Dr. Jeremy Maron

This podcast was recorded on the ancestral lands on treaty One territory, the traditional territory of the emission Abe, Cree, Ojibway, Cree Dakota and the DNA peoples.

And on the homeland of the Metis nation.  This is humans on, writes a podcast advocating for the education of human rights.

Here is your host, Stuart Murray.

My guest today is an expert, a curator of Holocaust and genocide content at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

And I am delighted to welcome Dr Jeremy Moron into our conversation today because we want to talk a little bit about the notion that International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust is January 27th and my understanding.

Jeremy, correct me.

But 27 January marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Germany for Nazi Germany.

I should say concentration and extermination camp of Auschwitz Birkenau by the Soviet troops.

Is that accurate?

Yeah.

So that's the date that was selected for international Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27th liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviets.

So a very pivotal.

I didn't mark the end of the Second World War in Europe, but a very pivotal moment towards concluding the Holocaust and the planned extermination of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany and their collaborators.

Okay, great.

Thanks for setting that up, Jeremy.

I appreciate that.

And we're going to obviously get into that conversation in this episode.

But first, let's just back up a little bit.

You have a PhD in cultural mediations from Carleton University, and your dissertation focused on the treatment of the Holocaust in Canadian cinema.

So that's a bit of a journey from a guy who I'm talking to today in Winnipeg.

I know you're a Winnipeg because I know a little bit about your full disclosure.

We had a chance to spend a bit of time together at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Any success I had there was because of people like you.

So thank you for that, Jeremy.

Let's talk a little bit about you.

So you're a winner.

Pinker.

Where did you get your education and primarily lead us into your education and how you got interested in studying the Holocaust?

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Born and raised Winnipeg er I went to the Mennonite private school education from my elementary and high school.

But my mother, my mother's family is Jewish, so I grew up with a lot of influence from that Jewish side of my family.

We didn't have any direct relatives who lived through the Holocaust in the family, but it was something that was sort of on the radar.

Of course, as we participated in family gatherings and the high holiday dinners, we were always included our family, even though we didn't practise Judaism, the first memory I have of really learning about the Holocaust was after the release of Schindler's List.

Like many people of my generation, this is kind of the first exposure.

But in particular, one of the leading Holocaust educators in Winnipeg at that time in the early to mid nineties, was a survivor named Phillip Vice, and Philip Vice was very, very proactive in promoting Holocaust education.

And one of the things that he did after the release of Schindler's List is he sponsored a screening of the film at the Movie Theatre.

At the There's a military base in the ST James of Winnipeg, 17 wing Army base.

They used to have a theatre that was open to the public.

They would run second run films there.

We went there very often for birthday parties in my younger years because it was the price was good and the price of the candy was good as well.

But Philip Vice sponsored a screening of Schindler's List, I guess probably 94 roughly so the year after Schindler's List was released and he paid for the admission for everyone who wanted to attend.

So my Uncle Murray took my cousin Steven and myself and Stephen would become a very big influence in my Holocaust education as well.

Sure, I'll speak with him more in this interview.

So Uncle Murray and Murray Hyman took Stephen and I to see this film.

So we watched the film, of course, but then also fill advice shared his testimony at the conclusion of the film.

So this was both kind of my exposure to the history of the Holocaust in a more dedicated manner and also hearing a personal story directly from someone who lived through it.

So this was probably maybe I was probably maybe great eight or grade nine at the time, So we went through the rest of high school, started university, was taking film studies, actually, so not not focused on the Holocaust at all at the time, just taking film studies because I was in my early twenties.

I liked movies.

I was like, Hey, you can study movies and university Cool.

But one of the electives that I took at the recommendation of my cousin Steven Hyman was a course in the history department on history of anti Semitism in the Holocaust, taught by Professor Lionel Steinman.

And this really ignited my academic interest in the Holocaust, learning about the long history of anti Semitism that long preceded the Holocaust and the multifaceted nature of anti Semitism that has occurred over the centuries.

Religiously based, politically based, socially based, culturally based, it was just so fascinating that Jews have been been blamed as communists.

They have been blamed as capitalists have been blamed for being too rich to poor, too insular, too focused on global domination.

It's absolutely incredible, and it's very easy to see why many scholars refer to anti Semitism of the longest hatred.

So this really opened my eyes.

And as I'm finishing up my film studies degree, this interest in anti Semitism in the Holocaust and my interest in film began to coalesce at the time.

And that was why in my grad school I started focusing on Holocaust cinema, which eventually led to my PhD on the Holocaust in Canadian film, which eventually would lead me to my job at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

The job offer of which I received the day of my last paycheck from my scholarship from Carleton.

So very, very thankful and literally it was my dream job to get a job in the Holocaust Gallery at the Human Rights Museum.

So yeah and Jeremy, you've obviously had a great impact on not only what is in the Holocaust, but also you oversee three of the museum's permanent galleries as well.

So you've got a great depth and breadth of expertise and knowledge on Let me just come back and probe a little bit about the treatment of the Holocaust and Canadian cinema.

Explain a little bit about what?

What did you discover there?

What were some of the things that maybe you didn't know that you would like to share with those people that are listening for sure.

So for anyone who is listening, who doesn't want to read the 400 page dissertation that is available online If you go through the Carlton Library.

What I found like nothing had really been written extensively on Canadian Holocaust cinema.

And before I started, I didn't really even know there were a lot of Canadian films on the Holocaust.

But as I I found a short filmography, that professor who teaches at the University of Ottawa, Gary Evans, prepared a significant number of Canadian films that touch on the Holocaust.

So I started watching them.

I started getting them as long as you had to buy them from eBay or different libraries.

They are not widely available.

I tell people that I worked on this.

Most people are like What all the costing Canadian film?

Are there any?

Well, there are.

But they're not very well known as Canadian cinema generally kind of suffering from a lack of exposure.

But as I was watching these, one of the things that kind of jumped out like I was familiar with kind of European cinema and the Holocaust of films from like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany.

These are countries that had a direct, experiential connection to the history of the Holocaust, and their films tend to deal with these different national histories.

In the case of American Cinema America, the United States had a similar relationship to the Holocaust as Canada, fighting as allies against Nazi Germany but not having that same kind of direct experience of the Holocaust that some of these European countries did.

But in the case of the United States, they have this massive classical Hollywood cinema narrative system where the history of the Holocaust and Holocaust stories get kind of translated in universe like Hollywood is a universal cinema.

It's something that it tries to appeal to everybody.

So you don't need a direct experience to understand some of the stories that are told through the Hollywood system.

So this is something that American cinema has that Canada does not have.

We do not have kind of this overarching, internationalising narrative system that Hollywood does.

So what I noticed as I was watching the Holocaust films from Canada.

What they did is they emphasised in different ways a distance and experiential distance between Canada and the Holocaust.

This manifests in different ways in different films.

Some of the films deal specifically with kind of the bureaucratic barriers between Canada and the Holocaust that Canada's war efforts did not really directly interact with the Holocaust at the time.

Other films position after the Holocaust, they positioned survivors within Canada as kind of socially and emotionally distant and removed from their Canadian surroundings, so kind of positing that experiential barriers between the Holocaust that is kind of like manifesting the survivors and their surroundings.

So it's that distance.

The dissertation title is unbridgeable barriers the Holocaust in Canadian cinema and is this unconquered distance that the United States and Hollywood is able to conquer through the kind of universal, ising narrative isation of Hollywood cinema.

So, Jeremy, one of the things that was very evident as we were going through the process of building the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and focusing on the work that you've done with the Holocaust Gallery was to really look at Canada's role historically of how that Canada has dealt with the Jewish refugees.

And of course, the issue with the M s ST Louis is is quite well documented and how they were turned away, how those Jewish refugees were turned away from Canada, and I think the one thing that is very interesting and I don't know if it showed in some of the cinematography that you saw over time about how Canada evolved as a place that was basically not open to bringing Jewish refugees or immigrants into Canada.

To really now being one of the strongest allies, I think that Israel has, and I'm speaking out more politically than than any.

But did you see that evolution in some of the cinema that you were looking at at that time?

More the kind of critical looks towards Canada's kind of restrictive immigration policies or our kind of the anti Semitism or historically, like at the time of the Second World War, Looking at some of those bureaucratic barriers that were informed by both political and social anti Semitism force the political and the social feed into each other, right?

But there was, like another aspect that a number of the films dealt with a lack of interest during the Holocaust and immediately thereafter.

Canada's borders were largely shot, too many quote unquote preferred European immigrants.

But in the years after the war, certainly those doors started slowly to open, and a lot of Jewish Holocaust survivors ended up making Canada their home.

But some of the films.

What they were looking at was a reluctance on the part of Canada to hear about these stories or a sense that the Holocaust didn't really have anything to do with Canada.

That Survivor should get over what happened.

And actually, one of the filmmakers that I wrote about in my dissertation is a Holocaust survivor who is based in Toronto, named Jack Cooper and when I interviewed him for the film, one of the works that he produced in 1960 so very, very early, only shortly thereafter.

The Diary of Anne Frank, the Hollywood version by George Stevens, was released in 1959 1960 CBC, where Jack Cooper was working.

At the time, he got a job at CBC and they produced a televised version of a play that he wrote called Sun in My Eyes, which is about part of his family's experiences during the Holocaust.

And he said at the time that he was writing this.

There was very, very little interest in exploring this topic, and the lack of interest kind of stemmed from a It's over.

Why are we still talking about this and be, Oh, this has nothing to do with Canada.

And so this is another example of those kind of like barriers that I was talking about in terms of the Holocaust experience and the Canadian kind of social political context.

These films are looking kind of critically at Canada's initial reluctance to first open the gates for those trying to flee Nazi Germany.

And second kind of this lack of interest at the time in hearing these stories and this is this has certainly changed.

You know, when we're talking about, you know, Jack Cooper.

Hearing this in the 19 sixties and as the Holocaust became more well known and people became more interested in it.

As you know, books and films about the Holocaust, new scholarship has been produced, But most of the films are kind of looking more at what we can learn, uh, kind of our political refusal to open the gates to those who were trying to flee.

And I think we're always trying to learn more and more and more more information comes out about issues around the Holocaust.

Jeremy.

One of the things I just wanted to sort of explore with you was how you felt the opportunity with your expertise coming to a museum, that museum being the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and having this focus on the Holocaust from musicological kind of standpoint.

As you said, it was your dream job.

And I think it's aptly put because I, you know, have to say that the amount of positive comments that come from that gallery as challenging, as difficult as emotionally wrenching as it is, it seems to have really settled in a way that people have an opportunity to learn to be surprised for.

Some who didn't know some of the history maybe tell us a little bit about how you felt your experience of what you were hoping to see, And I know there was a team involved.

But under your leadership, how you feel that that gallery has sat within the journey of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights?

Yeah, absolutely.

The Holocaust gallery had a very, very interesting developmental process.

It was always kind of understood that there was going to be a Holocaust gallery in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights right from the It was never intended to be a Holocaust museum with human rights at the periphery.

It was always intended to be a human rights museum.

But there was always a sense that it was important to look at the history of the Holocaust as a kind of a key and very widely used educational case study of genocide.

So as we were developing the content, the question was, Never should there be a gallery on the Holocaust in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

But what is the best way to do a Holocaust gallery within a museum?

Logical context in general, but then, also a Canadian human rights museum.

Logical context, specifically right.

One of the elements in the gallery that I think, as you say has taken people by surprise is a film.

It's kind of centred in the gallery.

There's a large theatre that has walls of that evoke broken glass.

Speaking to the night of broken glass.

Kristallnacht, the organised anti Jewish programme in 1938.

And this film looks at the history of anti Semitism in Canada in the 19 thirties and 19 forties as a complement of the historical information and the rest of the gallery that looks, of course, at anti Semitism in Nazi Germany and Nazi Europe.

More generally, and kind of disabusing a simplistic understanding of Canada's relationship to the Holocaust.

A lot of people might come in thinking, Oh, Canada and the Holocaust.

Canada fought on the side of the Allies to defeat Nazi Germany.

You know, we went to Europe and we rescued the Jews of Europe.

Isn't this wonderful?

Canada's efforts in defeating Nazi Germany were critically important.

But at the same time, that doesn't undo the fact that anti Semitism and anti Jewish sentiment in Canada was very prevalent at the time, and it informed the political response to the Jews trying to flee Nazi Germany.

So when the gallery first opened and I had the chance to speak to some visitors and guests and groups that were going through the gallery, the Holocaust is not a horror story that happened long ago and far away.

There are connections to Canada at the time and in Canada and the present and the lingering legacy of anti Semitism that continues to persist to today.

This is not just something that we should look at and be like, Oh, wasn't that awful?

Look how awful those were.

There is no human rights education in wagging your finger at past historical actors, right to put yourself in a position of moral vanity.

So what we're trying to do in that gallery is to get visitors to introspectively reflect on their own biases, their own prejudices, because we all have them because we're human and to kind of think critically about that, to think critically about Canada's role in relation to the Holocaust and also Canada's role in the international community.

More generally, if any listeners are interested in a kind of a broader discussion about the Holocaust gallery and the discussions that went into it and how this kind of human rights Canadian approach was manifest throughout the exhibit, myself and my predecessor, Clint Curle, did write a journal article.

It's free.

People don't have to register to get it.

But it goes into a lot of details to some of those discussions that informed how the Holocaust gallery was developed, including those moments of missteps where we had to, like, hit the pause button, take a few steps back and recalibrate through research and engagement with the community.

Yeah, I think it goes without saying that we were under a fairly significant microscope as we were having these conversations, Jeremy and I come back to the notion that there has been a tremendous acceptance.

I think of how the Canadian Museum for Human Rights positioned the Holocaust gallery in the journey, as we always talked about it inside that museum as a kind of that pivotal moment where we started to look at international issues in Canada's role.

I remember Jeremy one of the things that when we were talking about even developing some of the smaller, subtle things that happened in with respect to museums is Ralph Appelbaum, who was the designer and helping to sort of create and work with the narrative about what that looked like.

He made a comment once about where you had to pull out a drawer because there was something concealed inside a drawer and you had to pull it out towards you.

He was very adamant that these handles on the drawer should not be smooth.

They should have something that just is a little bit of a reminder of all of the pain that people went through, and they're not there to hurt you.

But it was a very subtle reminder to just say that just you're not opening a drawer simply, you're opening up, maybe a memory.

You're opening up something that is very meaningful to somebody.

So, you know, I think it's been really, really tremendous.

And I guess the one question I would ask Jeremy as we start to look at some of the things that you were involved in, what are some of the new elements that you might be looking at two with respect to to that gallery or any other galleries that you're involved in with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights?

Yeah, for sure.

So what?

One of the pieces that has kind of had a very profound impact on me recently that I've been working on.

I find artefacts are a really, really powerful way of bringing the Tanja bility of history to our visitors and those who have the opportunity to speak to.

And they can kind of lend a visual lens through which to think about these very, very complex histories that can sometimes feel kind of abstract when you think about it, right when you think about the six million right that titanic scale of the Holocaust, as important as that massive scale is to know and to teach about it can sometimes hide that he'd behind.

Those six million are six million individuals who had their own histories, who had their own dreams, have their own families had their own lives.

And sometimes artefacts are a way to kind of bring out some of those aspects that the six million can sometimes hide.

To give one example of a piece that I've been working on recently.

A few years ago, we brought into our collection.

It's a wallet, navy, blue, wallet, leather.

But this wall, it was made from pages of a Torah scroll that was looted during the Holocaust in Poland in the 19 forties.

So when you look at this wallet, first glance, it looks like a wallet.

You look at it a bit closer, you can see the Hebrew lettering on it, right?

We know that the Holocaust was a genocidal attempt to erase the Jewish people.

Conceptually, we know this right.

It was the genocide that helped Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the term genocide.

It helped him give a name to this idea of group destruction that he was interested in before the Holocaust.

But it was the Nazi aggression against Jews and the Nazi occupation of Poland that helped him going to put a name to this previously unnamed crime.

Right?

Right.

He's kind of the father of the definition of genocide exactly and kind of a very important contributor to the genocide convention of the United Nations.

So we know this attempt, cultural or Asia.

Is that what the Holocaust is?

But when you look at this wallet and you see the sacred writing on this wallet and the sacred material that has been glossed over and re signified into this crude and profane being the opposite of sacred object of commerce, you see a visual manifestation of this cultural Fraser.

That is not theoretical.

It's literal.

You see it because that which this was a Torah scroll that was used by a congregation in Eastern Europe has been profaned.

So we have this object in our collection and one of the things that looking at this that I wanted to do If this object is a manifestation of cultural erasure, what can we do with it?

And that's a human rights response to this, not just put it up and say what this is but there seems to be something more that we could do.

So I started engaging with some members of the Jewish community, including my cousin Steven Hyman and some rabbis that we had worked with previously.

And I thought Wouldn't it be powerful if we could figure out which sections of the Torah this is from?

Right?

So at the very least, we are not just accepting this as a wallet that was made from a Torah.

What was this when it was sacred?

And there is still sacred qualities that are retained?

This is something that some of the community members that we worked with just because it's now a wallet doesn't mean that there is not a sacred quality to this object as well.

But I thought would be great if we could figure out what these texts were.

So working with some local rabbis, including Rabbi Yosef Ben Roche, Orthodox rabbi from Winnipeg, we were able to figure out that most of the wall it was made from the book of numbers and kind of a billfold that is sewn onto it is from the Book of Exodus now, being able to re articulate what these pages of the Torah were from initially it felt like a means of undoing that attempted cultural or Asia if the creation of the wallet attempted to undo the Jewish meaning of the Torah as part of the Holocaust attempted, erase the Jewish people, re articulating that which this was seemed very important.

But even more important than figuring out what books of the Torah this while it was made from, was the process of engaging with the Jewish community because it is with the Jewish community of my cousin Steven Hyman, Rabbi Allen Green from parasitic Rabbi Yosef Ben Roche.

They were viewing this as a Torah, right?

They were treating this.

It was not a Torah that could be used for ritual purposes anymore, of course, but it was still something that had its sacred quality retained.

And this trading of this object with this reverence was a reputation of that with the effort of a racial that the wallet manifested in the creation.

So if the wallet manifested and attempted erasure, the treatment and the love with which this wallet was treated by the Jewish community is a reputation of that genocidal attempt, and it's also a declaration that the Jewish not only the Jewish quality of the text on the wall, it is still there by knowing what the text was.

But the treatment of it by the Jewish people shows the living reality of Judaism that continues to this day in spite of what the Nazis attempted to erase.

So that is where that powerful aspect to the wallet and the treatment of it by our Jewish partners really, really becomes powerful and becomes what I think is a human rights approach to Holocaust artefact.

Yeah, very well, said Jeremy.

So let me just explore a couple of things.

How old would you say?

Or do you know how old the wallet is?

Well, the donor of the wallet said that his mother acquired it from a marketplace and crack off, and I think it was 1941 or 1942 and this would have been around at the time that the Nazis were.

Indeed, I should stress that this is not a unique case.

The Nazis did loot Jewish homes in Jewish places of worship and kind of transform aspect things like the tor like Torah or prayer books into other commodity.

So this is, I should clarify that this is not a unique circumstances, but it would have been around those early years after the occupation of Poland in the early 19 forties.

In Poland, of course, had a very, very vibrant and large Jewish population.

So there were after the Nazi occupation.

There were a lot of synagogues in large Jewish population centres where materials like this would have been very rampant.

So I would guess it would have been produced probably shortly before it was acquired in the early 19 forties and was your sense.

Jeremy, as you are looking at this whole history and all the people that you've been involved in, was the sense that when the original person who purchased this wallet did they realise what it was, or did that happen over time?

How is it that it was discovered that this, you know, piece of a wallet?

I'm buying a wallet?

I happen to buy a wallet at a market and all of a sudden somebody looks at it and says, This is not really a wallet.

Myself and Steven Hyman are are actually in the process of writing an article that explores all of these questions that we're hoping will be published in a collection by the are the U.

S Holocaust Memorial Museum and the not too distant future.

In short, the individual who purchased the wall as far as we know from the donor it was his mother and she did not know what the wallet was when she acquired it.

And the doctor himself was quite young at the time.

But he recalls learning from his mother eventually that this was not just a wallet.

This was a wallet that was made up of Jewish holy books.

And as he got older, it became more and more important for the family to protect and preserve this wallet.

It wasn't being used as a wallet.

Once it became clear what it was, and they're kind of a long history of where the wallet was, where they were going to send it to how how they were going to preserve it.

But the importance of the wall it was very, very clear to the donor, and his family, like the wallet, was formally kind of donated to the museum.

I think it was in 2016.

If I'm not mistaken, and then I did an oral history interview with the donor in 2017, where he provided some background, some more background to the wallet.

But I think he first approached some of the early founders of the museum, maybe even Israel Asper himself, and maybe the very, very late nineties or very early two thousands about this piece so well before we would have been in the position to bring anything into a collection because a collection didn't exist yet.

But the donor said, like as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights was being developed, you kind of knew that this could be a very important home for this piece.

So we were very, very pleased when he kind of restarted that conversation.

And then we were able to bring it in and have a oral history with the donor as well, and that we're able to share the story in this publication from the U.

S.

Holocaust Museum that will hopefully be coming shortly.

That's fantastic.

And Jeremy, I don't know if you are in a position, and maybe there's some questions I may ask that you're saying, Look, we're still working on or we would like to maybe hold off until this article gets published or publicly, but I'm interested in how you look at an object that is this important in terms of the opportunity to be a part of bringing another element of what the Holocaust means today in Canada as an item that might be, you know, a musicological item, an item that an artefact that might appear in a museum versus a community that wants to be maybe holding onto that as a community peace versus something that becomes more of a public peace.

Yeah, those were certainly some of the, uh I don't know if we ever discussed it specifically with our partners in the Jewish community, including religious leaders.

Yeah, but it was something that was always kind of maybe percolating beneath the surface.

I guess maybe this is a testament to the fact that the Holocaust gallery has been very well received in general, maybe not universally well received in general by the Jewish community.

They've been very, very supportive of the fact that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights has a different mandate than a Holocaust museum specifically.

And so the Holocaust Gallery makes sense that it's approached in a somewhat different way than a Holocaust museum specifically.

But the general sense with the community members that we worked with were very, very pleased that a of the wall it was going to be in an institution that has the ability to preserve it and kind of a professional and best practises capacity.

But then also that the story could be brought out more generally Now, in an ideal world, we haven't had the wallet on display now, and we try to incorporate as much detail as we can.

But in order to fact labels, it's very you can only incorporate so many details.

In an ideal world, we wouldn't have put it on display until we had this article out.

We might have been able to have a programme, but unfortunately the pandemic has changed things.

Some loans that we were anticipating from external institutions were not able to happen because of the pandemic.

So we had a space where we without the wallet, we could you bring the wallet out to fill a space so you know we're not living in ideal times, but I'm hoping that as things will open back up and they eventually started getting back to normal we will be able to do some more public programming and more educational opportunity is about about this piece.

But other pieces as well, of course.

And you know, certainly, hopefully, whenever we do a public programme, we try to connect the past in the present in a certain way.

Not not to have to be careful when you connect the past and present that you don't just use the past as a kind of a careless launching off point to talk about something in the present right.

You want to do justice to both right, But certainly the anti Semitism and anti Jewish sentiment and more generally, a sense of other ring positioning.

The other is inferior and dangerous.

The wallet kind of evokes certainly has connections to human rights issues at the present.

So again, we're looking forward to being able to have opportunities to tell those stories more generally.

And in the meantime, I'm hoping that for those who are interested in a bit of a deeper dive will be this publication that will come out.

It's about difficult material.

History is generally that's what the book is about, not just about the Holocaust, but that's where the collection will be, Yeah, very interesting.

Fascinating.

And and, of course, as we're talking about January 27th being the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, you know, this is another example of some of the things in the great work that you at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights are doing.

Jeremy, we talked a little bit about because I saw on your website there's a Yiddish poem, but if you want to talk a little bit about the history of what that is all about, and people want to have a look and they can see this, they can go on.

The CMH are Canadian Museum for Human Rights website, but talk a little bit about the history of how that found itself in where it is.

Yeah, so this is another object that has been very, very profound to work with.

It's a home that was written in Yiddish in January 1943 by an individual named Herschel Zinberg.

Terry's in Joburg, and he wrote this poem in the midst of the Holocaust while he was living through it, and when he wrote this poem, Personal ended up surviving the Holocaust, and this poem ended up being like many artefacts from history ended up being an attic in an attic for decades, and it was only discovered well after Hershel and Hurdles Brother, who actually had the poem in his possession passed away, and it was discovered many years later by his Children.

And it was Herschel son who ended up donating home to the museum.

But the poem, The Yiddish poem, written January 1943 is very, very interesting because it evokes.

As I said, Hershel survived the Holocaust.

But when you read the poem, it was presented with a translation that was already done by two local Yiddish ists into English to Winnipeg based fetishists.

I should specify there's very much a sense that Herschel did not think he was going to survive when he wrote this poem, and there is a sense of the poem has a sense of hope, hopelessness and despair and the brutal conditions under which he was writing this and we don't know, 100%.

Like many historical artefacts, you don't know 100% some of it is deduction, But we believe he probably wrote this when he was in the Rodham, Ghetto Rodham R.

A.

D.

O.

M.

In Poland, and he was witnessing the brutal conditions of the ghetto.

And the poem also includes, in addition to this despair, a sense of hope that the Jewish people, the Jewish culture, he calls it the Yiddish gate.

We'll continue in some capacity in this world or the next, so there's a sense of hopelessness and despair, but also a sense of desperate hope as well.

And one of the interesting things that you kind of start delving into when you have a piece like this.

I started doing some more research into the time period of the random ghetto, and again this is deduction.

And this has explored a little bit in that Web story that visitors can find on our website.

I think that at the date of the poem that he wrote this, I believe there was a deportation happening in the Rodham ghetto of victims who were eventually sent to a death camp.

Now I don't believe based on his age at the time, he would have been a young man, and I think the deportation at that time would have been older people, possibly his parents.

So I think there's a strong possibility that he might have written this poem as a deportation was occurring from the ghetto into the camp.

And this is where you get a sense of kind of that threat.

He talks about boots moving in the snow and the sense of danger.

So I think as he's writing this, it's not obviously in a ghetto is not abstract danger, but I think it's very literal.

There are things that he's witnessing and feeling at that time, and I think that that poem and the fact that it's in Yiddish, this is a language that was almost entirely lost because it was a language that brought that was spoken by a lot of Jewish communities and Jewish small towns in Eastern Europe.

It was a language that kind of connected Jews of many different nationalities because it was a language that they shared even if they didn't share their nationalities, they shared the sense of language.

The fact that it's written in Yiddish is also kind of a means, and the fact that it survived in Herschel survived, and yet the Yiddish language is still.

Certainly there's not many, many speakers of the Yiddish language.

But it's something that does survive.

There is a sense of hope that this poem evokes, even as it kind of speaks to the history of the Holocaust and the danger that her Steinberg would have felt at the time that he was writing at and very, very powerful as well for the his son.

And when we put the poem on display, we welcomed his son and his family, and they came and got to see this poem that had been folded up and held in a not in a disrespectful way.

This is just what happens with people's material stuff.

Over years it was discovered, and now it's brought out and being used for educational purposes.

So Jeremy, one of the things that has I learned in my time at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and and learning from people like you and others who mentioned Clint Curle, you know, when I come back to what this podcast is really kind of making, I guess you know the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust was or Holocaust Remembrance Day to really talk about the memory of the victims.

And I think that one of the things that I learned even in the time I was fortunate to go to advice, um, is how the Jewish people have really taken this horrific event, this genocide and not concentrated so much on the numbers.

Although the numbers are clearly staggering at six million and maybe more, but that there is the ability to put a name to a person, a place where they were born so that they become their memory is about a person, not a number.

And I think the examples that you're talking about with the wallet and the poem, the Yiddish poem, If somebody wrote it, somebody made it.

Somebody had it.

You know, just that that very personal attachment and I would just love your sort of thoughts on the importance of how that is in terms of how you're able to bring visitors in to let them see the importance of how the Holocaust has been, I think, presented in a way that it makes it very personal.

It's not about numbers, it's about human beings about its live loss about victims.

Yeah, absolutely.

Just before getting to the museum, one of the very, very powerful commemorative approaches.

I don't know if other Jewish communities do it across Canada.

I imagine they probably do, but one of them is called on to every person.

There is a name in normal times.

It's held every year at the Manitoba Legislature, and then different people from the community read the names of individuals who have family that have come to Winnipeg, and it lasts for several hours.

And this is just people whose descendants are in Winnipeg.

And you read these names, these people of blessed memory, so very much.

There is that sense of the importance of remembering the individual.

As important as it is to remember the scale, I don't get me wrong.

The importance of the scale is very important as well, but it's important that the scale does not lose the individual aspects to it.

And you had mentioned Ralph Applebaum, the fantastic designer of the inaugural exhibitions, including the Holocaust Gallery at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

And it's a subtle strategy that I don't know if people get until you hear it, and then when you hear it, you're like, Oh yeah, so in like to get visitors drawn in in a museum.

Individual stories.

You really can't beat it because that's where you get that individual impact.

You know, you can hear about the anti Jewish persecution, anti Jewish laws.

When you hear about someone who's, you know, an individual who lost his job or someone who was not able to play at her tennis club anymore or sit on the bench that you should sit on the fence, that's where you kind of see the town.

That kind of individual impacts of this.

One of the things that Ralph Applebaum and his team did is that the walls of the Holocaust gallery are kind of layered, both in terms of physical, like you have panels that are physically at one level you have another panel that slightly set back from it and then also visually.

So you have images that are kind of in the foreground, images that are in the background.

Some are lighter in colour.

Some are darker, so you bring forward these individual stories.

But that layered approach is that there are more.

This is not a story that stands for everything else because every story is unique, but this is an individual story that brings you into that history brings you into an individual aspect.

But the layering shows that there are so many more stories like this, and I think that's a very, very powerful way of kind of bringing together that balancing that kind of the mass and the individuality and what museums can do as terms of drawing visitors in through a story but not implying that this story is the only one or necessarily the most important one.

It's a signifier of these other stories, these countless other stories that exist kind of alongside and behind it.

Yeah, for sure.

No, thanks.

Thanks, Jeremy, for that, Jeremy.

One of the things I just wanted to ask, and I know that this is maybe not necessarily part of your expertise, but just you know, if there's anything that you might illuminate from what you have seen and your studies with the genocide and the Holocaust and how that has all come forward and some of the elements around that if anything, you can illuminate about the residential school system in Canada.

Yeah, for sure.

So the Holocaust and the residential school system in Canada, these are obviously distinct historical events, like every historical event, has its own context and its own unique characteristics.

But there are there's a saying.

History doesn't repeat that sometimes at Ryan's.

And there are certainly rhythmic and practical connections between the experiences of indigenous peoples in Canada and the Holocaust.

Of course, this is not to conflate the two, but there are certainly similarities.

And certainly when you look through the lens of genocide as an attempt to destroy a group as a group, when you look at the work of Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide for him, genocide was not to be conflated with immediate mass killing.

So when you think about some of the iconic aspects of the hall across the gas chambers, the killing fields of Eastern Europe by the mobile killing squads, things like this can be a component of genocide.

But the attempted group eradication is broader than that, right?

So the attempt, what he blinking describes it as the replacement of the national pattern.

He calls it national pattern of the oppressed group by that of the oppressor.

So when you think about this, the attempted erasure imposed imposed forcibly by colonial measures is intimately bound up with the concept of genocide.

They can't really be separated from each other.

And for Lemkin, he was interested in the idea of group destruction before the Holocaust.

The Holocaust helped him give a name to this concept.

But he continued working on group destruction after after this and at the time of his death in 1959 he was working on a broad history of genocide internationally and in his papers.

There are a lot of materials on instances of genocide and colonisation, including Spanish colonisation of the Americas, the British colonisation of Tasmania, the early 20th century German colonisation of Namibia and the genocide of the Herero and Nama pupils.

So Lincoln, as far as I know, Lincoln didn't write about the Canadian case.

Specifically, I don't think it's not crazy to think that he if he if he hadn't died in the middle of this project, he may have.

And even if he wouldn't have his discussion about colonial genocide and colonial measures of group Fraser, such as killing and creating conditions intended to cause death or that would be reasonably assumed it to cause death, removal of Children from their families, which is a clear case in the Indian residential school system in Canada.

Other aspects basically intended to prevent the future of the group as a group.

These are clear commonalities that colonial genocides, including that in Canada, hold in common with genocides such as the Holocaust.

So it's not to say that every genocide occurs in the exact same way with the exact same steps.

But the attempted group, AirAsia and attempted group eradication is something that I think there is a commonality that the Holocaust can illuminate in thinking about the experiences of indigenous peoples in Canada and vice versa.

It's a whole other conversation to have Jeremy again.

I know where your level of expertise is and the way that you were able to illuminate your thoughts on this very, very much.

Appreciate your time.

So let me just throw the last one to you.

Jeremy, I love how you came at this and how you got interested in studying the Holocaust as a young person with Schindler's List.

I mean, there's always a pivot.

There's something that happens for those visitors that come through the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and go through the Holocaust gallery specifically what would you want them to leave thinking as they're leaving that and looking at going into the next gallery, which talks about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, etcetera.

But what would you hope that their takeaway would be from their experience in that gallery?

I think I was summarised it in kind of two things that I hope they take away.

One is the need for vigilance.

So even when human rights are very, very powerful, they're also very, very vulnerable, is very easy for human rights to be stripped.

And it's important to be vigilant when individuals are being dehumanised because of who they are because of the groups that they belong to.

So you look at the case of the Holocaust gallery.

It starts within the Weimar Republic after the first World War in general, a fragile democracy but a democracy nonetheless with a constitution that on paper had rights enshrined.

But if rights are not lived and believed in a society writes on paper, don't really mean too much if they can be undone.

So we want visitors to think about the need to be vigilant in order to protect human rights even when we think we are in a situation where we don't have too much worry about human rights abuses.

So vigilance.

The second one visitors to think about is the importance of individual agency in action.

Visitors, of course, can go through the gallery in any order that they want.

They can go through the museum in any order that they want.

But if they go through the gallery in terms of how it's kind of laid out and designed as part of the museum journey, the last exhibit that they see is a large, monumental artefact case.

The backdrop of the artefact cases, some aerial shots of Auschwitz, the original camp at Auschwitz and then Auschwitz Birkenau, which is sort of the iconic camp of the large tower.

Lots of barracks crematoria.

So these aerial shots are intended to signify the massive industrial scale of the Holocaust that almost beggars the imagination.

It was so big and it was able to be big because it was industrialist.

But juxtaposed with these aerial shots are some objects that speak to some of the smaller decisions that were needed in order for the Holocaust to be perpetrated.

On that scale.

As an example, transport lists for a group of Jews who had to be transported through a transit camp in Drancy, France, who ultimately ended up in Auschwitz.

Order forms for the Zyklon B canisters that would be used to poison Jews and other groups in the gas chambers blueprints to design the crematoria.

So these are actions that were needed in order for the genocide to be perpetrated.

So it's not only the example that I give, I'm sure you've seen Schindler's List.

Stuart, and probably many of your listeners have as well.

You have that scene where Ray finds character M and girth is on his balcony, and he's just wanting the shooting Jews at the camp, just picking them off with a rifle.

The Jews, they have nowhere to hide.

Those who are not shattered is continuing to cower and work as best they can.

And it is very easy.

I love Schindler's List.

I think it's a fabulous film.

It got me into my entire S, shaped my life.

But it's very easy for me to to not identify with Eman girth at that moment, right, like there's no introspection and like I would never find my I can't even imagine and finding myself in a situation.

We're doing that.

So that's where you get that sense of moral vanity like I would never do that.

But when you start thinking about some of the smaller actions, I mean, I don't know who Drew, who drafted the blueprints for the crematoria at Birkenau.

I don't know who typed up the order form for this lifeline began.

Mr Well, you start thinking about how your day to day actions and how your actions might interact with the individual actions of other people, how those might interact and contribute to human rights in either a positive or negative way.

And I think that's what I want visitors to think about is how their actions matter.

So it's not just about looking back and viewing not only the Holocaust but other human rights.

Historical abuses that are explored throughout the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is not just looking back to learn about what happened, but it's to reflect on the why and how some of those wires reflect on the individual choices and actions that you might make in the present.

Not all of them will be as consequential, of course, as drafting a transport list to drown sorrows.

But you might be blessed to never have to make those choices or realise that or not to realise that you're making those choices of such horrific scale.

But individual actions matter.

And when we start to think about how our actions can contribute to human rights, I think that's where you can get a real sense of what you the power that you have as an individual and within your sphere of influence.

Well, on that note, Jeremy, I would say that I'm very thankful that you would take this time to have this conversation with me today.

And I think that on the broader scale that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is thankful that your expertise and others have played a significant role in talking about the education, the advocacy for human rights through the lens of the horror of what took place in the Holocaust.

So thank you so much for today.

I really appreciate it, and I do look forward to the next opportunity when you and I have a chance to have a conversation.

It was my pleasure, Stewart.

Thank you very much for inviting me and I just want to take this opportunity also to thank you for your leadership role in navigating the museum through its opening and through those very, very challenging years before.

It was very much a pleasure to work under your leadership.

And I'm just glad to have this opportunity to reconnect now.

Thank you so much, Jeremy.

Really appreciate it.

You take care of humans on Rights is recorded and hosted by Stuart Murray Social Media Marketing by the Creative Team at Full current and Winnipeg Thanks also to trick Seem a Bit You in Music by Doug Edmund For more go to Human rights hub dot C A produced and distributed by the Sound Off Media Company.