We are at critical point in world history when International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27, 2026) coincides with an unprecedented rise in international anti-semitic hate crimes, anti-Israel, pro-terrorist and neo-fascist radicalization, and attendant security threats.  It is imperative that we commemorate the Holocaust ethically and respectfully and learn its most important lessons today.

I am a Canadian born daughter of a Holocaust survivor from a small town north of Warsaw, Poland.  My father survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz and the forced death march before being liberated by US troops in Ebensee, Austria.  I am omitting his name and those of my family members to protect our safety and privacy.

After many years of a ‘none is too many’ Canadian government immigration policy barring Jews entry to Canada during World War II, my father immigrated to Canada in 1948, along with other young adult orphans of the Holocaust sponsored by the Canadian Jewish Congress and our local Jewish community.  One other surviving cousin from his town in Poland moved to New York and built her family there after being in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany.

As it happened, Dad reunited with another cousin from his hometown at our synagogue in Hamilton.  She and her husband later escorted my father down the aisle at Dad’s wedding to my mother, and served as surrogate paternal grandparents to us as children.

My family and I are active supporters of Holocaust Remembrance and related advocacy, especially Yad Vashem in Israel as well as Canadian Holocaust memorials.  My father’s testimony is in the Steven Spielberg USC Shoah Foundation archives.

Dad was interviewed sensitively by a dear family friend and USC Shoah Foundation volunteer interviewer and video crew in our family home in the mid 1990s, while my sister and I hovered protectively just out of view and earshot upstairs.

At the end of the interview, we as the children of the survivor were brought in as part of the standard trajectory and survivor narrative choreography of these USC Shoah Foundation videos, to demonstrate the ‘triumph over evil’, much like the March of the Living and similar educational initiatives I question today.

I am uncomfortable with the tendency of uptown Jewish organizations to exploit the goodwill of Holocaust survivors and their children or to manipulate our stories.  I am especially uncomfortable with films exploiting or trivializing the Holocaust sentimentally or the concept of Auschwitz as a tourism site.

Still worse is the modern phenomenon on Youtube of videos of questionable merit exploiting archival footage of the Holocaust to depict the physical and sexual degradation and torture and suffering of Jewish women and men in an ostensibly ‘historical’ ‘objective’ ‘factual’ voice synthesized artificially in a British academic-sounding accent.  I call these Holocaust porn, and worry about their use to radicalize and motivate anti-semitic hate criminals today.

I interviewed my father a few years before he was interviewed by the USC Shoah Foundation and reviewed the related scholarly literature for an academic course in Sociology.  Perhaps it may have prepared him to tell his story more widely.

When I interviewed my father in the early 1990s on a snowy February weekend over cups of tea at the kitchen table at home, I had a tape recorder running.  I still have hours of tape and extensive notes from those interviews, which I could hardly bear to transcribe, and still find difficult to listen to.

It wasn’t that the stories he told were so horrific.  We all knew about the Holocaust and had learned about it and commemorated it at school, but until then, I had never really known my father’s story in detail.  Perhaps I never will, and none of us ever really do.

What was most disturbing to me was that my father could tell me about the most traumatic losses and events in a calm, everyday unemotional voice, the way most of us would describe where we grew up or went to school, or what we did yesterday.  This is buried trauma, and true of many survivors.   They were taught to hold in their natural emotions in the concentration camps.

But his audible fidgeting with a paper clip on the kitchen table conveyed his discomfort.  The clicking of the paper clip increased in volume and frequency on the tapes when I asked hard questions, or when he struggled to access difficult memories.  He was frustrated and upset too.

Sometimes when I asked my father questions, he would reply agitatedly, “How can I explain to you what it was like?”  At first I thought perhaps I wasn’t being clear in my repeated questions.  Then I thought it might be because English was not my........

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