Unique album showcased at Holocaust memorial event

YorkRegion.com
April 24, 2014
By Simone Joseph

An upcoming Holocaust commemoration at Vaughan’s Lebovic Jewish Community Campus promises to be a historic one.

The event this Sunday, April 27 — called Jews on the Edge 1944: Between Annihilation and Liberation — will include a presentation of photographs from Yad Vashem’s (Israel’s official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust) Auschwitz Album.

The album — the only surviving visual evidence of the process that led to the mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp — consists of images of inmates taken in 1944 by a member of the Nazi SS tasked with taking ID photos and fingerprints.

“One of the most interesting aspects of the Auschwitz Album is the story of how this album survived and came to be acquired by Yad Vashem; how Yad Vashem restored the album and digitized it so that the documentary evidence of what occurred in Auschwitz is available to people worldwide,” said Fran Sonshine, national chairperson, the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem.

“The need to commemorate Yom Hashoah is all the more imperative when one considers that now is the only time where we will ever be privileged to have a Holocaust survivor and three successive generations,” said Howard Driman, co-chairperson of the commemoration event, along with Lou Greenbaum.

“In not too many years’ time, there will be no eyewitnesses to the atrocities of the Holocaust, with the danger that the Shoah will become just another historical event, one whose unique significance will be diminished.”

Another highlight of the event promises to be the keynote address, delivered by Thornhill resident Leslie Meisels, 87, a Holocaust survivor and author and survivor speaker at the Neuberger Centre.

Mr. Meisels and his family narrowly escaped certain death when, thanks to a twist of fate, they were taken from a holding facility in Debrecen, Hungary to a forced labour camp in the Austrian countryside. The family was included in the 20,000 “exchange Jews”. People’s lives were bartered for gold, diamonds and cash in a secret deal between Rudolph Kastner and Adolf Eichmann. As Kastner Jews, they were sent to Bergen Belsen concentration camp where they were allowed to stay together and were treated somewhat better than the other prisoners. In April 1945, the family was liberated by the U.S. army.

Mr. Meisels’ remarkable tale of survival is recounted in his new book, which is part of the  Azrieli  Series  of  Holocaust  Survivor Memoirs, Suddenly The Shadow Fell, copies of which will be sold those in attendance at the Commemoration event, courtesy of the Azrieli Foundation.

The Yom Hashoah V’Hagvurah Community Holocaust Commemoration is co-sponsored by UJA Federation of Greater Toronto’s Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre and the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem.

For more information, call 416-635-2883 ext. 5301 or visit holocaustcentre.com or yadvashem.ca

GOOD TO KNOW:

Event: Jews on the Edge 1944: Between Annihilation and Liberation. Yom Hashoah V’Hagvurah Community Holocaust Commemoration.

Place:  Joseph & Wolf Lebovic Jewish Community Campus, on Bathurst just north of Rutherford Road, Thornhill Vaughan

Date: Sunday, April 27 at 11 a.m.