Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies (FSWC) hosted 40 Grade 11 students from a Catholic high school outside of the greater Toronto area at our education center in North York today. They joined us for the Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust workshop. There were a lot of students from Italian and Polish backgrounds and as a result this shaped some of the questions and comments made by students. A lot of them knew about the Nazi invasion of Poland, for example, and one student asked for more information about the secret treaty made between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia (the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of mutual non-aggression) which led to a discussion about the history of Poland’s precarious position sitting between the German and Russian empires. These imperial giants have threatened Polish sovereignty continuously over the last several hundred years and this has, in turn, played a role in shaping antisemitism in the region. While talking about antisemitism, one Polish student said that people resented Jews for being richer than non-Jewish Poles. FSWC Educator Elena agreed that this perception played a role but pointed out that while some Jews were better off, the idea that they were wealthier or taking advantage of the Poles ignores that the vast majority of Jewish people were living in poverty. When people are seen as both privileged and outsiders, they draw a lot more negative attention than the wealthy people who are a seen as “belonging” ethnically. Elena also spoke to the fact that certain professions had concentrations of Jewish people due to the fact that Jews were not allowed to own land, not allowed to be members of craft guilds, etc. 

The students (and teachers) were also very moved by the second half of the workshop when Survivor Hedy Bohm came in to share her testimony about life in Oradea, Romania and the destruction of that life during the Holocaust. Hedy’s story is very powerful because she was at Auschwitz where she lost both of her parents immediately after getting off the train. She was also one of the witnesses who testified at the two most recent trials of Nazi guards at Auschwitz, Oscar Groening and Reinhold Hanning held in 2015 and 2016. It’s great that she concludes with this information because it brings a small sense of justice to what she experienced and she explains how important that was to her, to be able to sit in a court of law with German judges before her, and publically state that her parents had been murdered by the Nazi state. She said that is still seems surreal that she should have survived and ultimately got to share her testimony in Germany and that during World War II this would have been an unthinkable dream.