N.L.'s Jewish community pays tribute to those lost during Holocaust
WARNING: This story contains distressing details.
Eighty years ago, as World War II tore apart Europe, members of a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, fought their German oppressors in what's known as the largest uprising during the Holocaust.
On Sunday, half a world away, the Jewish community in Newfoundland paid tribute to the people who lost their lives in that battle and beyond.
"It is a way of remembering the victims of the Holocaust, and saying that they haven't been forgotten. But above all, it's a way of saying never again," said Steven Wolinetz, a political science professor at Memorial University.
"This is a world of rising anti-Semitism, rising tensions among groups," he said. "It's a way of saying we don't give permission, that we don't want to live in a world of hatred, world of intergroup conflict, but rather a world in which different groups can get along with each other."
Wolinetz helped organize a memorial service in St. John's, where Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter recalled some of the atrocities he witnessed during the Nazi reign.
Gutter described how he was led into a concentration camp as a small child, forced to strip naked and stand in a shower.
"They try to fool you and instead of water, gas comes out. Then you're gonna die. So [I] started saying my prayer and waiting," he said. "But in my case, water came out."
He worked for a while in the firing range — a dangerous job where exploding ammunition could kill at any moment. But it saved him the fate of many others forced to work with dangerous chemicals and no protective gear, who often died within months of arriving at the camp, their skin yellow from the poison that had seeped into it.
One day, Gutter recalled, prisoners were taken for rollcall and told the camp was being dissolved. Suddenly, two women were executed in front of the crowd.
"We started running," he said. "Where do you hide? You are surrounded with electrified wires … [but] the barracks were built on stilts, so I tried to burrow myself like an animal underneath."
But a friend found him, pulling him to safety before soldiers could find him and shoot him. The man changed him out of his dirty clothes, combed his hair and rubbed his late wife's lipstick into his cheeks before directing him back to the roll call lines.
"He saved my life," Gutter said, describing how the most ragged of the prisoners were plucked from the lines and taken into the forest to be shot.
Gutter was later liberated, and has gone on to work as a Holocaust educator, spreading his testimony throughout Canada.
For Wolinetz, stories like Gutter's must be retold, even decades later — and thousands of kilometres away from the epicentre of the Holocaust.
"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it," Wolinetz said.
"What happened ... people might have thought was unthinkable. And yet the unthinkable happened. People fell into line. And we see these those signs — not so much in Canada, maybe a little bit, but in other countries — we see the signs of intolerance. Indifference. Forgetting that there's a better way.
"So it's important, even if it's only 100 people ... to remember it, to reiterate those lessons."
