Refusing to Forget

Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.”

Seventy-six years ago, the world was horrified as the extent of the Holocaust extermination was unveiled. Six million Jews were systematically persecuted and slaughtered in under five years. We don’t often hear about the five million others whose lives ended under the Nazi regime as well—priests and pastors, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, homosexuals, resistance fighters, Roma (then commonly called “Gypsies”), Afro-Germans, and people with mental or physical disabilities.

Hitler’s “Final Solution” was the policy to rid Europe not only of all Jews, but of any groups considered racially or biologically inferior. Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis murdered at least 250,000 of their own German people institutionalized because of mental or physical disability, including thousands of children.

In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The UN encourages its member countries to hold commemoration ceremonies to honor these victims and to promote Holocaust education throughout the world.

At the 2020 event in Ottawa, Prime Minister Trudeau said, “Canada will always strongly condemn these acts, and is committed to standing against hatred and discrimination in all their forms … I encourage Canadians to take time today to remember the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. We will honor them by continuing to fight hate, protect the most vulnerable, and make the world a more peaceful and prosperous place for everyone by vowing ‘Never Again.’”

Of course, we agree with Trudeau’s speech. But lest we become smug as Canadians, believing we would never stoop to such blindness… well, I think you already know we have a long way to go.

I have appreciated Cornell Pashe’s articles in our local paper, as he walks us through the 94 calls to action outlined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The stories of residential school survivors make us weep with shame that such things could have been sanctioned in our beautiful country.

With sadness and horror, I’ve been reading first-person accounts of the British Home Children, orphans sent to Canada between 1880 and 1930 to work on farms. The program, intended to solve two problems, amounted to legalized child slavery. In many cases, abuse in every form ran rampant—and had nothing to do with race.

Another, less often spoken of, travesty occurred during World War II when some 22,000 Japanese Canadians were stripped of their property, businesses, and dignity and forced into camps. Many ended up working on sugar beet farms here in Manitoba. I’ve written a novel around this topic. This fictional story is based on the real-life journeys of numerous Japanese Canadians who lived through it, focusing in on a young woman named Rose. It’s also the story of a Canadian soldier who spends most of the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, longing to return to his family’s sugar beet farm in Manitoba. Researching this book is probably the most sobering activity I have ever done, but I’m also more excited to release this story than any I’ve written to date.

Rose Among Thornes is set to release this August. I truly hope that by then, we can once again hold an in-person launch party, that I can place a copy directly into your hands and see your smiling face. More importantly, I hope the book’s tag line, “Forgiveness is the deadliest power on earth,” will ring true in our society and in our hearts.