Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day

Holocaust Study: It Took Three Years for Polish Jewry to Wake Up - Jewish World - Israel News - Israel National News

A new study by Dr. Chavi Dreyfuss Ben-Sasson analyzes the experiences of Polish Jewry as they dealt, or didn’t deal, with their neighbors and friends who suddenly became enemies and Nazi collaborators.

The study appeared several months ago in a book entitled, “We are Polish Jewry?” The book researches the relations between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust – relations that have been termed the “most complex and charged” of the entire Holocaust period.

Speaking with Arutz Sheva’s Hebrew newsmagazine on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Dreyfuss said that the picture that arises clearly is one of an “ongoing attempt to prettify the reality in the early war years and try to see the positive sides of Polish society. When [the Jews] encountered grave incidents, they termed them ‘marginal’ and ‘not representative’ of Polish society at large.”

The study is based on documents, letters and other written material, “from which the same consistent picture emerges,” she said. “It is hard to depend on oral testimony, because people don’t quite remember what they thought then. That is why I relied solely on written documentation.”

The picture collapses
Poland was overrun and conquered by Nazi German in September 1939, and the above picture was accurate for about three years. “But in 1942,” Dreyfuss said, “there was a turnabout in the way Jews saw things. Their picture of Poland and Poles collapsed. There was great disenchantment and bitterness. The Jews were apparently then exposed to what was really going on, to the dimensions of the mass murder and the reality of total liquidation. Until then, they thought that if the worst happens, the Poles would not cooperate with the Nazis, but it was proven to them otherwise. From then on, people began to say things like, ‘the Poles are worse than the Nazis.’”

Dr. Dreyfuss feels that the approach taken by German Jewry, which also chose to misinterpret, at first, the evil unfolding in front of their eyes, was very different than that of Polish Jewry. “German Jewry was smaller, because many of them had left at the beginning of the war; those few who remained saw themselves as an inseparable part of Germany – and suddenly Germany turns its back on them. This was truly difficult for them to absorb. But Polish Jewry underwent a totally different process. They were involved in the Polish society, but suddenly an outsider came on the scene and told them, ‘You’re not part of this; you’re not even human beings.’ … In addition, the Polish Jews were placed into ghettos, while German Jews still lived among the Germans until October 1941; the Jews there were able to see how the German society was becoming more Nazi, while the Poles didn’t see what was happening.”

Remembering...

Jason Kenney, Canada's Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, issued the following statement on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day:

"The extermination of millions of Jewish people during World War II was a crime against all humankind. In remembering the Holocaust and paying tribute to its victims, we renew our commitment to fight against the evils of racism, discrimination and anti-Semitism.

"The Holocaust stands alone in human history for its horror and its inhumanity. It is crucial that we learn from this experience, not only to ensure that such atrocities never take place again, but also to better enable us to build societies based on a respect for human dignity, in which such acts are not possible.

"Our government has taken a principled stance in combating Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. More than a year ago, I announced that Canada would refuse to participate in the racist Durban process because we had serious concerns that the failings of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, would be repeated at the 2009 Durban Review Conference. In 2001, the Durban Conference degenerated into open and divisive expressions of intolerance and anti-Semitism. Yesterday's speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vindicated Canada's principled decision to lead the world in withdrawing from the conference. As a result of Canada announcing its withdrawal from the Durban Review Conference, Canada's seat will be vacant for the duration of the conference.

Under our government, Canada will support any international conference that combats racism; we will not, however, lend Canada's good name to those that promote it.

"The Government of Canada is committed to ensuring that the Holocaust is not forgotten. To that end, Canada co-sponsored the UN resolution that led to the recognition of January 27th as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. In 2007, Canada co-sponsored another UN resolution that condemned denial of the Holocaust. Canada has consistently voted against unbalanced resolutions within the UN. "

This commitment is also reflected in our ongoing efforts to attain full membership in the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. In 2008, we took another step forward and received liaison status in this Task Force and, in June, I will present Canada's formal application for full membership.

"As Minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, I urge Canadians to learn about the Holocaust, to remember its victims, and to reject all forms of hatred and discrimination."

Radio Memories: Small Town Heroes

One of my minor New Year's Resolutions will be to continue the Radio Memories posts I began the week before Christmas. Once a week or so I'll dip into my collection and post one of my favorite old radio dramas, from the early days of radio, back when radio offered its faithful listeners the excitement of a theater for the imagination.

For this fan, many of the more interesting programming appeared in the 1950s, at the tail end of radio drama's dominance of North America's entertainment habits. One very short-lived series starred a real-life hero, who, like most legitimate heroes, handled his accomplishments with graceful modesty and deferential humility. I'm speaking about Will Rogers Junior, little known today except for being in the shadow of the lingering fame of his humorist father, who never met a man he didn't like.

Will Rogers Jr did many things that his more famous dad never did: Junior ran a newspaper, served in the US congress as a Representative from California, resigned his seat in Congress in order to join the US Army fighting in Western Europe as a tank commander under General Patton, where he earned a Bronze Star... and:

He helped save the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust.

In November 1943 freshman Congressman Rogers introduced what became known as "the Rescue Resolution" into the House, urging the creation of an official U.S. agency to rescue Jewish refugees from the Nazi death camps discovered being erected across Eastern Europe. His objective was to create refugee camps in allied liberated territory in North Africa as well as neutral European countries. (Interestingly, his eventual congressional allies in this legislative effort included Maryland Congressman Thomas D'Alesandro Jr, father of today's Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.)

To make a long story short, the actions of this group of wartime legislators pushed a reluctant President Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board in January 1944. It was with the Board's assistance that noted Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenburg was able to save tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest, Hungary. The Board itself was said to have saved over 200,000 Jews in the last few months of the war. In and out of the public eye after World War II, Rogers never made a big deal of his part in getting these rescue efforts underway; "I didn't regard it as worthy of mention," he once said, with typical modesty.

After playing his father in the high-profile movie biography filmed in 1952, The Story Of Will Rogers, Rogers Jr turned his multi-talented mind to radio, where from July '53 through January '54 he starred as a composite of the public's memory of both him and his father in the rural drama Rogers Of The Gazette.

I can close my eyes and easily find myself transported into the show's fictional portrait of Illyria; it's been my good fortune to spend quite a lot of time in small towns like it, as a resident as well as a visitor. The show's theme music conjures up many pleasant personal memories of hunting for frogs in fields and ponds, in later years pausing to chat with folks in stores and offices, and being greeted with silent smiles by strangers crossing me on the sidewalk. I met many Maggie Buttons' and many Doc Clemens' (the other two main characters of the series) there, and more than a few Will Rogers', whose heroic pasts were kept secret from younger eyes and ears, until it was too late to offer anything but posthumous gestures of appreciation...

The Passing Of A Righteous Hero

On May 12th the world lost a very special lady.

Polish Catholic Irena Sendler (1910-2008) saved the lives of 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.

Working in the Zegota ("Council for Aid to Jews ") underground movement, where she ran the Children's Division, Irena contrived ways to enter into the Ghetto (often as part of the official Contagious Disease Department) and, with the consent of their parents, smuggle out Jewish children through various means, from hiding them in suitcases and body bags to sneaking them out, as was the case of five-month old infant, Elzbieta Ficowska, inside a carpenter's box. An ambulance driver who smuggled infants under stretchers in the back of his van kept his dog on the seat beside him, having trained the animal to bark to mask any cries from his hidden passengers.

Once outside, Irena created new identities through false documents and worked to find families willing to accept the children and pass them off as Catholic, or managed to hide them in convents and orphanages. Zegota made it clear to all of those hiding children, when the war was over, they must be returned to Jewish relatives.

She kept meticulous records of the real names of all the children she saved, having the courage to believe that her country would one day be freed and that the children could then be reunited with their parents. She hid the lists in glass jars that she buried in the garden rather than keep them around the house, and risk them being discovered.

Her rescue operation came to an end in 1943 when she was captured by the Germans. She was brutally tortured in prison, as the Nazis attempted in vain to learn more about her underground activities. These beatings resulted in both her legs and feet being fractured, causing injuries that plagued her to the end of her days, yet she did not reveal the whereabouts of her list.

She was rescued from the hands of her torturers by the Polish underground, and even though she herself spent the remainder of the war years in hiding, she continued to find ways to be of service to the hidden children. After the war, she dug up her lists from their hiding place, and devoted much time trying to reconnect the rescued Jewish children with their families.

Sadly, most of the relatives had been killed at the Treblinka death camp.

The communist regime that occupied Poland following World War II branded Irena a "fascist" , for her group's anti-communist views, and kept her from receiving just reward for her valiant wartime activities. Her story was rescued from the fog of history by four American high school students from Kansas, who created a play called "Life In A Jar", based on their research into Irena's righteous acts during the war.

As the play's popularity helped her brave efforts to become more internionally known, Irena Sendler put her inspiring courage into humble perspective:

“We who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true—I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little.”

Last year Irena Sendler was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, but lost...
to Al Gore.

Miracles And Mother's Day

Born in the corner of hell that was the Auschwitz concentration camp in the last year of World War II, a daughter shares the remarkable story of a mother's choice to bring new life into a world filled with death. It's an inspiring example of the strength that can come through faith: the consolation that when you commit to doing the right thing, you will find a way to do it... because you must.

When 25-year old Vera Bein was shipped to Auschwitz in May 1944, she was almost two months pregnant.

From People Of The Book, we can read the stirring account of Bein's daughter, Angela Volgar, whose birth certificate testifies that she had been Born In Auschwitz:

"My mother felt so terrible for all the people who had lost their children. They lost their babies, and she brought one back," Polgar said.
...
On Dec. 21 Bein felt labour pains. She climbed to the top bunk in her barrack, and there, aided by two other inmates, gave birth in secret to a baby girl.

It's a miracle that she herself survived, let alone both her and her daughter:

At selection on the platform, most visibly pregnant women were sent to die; so were babies, children, the obviously sick and the elderly. Others were spared for use as slave labour or fodder for medical experimentation.

One of the only times Angela Volgar's mother Vera Bein ever discussed her memories of that terrifying time was in an interview she participated in with her teenage granddaughter for a school assignment in 1984. From that tape, Bein relates these details:

"I felt the pain and told the Block altester (the barrack's inmate supervisor) that I feel cramps and pain. She asked me to climb on the top of the bunk, and she came with me and she helped me to give birth to your mummy," Vera tells her granddaughter on the tape.

"She knew how to do it, because she was the daughter of a doctor, so she had an idea about cleanliness and how to help a woman in labor. She brought hot water and clean sheets. She cooked a pair of scissors in hot water to sterilize them" before cutting the umbilical cord, she said. "So everything went quite easily." The infant weighed one kilogram, a little over two pounds "Mummy was so weak and so tiny, she didn't cry. So nobody knew she was born."...

The only other infant survivor, according to Auschwitz museum records, was a Hungarian boy, Gyorgy Faludi, born the day of liberation with the help of a Russian doctor.
...

An important lesson we sons of mothers may learn from this story, and from the example of our own mothers, is how the act of making life meaningful is an ongoing one, a flame forever on the verge of having its light extinguished. For nourishment it requires a reaffirmation of commitment, a refueling of motivation, and a renewal of spirit on an ever-recurring basis.

To feed this reconnection we may wish we could readily find our inspiration with little effort, through existing resources lying physically at arm's reach; but as with Vera Bein's example we must learn to look within, so that even the most horrific tragedy may not impede our ability to see the miraculous treasure trove of inner strength waiting to be tapped into, and brought to light.

Witnessing new life arise from "nothing" seems miracle enough. Yet the miracle continues as the new life continues, as a mother's love for the child they gave birth to is itself forever reborn day after day, year after year, remaining undiminished even as other children may be added to a growing family. It grows, because it must.

The miracle of life, like the miracle of a mother's love, is one beyond physical limits. It is infinite.

And, through the blessing of memory, combined with the wisdom we may accumulate through advanced age and experience, with grateful eyes we learn to see that its light remains upon us, even beyond a mother's death, allowing the miracle to become eternal:

[Angela Polgar] remembers her mother for many things: the odds she overcame, the perseverance she embodied, the pain she concealed for so many years under a mask of optimism and a survivor's dream of renewal."

A heartfelt Happy Mother's Day to Mother's everywhere. God Bless you all, and thank you for teaching us what it means to have faith.


[Great thanks to Suzanne at Big Blue Wave for pointing the way to this amazing story.]

Are you next? After me?

In an article in today's National Post, Terry O'Neill brings our attention to

Section 7 of B.C.'s human rights act [which] makes it an offence for any person to publish "any statement, publication, notice, sign, symbol, emblem or other representation" that so much as "indicates discrimination or an intention to discriminate" against a protected group, or "is likely to expose a person or group or class of persons to hatred or contempt." No actual discrimination or hatred has to occur for an offence to occur. And, as pointed out on these pages over the past few weeks, truth is not a defence.

Did you know you were living in a totalitarian society where you can't speak the truth if there is any chance someone or some group who is privileged, by the state, to be considered more socially or culturally marginal than you, claims to be hurt by what you say or write? Were you aware that to think is to discriminate and, effectively, to hate evil? and that to be human is to be inescapably resentful in some degree, to feel alienated by someone who is closer to the sacred center of attention than are you? Did the British Columbia NDP government that passed the above-quoted section of the Human Rights Act - which should be considered unconstitutional and long ago thrown out (but it's still here) - ever win an election on the question of whether British Columbia should be a totalitarian state where you cannot express (and hopefully make productive) your inevitable human resentments of others?

No, because the people who pass such legsialation are not themselves aware that they are full of hate and contempt, especially for those they declare - with much passion - full of hate and contempt: e.g. the Archie Bunker stereotype, the "bigoted white male Christian", the "reactionaries" who act as what Rene Girard called "mimetic doubles" for our heroic "progressives". No, our left-liberal elites think they're secular, but they have a very powerful religion, of a Gnostic variety, that responds to the great and gut-wrenching uncertainties of our conflict-ridden human existence by looking for guarantees of self-righteousness. They're against hate and contempt, you see. They must be on the side of the holy. They're right, and you contemptible one are not, unless you "think" and chirp like them. It's oh so Utopian and feel-goody.

To understand how their religion works, we have to understand their utter dependence on the figure of the victim, around which their self-righteous consensus develops. They are, to put it bluntly, a variety of death cult, of human sacrificers, only less honest about it than were, say, the Aztecs, or less aware of how their need for victims - in order to appear politically self-righteous in supposedly defending victims - tends to lead to the production of the needed victims, if only (but it is not only) most obviously by the stigmatization of "right-wing religious bigots" (which in turn creates a desire for a class of people to go through life as the putative victims of "right-wing religious bigots". In extreme cases the cult of "human rights" leads "freedom fighters" to make victims of "their" own people to put on display before the world media, always in need of victims of modern Western States, in order to champion a cause.

What would be a simple example of this religion's mindset? Well consider this excerpt from another opinion piece in today's National Post, regarding the scandal of the Canadian "human rights" police. Barry Cooper tells the story of a Christian who apparently thought he had the right to a critique of homosexuality (not of the personhood of homosexuals, which as a Christian he must consider divine), long a part of a Judeo-Christian culture for reasons that we could debate (if we lived in a free society):

Last November, Lori Andreachuk, QC, a Lethbridge divorce lawyer and chair of an Alberta human rights panel, decided that, by writing a letter to the editor, Stephen Boissoin exposed homosexuals to hatred and contempt, which violated the Alberta human rights act.

[...the]entire ["Human Rights"] process is skewed. Most obviously in that complainants get a free ride and defendants pay full legal freight. The taxpayers of Alberta paid for Levant's interrogation. A lawyer from the Alberta Attorney General's office was present at the Boissoin-Lund panel.

This meant that, unlike the procedure in a genuine court, even if the defendant wins, he loses -- money, if nothing else -- and even if the complainant loses, he wins by ensuring that potential critics will think twice about speaking up.

Worse, the common-law rules of evidence do not apply so that the most bizarre and unconnected phenomena can be introduced as if they were relevant. These tend to involve the "feelings" of the defendant. In principle, human rights panels are inquisitorial bodies operating in what is usually an adversarial legal context, but they lack the balance that characterizes both systems taken on their own terms.

Incidentally, the government lawyer at the Boissoin-Lund panel asked me one of the strangest questions I have ever answered in many cross-examinations as a so-called expert witness. "How," he asked, would I "distinguish" Boissoin's letter to the Red Deer Advocate from Hitler's Mein Kampf? I resisted the temptation to give the reply that came immediately to mind and provided a more or less civil answer.

But Barry - and this is my example and point illustrating the Gnostic and victimary religion that motivates the "Human Rights" world view of today's liberals - this insane question is not at all incidental to the mindset of those who promote and prosecute thought crimes. It is a perfect example of how the central revelatory event of the religion of White Guilt - i.e. the Holocaust - allows one to lose all sense of differences and scale: everything is reduced, or inflated, to the central truth: that Western Society, as exemplified by the middle-class and professional-led Nazis, can, when taking its "norms" and "prejudices" seriously, result in the absolute and unquestionable victimization of the perfectly innocent "Jew" by the perfectly evil "Nazi", and with the more or less active co-operation of every "normal" person and profession in the country. That did happen in 1930s-40s Germany, so does that mean we in contemporary Canada can't be trusted to do any better with our freedoms? But if we can't, how can we be protected from our "protectors" and their ideas about who is a victim and who a victimizer?

Once the guarantee of the righteousness of the "victim" is determined by simply invoking memory of the Holocaust, all that remains for the neo-fascists of the "human rights" police is to insure that every worthy or potential victim of Western norms can now be clothed in the dress of the "Jew" and everyone who is in a position of normalcy, authority, power, or success in the Western world can be labelled a "Nazi". Many will have noted the leftist glee with which the Israelis and Americans have become the new Nazis. Those who have developed the power and means to lead and feed the world are now often the epitome of evil. Nazi antisemitism has given way to new left antisemitism. Mimetic doubles.

And so, the poor bugger who writes a "homophobic" letter to the editor can be fined and possibly jailed, be banned from speaking on given issues, because there is no essential difference - at least not in our human rights law - between his little Christian text and Mein Kampf. All sense of empirical discrimination - i.e. reference to facts and calm reasoning about the degree of one's reliance on the victim figure - is thrown out the door in a religious rush to the New Utopia. It is a passion that only creates a need for more victims in the guise of defending them.

I would like to be a bit more reflective about all this, but I'm damn angry (not that I ever get too angry) and I want to get this post up now, so I will conclude by quoting a better mind, Tom Bertonneau on the authors Howard Schwartz and Eric Gans:

The politically correct university is not only, as Schwartz notes, a "psychological regression" (159) into infantile narcissism, it is likewise a cultural atavism, a relapse into archaic, indeed sacrificial, forms of communal organization that belong more properly to the Stone or Bronze Age than to the twenty-first century of the Christian Era. I return here to the work of Gans, who argues in Signs of Paradox[1997]the Holocaust represents a cultural turning point in the Western moral imagination, by verifying in a massively empirical way the essential Christian revelation that communal solidarity based on persecution and victimization is evil. "Our ideal moral certainties are re-grounded in the opposition between (Nazi) persecutor and (Jewish) victim" (188). But it is really a good deal more complicated than this, because:

The descent of the absolute into the empirical world is the moment of its undoing. As soon as we posit an absolute difference between victim and persecutor, the underlying symmetry of their relation reasserts itself. When the SS torturer becomes the villain of the war film, he is turned into a sacrificial figure, a scapegoat, [a] structural equivalent of the Jud Suss in Nazi cinema. In the already tiresome clarity of this asymmetry, culture has been abandoned to youth; adults are too world-weary to participate wholeheartedly in the eternal and now transparent structure of victimary resentment. Group resentment has replaced individual resentment - the point of essential difference between the high and the popular - as the primary object of cultural deferral. (188-189)

Gans remarks how

a long-lost Dionysian frenzy reappears in the ecstatic forms of postwar popular culture, in its music and dance, the audience of which more than that of any other popular form incarnates "the people." These central dramas of the youth-culture are not coincidentally the most subject to black and other minority influences. The rhythms and chord progressions of popular music dissolve individuality in a real or imaginary group movement that is the historical heir to sacrificial ritual. They create, in an imaginary context, the resentful unanimity of the sparagmos [ripping apart and distribution of the sacrifice or victim]. (189).

Schwartz's "Revolt of the Primitive" and Gans's atavism of a minoritized "youth culture" are, I believe, aspects of the same epochal cultural transformation. The primordial mother is the ringleader and youth (always in a rainbow coalition of sexually ambiguous misfits) are her press gang. Schwartz interprets the phenomenon more pessimistically than does Gans, who notes, but does not particularly stress, the sacrificial character of the new, resentment-driven forms of collective identification. Yet Gans does admit that "what is new in our era is the promotion of non-integrative local theories - as though they were the only theories conceivable and it were no longer possible for the human community to think of itself as a whole" (198). He also notes how "feminism and other minority approaches, which maintain their link with universal thought only through the unacknowledged mediation of the Christian centralization of the victim, are fast driving out other forms of cultural interpretation" (198). Gans' "non-integrative local theories" are nevertheless deeply troubling, not least because their most recent prototype appears to lie exactly in the ferocious biological dualism of Hitlerian anti-Semitic policy, as "non-integrative" as you can get. Paradoxically, of course, the proliferating new ubermenschen find their superiority to all others in their own alleged victimization, which then becomes the pretext to victimize all who would deny the in-group's special (mother-authorized) victim-status. The lese, as it were, proves the majesty. Where the lese does not exist, which means just about everywhere, it is necessary to invent it. There is much burning of the Reichstag. Schwartz catches the same paradox, noticing that the eidos of women in the regime that they now obviously control is a contradictory one, simultaneously a picture of "passive, hopeless victim" and "exemplars of the primordial mother" (158).

Bertonneau, Gans, and Schwartz are liberating thinkers, devoted to the true liberation of each and every individual, regardless of sex or race, from group passions and resentments. But I have my doubts if anyone in British Columbia would dare publish them, given the expensive frustrations the new Nazis of the Candian "human rights" commissions could throw at you for revealing an ugly religion - their religion - for what it is.

As Barry Cooper says, in the conclusion to his article, "Grow Up, People". Now is the time to demand our politicians pay attention to the growing outcry, so far limited largely to cyberspace, and insist they remove from all human rights legislation the ability of the state to police "hate speech". One may argue for retaining a criminalization of an incitement to violence, but in a free society we are best protected from hate by everyone having the freedom to speak out and show the hateful what they are, in full light of day. The state cannot really protect us, for it is the biggest threat. We must each, as individuals, sign a covenant to act as guarantors of each other's freedom. As the Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant cases make clear, we as a civilization presently have no sane understanding of what human rights really are. And if the Mainstream Media are any indication, we have little will to stand up and defend them, in face of state evil. If you need a better understanding start by reading Cooper and O'Neill in full, two of only a few opinion pieces you will find in the Canadian papers; digest their arguments and then sit down and do your civic duty and write your provincial and federal politicians and tell them to fire the censors, now! They have no right to impose their religion and need for victims on the rest of us. They are not the good guys. You are, if you act now, in defense of freedom which is always the surest guarantee of our ability to minimize human violence. There is not some all-wise figure in the government, some Gnostic elect, who know how to do it better than millions of Canadians, liberated to speak their minds, to defend each other, in daily life.

Stephen Harper on anti-semitism

I'm not used to praising politicians, and feel a little awkward doing so, since I consider myself far more partisan to ideas rather than to parties. Yet I continue to be impressed with Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to the point where I can actually imagine myself carrying a sign with his name on it, in support of his ongoing leadership... an unprecedented gesture, for me, for any politician, from any party.

Sunday he demonstrated what for me was an impressive moral consistency, through a powerful speech delivered at the annual Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony, Yom Hashoah, on Parliament Hill.
How many times in recent Canadian history has any politician, let alone a Prime Minister, been so clear in their stand for Israel, and the Good that should be associated with that nation and its people?

Here is Prime Minister Harper's full speech, from yesterday:

It has been said that lies become truth if they are repeated often enough.
That’s why truth is so precious. That’s why the truth must be repeated, over and over and over, to protect us from lies.
So let us plainly state the awful, incontrovertible truth that brings us here today: millions, including six million Jewish men, women, and children, were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
This genocide was so premeditated and grotesque in design, so monstrous and barbaric in scale, and so systematic and efficient in execution, that it stands alone in the annals of human evil.
To this day, the holocaust terrifies and mystifies. We cannot really understand the evil that consumed one the great nations of Europe. We cannot fully fathom why it was embraced by an ideology rooted in hatred. And we cannot truly comprehend the suffering of the people who perished in the madness. But we do understand that the attempted extermination of the Jewish people was a crime against all of humanity.
Culturally.
Intellectually.
Economically.
Socially.
Our world is immeasurably poorer because of the Holocaust.
We will never know how many more Einstein’s, how many more Gershwin’s, Golda Meir’s, Leonard Cohen’s, or Mordecai Richler’s, might have enriched our world.
But we do know it must never, ever, happen again.
Unfortunately, in some countries, hatred of the Jews is still preached from religious pulpits and still proclaimed from political podiums.
There are still people who would perpetrate another holocaust if they could.
That’s why we must resist the error of viewing the Holocaust as a strictly historical event.
It’s not good enough for politicians to stand before you and say they remember and mourn what happened over six decades ago.
They must stand up to those who advocate the destruction of Israel and its people today.
And they must be unequivocal in their condemnation of anti-Semitic despots, terrorists and fanatics.
That is the only real way to honour the memory of those who were consumed by the Holocaust.
And the only way to ensure it never happens again.
Thank you.
Shalom.

~~~~~~

[Sunday's] ceremony and moment of silence on Parliament Hill were organized by the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem. The commemoration concluded with a march to the Ottawa Congress Centre.