Holocaust Memorials Held Around The World

In honour of Yom HaShoah, the Jewish day of Holocaust remembrance, ceremonies took place around the world Sunday that paid tribute to the millions of victims who were killed during one of the most horrific periods in human history.

In Ottawa, wreaths were laid for the victims on Parliament Hill.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered a speech at the memorial service.

“This genocide was so premeditated, grotesque in design, so monsterous and barbaric in scale, and so systematic and efficient in execution that it stands alone in the annals of human evil,” said Harper. 

The Toronto Holocaust Remembrance Commemeration was held at Earl Bales Park on Bathurst South of Sheppard, and featured keynote speaker Sybille Niemoeller.

Niemoeller’s late husband, Pastor Martin Niemoeller, penned the famous quotation “First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out.

Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Her father also took a leading role in hiding and transporting Jews, and directed the ill-fated plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944.

“I personally don’t know any family in the Toronto community that wasn’t in some way affected by it,” said Jewish Canadian Zev Goldstein.

“My father lost a tremendous amount of his family and that affects us even growing up.  I never had grandparents to play with.”

By 1945, two of three European Jews were killed as part of the Nazi engineered genocide.

“If we look at Rawanda and if we look at Darfur, the world has still not learned its lesson but that does not mean we are free of responsibility of teaching that lesson over and over again,” said one member of the Canadian Jewish Congress Len Rudner.

Sunday’s event also featured a candle lighting ceremony, a personal testimony from Holocaust survivor Herb Goldstein, and the reading of victims’ names.

After much controversy and speculation, the Vatican’s ambassador to Israel attended a Holocaust memorial Sunday, despite initially refusing to attend because an advertisement of the event described the wartime conduct of Pope Pius XII.

A caption next to a picture of Pius in the Yad Vashem holocaust museum reads “even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the pope did not protest.”

It’s a reference to the pontiff’s refusal to sign a 1942 Allied condemnation of the massacre of Jews and the boycott threatened to upset fragile relations between Israel and the Vatican.

Elsewhere, the “March of the Living,” a yearly Holocaust remembrance and education event at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau is set to take place Monday.

Thousands of Jewish teenagers come each year from countries all over the world including Canada for the event.