By Joel Goldenberg
The Suburban
The Gelber Centre was packed Monday night for the Montreal Holocaust Museum’s commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp where more than a million Jews were slaughtered.
On hand were the Consul-General of Germany, the Deputy Consul of Italy, federal Liberal leadership candidate Chrystia Freeland; former federal Liberal Pablo Rodriguez, who plans to seek the Quebec Liberal leadership; Liberal MPs Anthony Housefather, Anna Gainey, Alexandra Mendès and Rachel Bendayan; and D’Arcy McGee MNA Elisabeth Prass. UFC star Georges St-Pierre was on hand earlier in the evening.
MHM president Jacques Saada thanked the large audience for attending, saying “it means so much — today, especially, as we are going through a revival of antisemitism around the world.”
Rodriguez asked the community to work together “for a future in which such atrocities like the Holocaust never, never happen again. Let us commit ourselves to transmitting this memory to future generations so that history does not repeat itself and human dignity is preserved for all.”
The main event at the commemoration was an interview of Holocaust survivor George Reinitz by longtime CBC journalist Peter Mansbridge. Born in Hungary and now in his 93rd year, Reinitz came to Canada in 1948, and became a world class wrestler and a successful businessman with Jaymar Furniture, founded by Reinitz in 1956.
Reinitz, who was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 12 in 1944 and was the only member of his immediate family to survive, told the harrowing story of his daily battles to find food to eat — this included risking his life to leave his barracks at night to find discarded potato skins, which he shared with others. One time, he was caught, but an intoxicated guard let him live.
Asked by Manbridge if he was worried that history could repeat itself, especially with the current level of antisemitism, Reinitz said that education is the way to counter this.
“There are always going to be people who want to kill you, whether it’s because you’re a Jew or a Christian” he said. “We came a long way from those days when I was a kid. Antisemitism is going to be here forever. We’re lucky we have an Israel where we can go and fight and try to survive.”
Mansbridge told Reinitz that one way to counter antisemitism is to “make sure people like you tell their story.
“Without you reminding us of what happened, people will forget….The answers are education and leaving behind a record, which you’ve done many times.”
Reinitz later received a surprise, a wrestling sweater from longtime Concordia wrestling coach Victor Zilberman and a letter of tribute from Wrestling Canada read by Zilberman’s son David, a Canadian Olympic freestyle wrestler. n