Canadian War Museum
Ottawa, Ontario
April 28,2015
As delivered
Cherished survivors, honoured veterans, distinguished guests, fellow Canadians:
Seventy years ago tomorrow the United States Seventh Army arrived at the notorious Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. A first-hand report from a Turkish journalist who had been imprisoned there, because of his reports from the Warsaw Ghetto, reads as follows:
“The detachment under the command of the American major had not come directly to the Jorhaus, it had made a detour by way of the marshalling yard, where the convoy of deportees normally arrived and departed.
“There they found some fifty-odd cattle cars parked on the tracks-the cars were not empty. The train was full of corpses, piled one on the other, 2,310 of them to be exact. The train had come from Birkenau and the dead were Hungarian and Polish Jews, children among them. Their journey had lasted perhaps thirty or forty days.
“They had died of hunger, of thirst, of suffocation, of being crushed or of being beaten by the guards… They were all practically dead when they arrived at Dachau station.
“The SS did not take the trouble to unload them. They simply decided to stand guard and shoot down any with enough strength left to emerge from the cattle cars. The corpses were strewn everywhere – on the rails, the steps, the platforms.”
“I never saw anything like it in my life,” said Lieutenant Harold Mayer, “Every one of my men became raving mad.”
In some ways, the Holocaust of the Jewish people began and ended at Dachau.
The first Nazi concentration camp, it was established by SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler just three months after Hitler came to power. First it housed political enemies of the regime and petty criminals. But as the Nazi terror expanded, its population of victims grew to include homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovahs Witnesses, the mentally and physically disabled. Following the Kristallnacht in 1938, it began to imprison Jews for the crime of being Jewish. Some of its last victims were those Polish and Hungarian Jews encountered by the US Army, who having survived the Birkenau extermination camp, were shipped westward to Dachau just prior to the liberation of Auschwitz.
In some ways, Dachau perfectly incarnates what Hannah Arendt later called “the banality of evil.” According to the New York Times of April 30, 1945:
“Bavarian peasants – who traveled this road daily – ignored both the bodies and the horrors inside the camp to turn the American seizure of their city into an orgy of looting. Even German children rode by the bodies without a glance.”
And so as we gather together solemnly to discharge the duty of zachor – of remembrance – we are moved to silence in contemplating the mystery of this evil, reduced to such banality by Hitler’s willing executioners.
We are reduced to silence because it is impossible for us to grasp the immense depravity of the Holocaust. As theologian Arthur Cohen wrote:
“The Holocaust is evil torn free of its moorings in reason and causality, an ordinary secular corruption raised to unimaginable powers of magnification and limitless extremity.”
This is why the Holocaust is a lesson, a sign, for all of humanity, and for all of history.
It is why we must relentlessly fight efforts to deny it, but also to diminish it through false analogies.
And it is why we must never end the work of remembrance.
Every year we are moved to reverence at this ceremony by the presence of survivors of the Shoah. But every year, fewer of them are with us. Which is why we must – and are – renewing the work of remembrance.
It is why we will soon see the National Holocaust Memorial raise within sight of this place, as a sign for future generations.
It is why the Government of Canada is supporting efforts to record the testimony of our survivors, such as the March of the Living Digital Archive Project, so that their memory will be transmitted down through the centuries.
It is why we have erected the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Canada’s heartland, to forever remind us of the consequences of denying the inviolable dignity of the human person.
And we will continue to remember the other great genocides of the “century of tears,” including the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, which we commemorated last week with the House of Commons adopting a motion to establish April as Genocide Remembrance, Condemnation and Prevention Month.
Finally, we must give real meaning to the commandment “never again” which comes to us from the voices of the survivors. Because as Elie Wiesel reminds us:
We must take sides… Sometimes we must interfere. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race or religion, that place must- at that moment- become the center of the universe.
That is in part why we have deployed the Canadian Armed Forces to join the fight against the genocidal antisemitic death cult of Daesh, the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. By acting with our allies, we have saved countless innocents – Christians, Yazidis, and others, from attempted genocide.
Just as Canadian troops helped to liberate Bergen-Belsen seventy years ago this month, today Canadians are helping to defend human dignity against genocide.
And so today we rededicate ourselves to a world without genocide, as we call to mind the sacred memory of the six million in the words of the Mourners’ Kaddish:
‘oseh shalom bimromav
Hu ya’ase shalom ‘alenu
V’al kol yisra’el, v’imru amen
“May He who makes peace in His high places grant peace upon us, and upon all his nation Israel, and say Amen.”
