Never again? Second World War did not end anti-Semitism
According to Statistics Canada, there are about 877,000 people living in this country who are between the ages of 85 and 100. Whoever they are, wherever they live now or lived in the past, they all have one thing in common: They lived through the six years of the Second World War.
Of that number, several thousand are among the approximately one million Canadians who enlisted to fight what was generally accepted to be a direct and real threat to the lives and liberty of freedom-loving people all over the world. Canada’s population was 11 million in 1939. Do the math.
Hundreds of thousands more took on civilian tasks in the all-out war effort, from women working in factories to families growing Victory Gardens.
Of the one million in uniform, 45,000 died and 55,000 were wounded in the wars in Europe or Asia and even close to these shores.
Remembrance Day is the time when people, while honouring the war dead, perhaps should be seized with the fact that living among us today – our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents – are people who endured what was undeniably the worst of all human times. They remember. How could they forget?
It’s also worth remembering that, were it not for a few twists of circumstances, such as the steely and canny resistance of the Brits in the Battle of Britain, the United Kingdom could well have been an early and special prize for Hitler – and then what?
Eighty years ago, the tide was turning on what had seemed a near-hopeless situation in Europe. By the spring of 1943, the Allies had gained the upper hand in the Battle of the Atlantic, opening the passage of troops and munitions from Canada and the United States to Europe.
Until then, Nazi submarines had even roamed into the St. Lawrence River and Gulf, torpedoing ships and claiming the lives of hundreds of Canadian and Newfoundland seamen and civilians.
With the Americans now engaged in the war in Europe as well as the Pacific, the Allies pushed the Nazis from North Africa, then in July 1943 began the long and bloody battle to liberate Italy in which Canadians played a key role. That campaign weakened the Nazi fortress and set the stage for D-Day in June 1944.
On the eastern front, Hitler’s assault on former ally Russia ended in catastrophe in the frozen hell of Stalingrad and drained Nazi forces for the defence of western Europe.
The Nazis were defeated and with the liberation of Europe, the vast horror of the extermination camps was revealed to the world.
Eighty-four years after the start of the Second World War and 90 years after Hitler seized power in Germany with his plan to rid the world of Jews, there’s another assault on the Jewish people, this time in their own state.
The perpetrator this time is Hamas, and its members are less discreet than the Nazis were in their ambition to wipe out Jews. Though word leaked out about the Nazi death camps, they were operated in secret, to the extent that the locals could claim ignorance of what was going on with all those trains full of people passing by and the smoke from the crematorium stacks.
How times have changed. Now the modern exterminators of the Jews proudly post videos of the horrific slaughter on Oct. 7 on social media for all to see.
Those who really remember on Remembrance Day, those who were there and knew firsthand the unimaginable pain and sacrifice of the Second World War, may have thought the disease of anti-Semitism had been stamped out for all time.
Never again, they may have thought. Those defiant words come from a 1927 poem about the suicidal Jewish resistance to the Roman siege at Masada more than 2,000 years ago. It next appears on signs scrawled by liberated death camp survivors in 1945.
Never again? More like again and again, always.
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