Polish Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter draws on his horrific experiences during World War II to try to tear down walls of racial hatred and build a better world. In speeches inside and outside Canada, he preaches the virtues of tolerance and warns that genocide can repeat itself if its causes are allowed to fester. Now a […]
Tag: Holocaust
Poland marked an historic anniversary on June 23. At a “Polish Freedom Gala” banquet, held at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto under the patronage of President Bronislaw Komorowski, Poland hailed its return to the western democratic fold. Twenty five years ago this month, the Solidarity trade union movement staged a peaceful revolution that […]
Last month, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, broke important historical ground by describing the Holocaust as “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era.” Shortly afterwards, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif declared that he would not permit Iran’s reputation, such as it is, to be sullied […]
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The Engineers Of The Holocaust
In 1878, a master brewer in the eastern German city of Erfurt named Johann Andreas Topf founded Topf & Sons, a respectable company that would become the world’s leading manufacturer of malting equipment for the beer industry. Thirty six years later, Topf diversified its operations, introducing a line of crematorium furnaces. The new product would […]
Mohammed Dajani, a professor at Al Quds University in eastern Jerusalem, is the kind of Palestinian the Palestinians need more of. Once a flaming radical, he’s now a pragmatist who supports a two-state solution to defuse the Arab-Israeli conflict and espouses such eternal and precious values as reconciliation and dialogue. Driven by these laudable ideas, […]
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Happy 100, David
My father, David Kirshner, does not appreciate publicity, though he is increasingly fond of talking about his past as a soldier in the Polish army and a Holocaust survivor who endured the rigors of the Lodz ghetto and the horror of Auschwitz extermination camp. I realize that this short essay may upset or anger him. […]
On March 19, the Hungarian government is scheduled to unveil a statue in Budapest’s Freedom Square in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Hungary, an event that robbed Hungarians of their independence and doomed Hungary’s Jewish community. The stylistic statue, brimming with historic symbolism, portrays a rapacious German imperial eagle attacking the […]
The grainy and seemingly innocuous photograph on the cover of Jan Tomasz Gross’ disturbing book, Golden Harvest, published by Oxford University Press, shows a group of Polish peasants standing together in a group. One of them, a woman, holds a shovel. The photograph in question, which first appeared in Poland’s largest newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, on […]
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A “Decent” Nazi
Udo Klausa regarded himself as a “decent” Nazi. From 1940 to 1942, he was the principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, a mid-sized town in Poland that, in September 1939, was the scene of one of the very first Nazi atrocities against Jews. Klausa was not at his post in Bedzin when these crimes were committed, but […]
The independence of the Republic of Lithuania was restored in 1990 in large part because the people of the country demanded a restoration of their right to live as an independent nation. This meant that the injustices of the past should be recognized and rectified, a determination expressed in the million-strong “Hands across the Baltic” […]