The passport Felix Kuppenheim used during his wartime escape from Germany. It is part of an archive that University of British Columbia professor Timothy Taylor donated to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and the UBC Library.UBC Public Affairs/Supplied
Good morning.
Monday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and also the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. World leaders, including King Charles, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, were in Poland for the event.
But the number of survivors in attendance reflects the passage of those 80 years: only 50 were in attendance, two of them Canadian.
It will soon be left entirely to future generations to ensure the Holocaust is not forgotten.
Timothy Taylor was handed the weight of that obligation from his mother in the form of six or seven bankers boxes. His sister drove them from Edmonton in 2019 after their mother died, delivering the boxes containing 10,000 pages of his grandfather’s letters, diaries and photographs from 1940 to 1948, from his life in Nazi Germany and beyond.
“My mother told my sister before she died that I would know what to do with them,” said Taylor, an award-winning writer and creative-writing professor at the University of British Columbia.
“I wasn’t so sure, I thought, ‘I hope she’s right.’”
The fragile letters, some from even further back, were yellowed with age. Written in German, their meaning had been buried beneath decades of silence.
They offered Taylor insight into a lifetime of curious observations: his mother’s strict pacifism, the way she flinched at certain sounds, the time she snapped at her children for pretending to play with toy guns. He learned of the desperate effort of his grandfather to reunite his family away from Germany and of the rage his grandfather carried.
“I never knew my grandfather as an angry man,” Taylor said. “But in these letters, he hated Germany. He hated what fascism had done to him and his family.”
As per his mother’s wishes, Taylor has donated his grandfather’s archives to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) and the UBC Library. The digitization of the archive is set to be completed in August, and it will be open to researchers worldwide.
On Monday, Taylor also launched a six-episode podcast called The Hidden Holocaust Papers.
“This isn’t just history. It’s the real-time thoughts of people experiencing it. That’s what makes it powerful,” he said.
It’s a persistent fear of survivors that the Holocaust – and the cruelty that led to it – will be forgotten, a fear underlined especially of late, as far-right politicians gain favour in Europe and elsewhere.
After the inauguration last week of U.S. President Donald Trump, right-wing extremists celebrated Elon Musk’s straight-arm gesture.
While the gesture resembled a Nazi salute, Musk’s intention wasn’t totally clear. The Anti-Defamation League, an antisemitism and human-rights watchdog, called it an “awkward gesture” and urged caution in reading too much into it – a response that itself drew backlash.
Globe columnist Marsha Lederman wrote a plea this week for people to reflect on the lessons of Auschwitz, lessons she feels especially acutely. Her grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, and her parents managed to survive it.
“Cruelty seems to have been the point,” she wrote. “Mixed with power, the cruelty was able to thrive.”
Lederman noted that some who managed to survive Auschwitz without being completely broken emerged with a reason to go on. American Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel made it his mission to stop such horrors from happening ever again.
Primo Levi needed to tell the world. He wrote in his memoir, Survival in Auschwitz, about reaching for an icicle shortly after arriving at the death camp. It was freezing and he was very thirsty, but a guard snatched it away.
“Why?” Levi asked, to which the Nazi responded: “Here there is no why.”
Lederman wrote that “an obvious lesson of Auschwitz – beyond ‘do not murder’ – could be to show kindness, care and respect for our fellow human beings,” adding that “these can be small gestures, or they can be very big ones. But they must trump cruelty. I don’t think I need to explain why.”
This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.