 3,500 young Jewish men. When the gulag was liberated in 1944, only 700 survivors remained within its fortified walls.
His father escaped the gas chambers, but the horrors of the extermination camps haunted him.
"My dad suffered all of his life from the extreme hardships and the beatings in the slave labour camp."
After the war, the family escaped Romania with the help of a Russian soldier.
They walked across Hungary, crossed the Danube River and wound up in a displaced persons camp in Vienna, where they spent months awaiting passage to Israel.
Instead, a distant relative who had been desperately searching for fellow survivors, tracked them down and brought them to Canada.
Silverman spent his childhood on a farm in southern Saskatchewan before finally making his home in Edmonton.
The feelings of persecution never left him.
'It's an amazing story of survival'
Seeing racial violence erupt in the United States has left him feeling darkly resigned. It's been a troubling time for him and the 120 other Holocaust survivors who live in Edmonton, Silverman said.
For society as a whole, the atrocities and racism are too easily forgotten, or ignored.
"There is really nothing new in all of this. This has been ongoing for a lot more years than I have been on this Earth. It's been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years.
"As a species, we don't learn."
Silverman has shared his memories with his children again and again, hoping his family at least will learn from the past.
"My story should have a familiar ring because it is the story of many who survived the Holocaust and survived those atrocities," he said.
"It's important that I leave that history behind for my family. They need to know where they come from, how difficult it was, and how lucky they are to have been born in recent times, where they are protected from so much of that."
