Ninety-five-year old Toronto resident Elly Gotz survived the Holocaust along with both his parents.
“I never went to high school, because in 1941, the war started,” says Gotz. “They attacked the Jews in Lithuania… They grabbed Jews in the street and tied them up and robbed them and killed them.”
Gotz’s family was moved to the Kovno ghetto. There, the Germans came house to house, first seizing their family’s valuables and later seizing their books.
Years later, they were sent to Dachau, the Nazis’ first concentration camp, where Gotz first did construction labour 12 hours a day.
“When we came home, we got a litre of soup. Water soup. If a potato floated in the soup it was a good day: no meat, no fat, nothing and one slice of bread for the whole day.”
“So we starved. At first the older people died and then the young ones started to die.”
A job at pump station, where a kind German officer snuck him extra food, kept him and his father alive.
When the Americans liberated the camp on April 29, 1945, his father weighed 65 pounds.
Gotz says it was “very, very upsetting” to learn that Parliament recently honoured Second World War veteran Yaroslav Hunka, who served in a Nazi unit, as a “Ukrainian hero and a Canadian hero.”
“It shows the ignorance, even in high places, of our history,” says Gotz, who gives talks to thousands of students each year. “We need to know our history.”
The Second World War “is simply an event in history that we have to better understand,” says Tim Cook, chief historian at the Canadian War Museum and author of 17 books on Canadian military history.
Even though about one in 10 Canadians served in the Second World War, Hunka was honoured out of “ignorance for understanding the complex history of the [war], when the Soviet Union was our ally,” Cook says.
“History has almost become an elective subject with no importance,” says Bernie Farber, who is the founding chair of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
The incident was “surprising and shocking,” he said, because it involved members of Parliament. “But if you were to go up and ask the average person, ‘Who fought against the Soviets between ’41 and ’45?’ they would not know what you’re talking about.”
‘Failure of democracy’
A 2018 survey commissioned by the Azrieli Foundation and the Claims Conference, an organization that helps Holocaust survivors around the world get compensation, identified significant gaps in Canadians’ knowledge about the Holocaust.
While 85 per cent of survey participants said they knew about the Holocaust, almost 25 per cent thought that fewer than two million Jews were murdered, instead of the six million who actually died. Almost 50 per cent of adults surveyed could not name a camp or ghetto associated with the Holocaust. Many did not know the Holocaust occurred in countries other than Germany.
And young survey respondents, those aged 18 to 34, knew even less about the Holocaust.
Yet, the survey also showed the importance of education. Of those who knew about the Holocaust, 40 per cent said they learned about it in school. Almost 72 per cent said they thought Holocaust education should be mandatory in school.
Farber agrees. “There should actually be a course of study called Holocaust Education,” he says, not just a course on genocide.
“By looking at the particular you can extrapolate to the general,” he said. “The Holocaust, because it’s so well-documented and because it can be taught in an early grade and because it has ample lessons for everyone, it should be part of a curriculum.”
Curriculum for several elementary and high school social studies and history courses across Canada include study of the Holocaust. But teachers can choose how much they want to emphasize it, if at all. Often it might just be mentioned in a Canadian history lesson or in a discussion of how nationalism can lead to genocide.
This fall, Ontario introduced new requirements for Grade 6 social studies. Now, teachers are to teach students the history of Jewish communities in Canada, including antisemitism, and how Canada responded to the Holocaust. This includes talking about the restrictions Canada placed on Jewish immigration.
Just knowing facts about the Holocaust “doesn’t mean it’s understood,” said Audrey Licop, the deputy executive director at the Montreal Holocaust Museum.
Students need to know that Canada restricted Jewish immigration, said Licop. They also need to know how the Holocaust led to the development of human rights laws. This education can make them better citizens, she said.
The Holocaust was a “failure of democracy,” she said. “As a citizen, you have to know that to understand your role to protect the value of democracy.”
Hearing from survivors
Teaching the Holocaust can be challenging, especially for elementary school teachers who aren’t trained to be historians, said Mina Cohn, chair of the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship. The Ottawa-based organization provides lesson plans and resources to teachers and helps connect them to survivors. It has developed teaching resources, particularly for Ontario’s new curriculum.
“I’m glad we have something in Grade 6,” she said. “I hope there will be a continuation.”
Hearing from survivors is critical, said Cohn, whose parents were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. “Probably this is the last generation that will have the opportunity to do that.”
Scott Masters has been inviting Holocaust survivors into his high school history classes at Toronto’s Crestwood Preparatory College since 2005. That year, Max Eisen, author of the award-winning memoir By Chance Alone, came to speak.
Since then, Masters and his students have visited survivors in their homes and over Zoom — occasionally connecting with survivors in Israel. The students record interviews with the survivors and these recordings become part of the school’s oral history project, available for free online.
In a more than 30-year teaching career, Masters said, this has been the most rewarding part.
“Very few kids have spoken with people from that generation. So they often times know very little about the Holocaust and very little about the war in general,” said Masters, whose grandfathers both fought in the Second World War.
The lessons also help students understand current geopolitical conflicts. “That kind of hatred and prejudice and violence shows up all too often in history,” said Masters. “I think it’s pretty important to clue kids into that.”
Holocaust survivor Gotz is not a bitter man. When he speaks to students, he tells them that, one day, in the year after he was liberated from Dachau, he decided to stop hating the Germans.
“I want [the students I speak to] to have a better life by not giving into hate.”
Very sad the way Notth America has left the genocide of 8 million people out of the history books. Never Again means nothing if our children and their children have no knowledge of history. Lest we forget is happening.