By Ivonne Flores Kauffman

It has been over 70 years since the world witnessed one of the darkest chapters of human history — the Holocaust. Even though the Holocaust led to the killing of over six million Jews, today its testimony is beginning to fade.

According to a survey released in January by the Azrieli Foundation, one in five Canadian youths lack knowledge about the Holocaust. Furthermore, 49 per cent of those surveyed were unable to name at least one concentration camp. For this reason, as part of this year’s Holocaust Education Week (HEW), Canadian universities and organizations featured films to remember the horrors of the Holocaust and raise awareness on the dangers of hatred, antisemitism and intolerance.

From November 3 to 15, fiction and documentary films about the Holocaust were presented across the GTA. The goal of these screenings was to remind older generations and educate the younger ones about it.

The Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, an organization that seeks through its museum and various programs to create knowledge and understanding about the Holocaust, presented The Holocaust and Now as its theme for this year’s HEW.

According to the organization’s website, the goal of The Holocaust and Now is to “pose a difficult question: 75 years later, why should Canadians learn about the Holocaust?”

To answer this question, The Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre featured several films as part of its multidisciplinary programming that sought “to illuminate the relevance of Holocaust education to all Canadians and their concerns for the 21st century.”

One of the films presented as part of the organization’s HEW 2019 was Caring Corrupted, an award-winning documentary that tells the tale of nurses who abandoned their ethical duties from 1936 to 1945 to collaborate with the Nazis. The film, which can be found online, is a cautionary story, which exposes the compliance of the German medical community in the killing of thousands of disabled and mentally ill citizens, homosexuals and Jews, along with other races of people who didn’t fit the ideals of the Nazi eugenics. 

The film features on-camera interviews with Holocaust survivors, including Eva Kor. Eva and her sister Miriam were among the 1,500 sets of twins subjected to medical experiments by the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, also known as The Angel of Death. In the film, Kor, who died in July of this year, recalls the experiments to which she was subjected as a kid at the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.

The film also provides a view on the Aktion T4 program, the systematic killing of disabled and mentally ill German citizens among others; first through starvation, followed by lethal injections and eventually gassing them with lethal gas in chambers that resembled showers. Furthermore, the film exposes the audience to some horrendous truths such as how the United States inspired the Nazi forced sterilization laws. 

In 1933, the Nazis created the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring which resulted in thousands of forced sterilizations. As horrific as this act was, Nazi Germany was not the first place to legalize the sterilization of those considered “inferior.” The film shows that before the Nazi party took control of Germany, in the early 1900s in the United States, it was legal to sterilize citizens considered “unfit.”

Linda Crays, Director of Education Technology at Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth and the production coordinator of the film, attended the screening at the Innis Town Hall in downtown Toronto and spoke to the audience.

Crays’s conversation not only reflected on the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany; it also created a space for attendees to confront themselves with difficult questions concerning their history.  

A couple of attendees raised their concerns on the treatment of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, which includes atrocious acts such as the forced sterilization of hundreds of Indigenous peoples and the disappearance of Indigenous women and girls. According to the International Justice Resource Center, forced sterilization targeting Indigenous women in Canada can be traced back to decades ago and has allegedly been performed as recently as 2018 in Saskatchewan according to lawyer Alisa Lombard.

Days after the screening, in a phone interview with Dr. Crays, she explained that Caring Corrupted surged after she and her colleagues realized that students at UTHealth were faced with uncomfortable situations in which the students felt they had to obey the person with the most authority in the room, even if that didn’t feel like the right decision. 

“We realize that students are being faced with some difficult ethical decisions and so we’d want to provide them with some resources to help them navigate through those waters,” said Crays. 

Crays also explained that students at UTHealth are assigned to watch Caring Corrupted during their first week of orientation. But the documentary was not only inspired by the ethical questions health students face, its roots go back to a 20-year long friendship between Dr. Patricia Starck and Dr. Viktor Frankl. 

Dr. Starck, who was the Dean of the UTHealth School of Nursing for over 30 years and the impetus for this film, first contacted Dr. Frankl through correspondence. Dr. Starck wanted to apply Dr. Frankl’s Logotherapy approach  to patients with physical disabilities. Dr. Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and psychotherapist, developed the Logotherapy theory during his time at various Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Logotherapy, a theory founded on the belief that human nature is motivated by the search for a life purpose, was first explained in his book Man’s Search For Meaning, which has become a well-known Holocaust testimony.

In an email interview with Dr. Carson Phillips, the Managing Director of the Sarah & Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, he said that “being able to see ourselves reflected in the experiences of others and caring enough to reject hate are also key elements in building a strong, healthy, and understanding civil society. Doing so ensures that all Canadians are treated with dignity, respect and understanding.”  

He added that “for Canadians, the Holocaust is also an important aspect of human history and holds I believe, universal meaning for all of us. If we study and learn from the Holocaust, it can help us build the type of civil society that we want to have; how we can value and respect diversity, and how we can nurture a caring, democratic society.” 

The Neuberger Holocaust Centre featured seven films as part of its multidisciplinary HEW 2019 program; including the premiere of Cheating Hitler: Surviving the Holocaust, a Canadian film that narrates the story of Helen Yermus, Maxwell Smart, and Rose Lipsyzc, three Canadians who survived the Holocaust. 

When it came to the selection process of the films featured in the HEW 2019, Dr. Carson explained that choosing the films was a collaborative process that involved recommendations from colleagues, cultural partners, members and volunteers. He added that the centre selected films that reflected the theme of this year’s HEW and that contributed to the dialogue and discussion while deepening knowledge about the complexities of the Holocaust.

Other organizations that featured films during this year’s Holocaust Education Week were Hillel Ryerson, the university’s Jewish student group and Ryerson Students’ Union (RSU). The organizations presented the 1972 acclaimed film Cabaret as part of this year’s Ryerson HEW. 

Directed by Bob Fosse, the film is set in the last days of the Weimar Republic before the Nazis came into power. The film shows how the aggressive Nazi party’s rise to power altered the lives and attitudes of thousands of Germans. 

In an email interview with Jake Benaim, the Vice President of Holocaust Education at Ryerson, he explained that including a film in this year’s HEW program came as an effort to “be receptive to the different ways in which people learn best.” He added that not everyone is interested in engaging with lectures. 

Benaim explained that the committee’s decision to present Cabaret at this year’s Ryerson HEW came from a collaboration between Hillel Ryerson and RyePride, a student group representing Queer and Trans students at Ryerson. 

“Cabaret is an iconic film within the queer community, but it’s also important to note the shared struggles it highlights between both Jewish and Queer communities,” said Benaim. 

He also emphasized the fact that “a number of renowned and powerful films tell Holocaust-era stories. They’re all so moving, and definitely worth watching, however, they’re also not for everyone. This kind of storytelling can be really graphic and traumatic at times, but we don’t have to limit ourselves by thinking that reliving trauma is the only way to learn about it.”

Using films to educate young audiences about the Holocaust is not something new. High schools across the country use popular Holocaust-related films such as Schindler’s List (1993)  and  The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (UK, 2008) to educate youth on the topic. Although historic films have proven to have an impact on an audience, a 2018 study by Stephanie Rauch shows that the effects films based on the Holocaust have on an audience are linked to their previous knowledge on the subject. Additionally, the study showed that “films that were perceived as historically authentic were those that most significantly added to or changed interviewees’ knowledge or understanding.”

Watching films based on the Holocaust is an excellent way to educate ourselves on an issue that shaped the world. Learning about this dark chapter in human history is not only relevant to honour the lives of millions who perished in the hands of the Nazis but is essential for human-kind to avoid repeating the same mistakes. The Holocaust should be a lesson on how hate, antisemitism and beliefs of racial superiority can easily lead to human rights violations and genocides.