By M.Buie (FSWC Educator)
Connection to Grade 6 Social Studies:
Strand B.3.5- Canadian government response to the Holocaust, acts of hate and human rights violations. Learning on the impact that global changes in understanding and legislation around human rights since World War II have had on the development of Canada’s responses to acts of hate and human rights violations.
November, a time for remembering past sacrifices made by Canadian soldiers, provides a yearly opportunity for teachers to build understanding and empathy about why the Holocaust is relevant for young Canadians to learn about today. With only few eyewitnesses to the Second World War still alive, we can remind students that young Canadians, some not much older than themselves, were among the first to help liberate Nazi concentration camps in Western Europe.
The persecution of Europe’s Jewish communities was not the main motivation for Canada’s entry into the Second World War in 1939; nonetheless, the horrific crimes of the Nazi regime were impossible for Canadian soldiers to ignore when they entered the gates of camps, including Westerbork in the Netherlands and Bergen Belsen in Germany. Young men, many barely out of their teens, far removed from home and their usual lives, were among the first people to encounter the depravity and scale of the genocide against Jews in Europe. Their encounters at the camp were “haunting, transformative experiences that forever changed their lives.” (Kingdom of Night: Witnesses to the Holocaust (2021) by Mark Celinscak)
Canadian forces arrived at Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, just days after the liberation of Westerbork, joining the British who had secured the peaceful surrender of the camp days before. Canadians provided support, bore witness, and documented the crimes of Nazi Germany. What they ultimately witnessed there was unimaginable: arriving amid a terrible typhus epidemic, Canadians found 13,000 emaciated corpses lying scattered throughout the camp, about 60,000 mostly Jewish living inmates, starving and sick. About 500 were children. Teenage Anne Frank had died there of typhus, just weeks before the camp was liberated. Combat pilot Brian MacConnell described the experience of witnessing these horrors, stating, “I’m pretty sure we were taken there to tell people what we had seen. We were in complete shock. I couldn’t believe a civilized country like Germany could do such a thing.”
By all accounts, Canadian forces were overwhelmed by what they encountered and ill-prepared for the work at hand, left without adequate supplies, equipment and medicine. Even so, they provided important relief in a variety of ways. One Jewish Canadian soldier, Sol Goldberg, became frustrated with the pace of official relief efforts and initiated some of his own, including collecting blankets, clothing, boots and food from fellow enlisted men. He allegedly even cut a hole in the camp’s fences and smuggled supplies directly to survivors, who trusted him because he spoke fluent Yiddish. Jack Markovitch, a Jewish soldier from Montreal, participated in the arrest of the camp commandant, Josef Kramer, who was later sentenced to death.
Despite the best efforts of Canadian and other Allied soldiers, medical professionals and volunteers, roughly 14,000 more inmates tragically died over the next month, succumbing to typhus, cholera, dysentery and general starvation. The trauma of witnessing the terrible consequences of Nazi policies forever changed Canadian soldiers, but their suffering was not in vain. Aside from the immediate relief they provided, their first-hand accounts are an invaluable part of the historical record. The voices of witnesses became instrumental in the fight against Holocaust denial and distortion in subsequent decades.
Further Reading:
Kingdom of Night: Witnesses to the Holocaust (2021) by Mark Celinscak
https://legionmagazine.com/liberating-the-death-camps/
https://ellinbessner.com/2023/02/how-canadian-soldiers-liberated-the-nazi-death-camps-in-ww2/
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