The evils of history, repeating

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/12/2023 (1006 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg is my adopted hometown. I have lived here off and on for the last 40 years.

I was only 29 when I first started working at Polo Park for Randy Moffat’s CKY. My hometown then was still Montreal. Who knew in the fall of 1983 that Winnipeg was to become home sweet home for most of the next 40 years?

I haven’t lived in Montreal since the fall of 1978. But I still get affected by news from the old neighbourhood. And this week on the eve of Hanukkah, the news from there felt like a steel-toed boot to the windpipe: a threat towards former federal cabinet minister Irwin Cotler.

Everyone joining me on these visits is familiar with my deep affection for the father who rescued me from the ashes of a revolution in Communist Hungary, put me in his old leather backpack, and carried me to freedom in Canada.

Everyone knows that the most important patch of ground in my biography isn’t a radio or tv studio. It’s my dad’s tiny store that gave his little refugee son meaning and purpose.

My dad lived most of his life in his shop on Queen Mary Road in the federal riding of Mount Royal. In the late ‘60s, ‘70s and early ‘80s he voted for a fellow named Trudeau. In later years it was another off-the-charts brilliant human being named Cotler.

Turns out Irwin Cotler wasn’t just whip smart at law. He specialized in human rights, fought for them all over the world.

Some years after his political career as an MP for Mount Royal and serving as justice minister, he founded the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. As the Swedish ambassador to Hungary in the 1940s, Raoul Wallenberg ran a mission designed to get Swedish passports into the hands of as many Jewish people as possible. With a Swedish passport in hand, a Hungarian Jew could avoid deportation to a death camps.

In 1944, the only gas the Nazis weren’t running out of was the kind they used for mass murder. In that final year of the war in Europe, the Nazis were in a hurry to gas as many Jews as was inhumanly possible. Their regime, which they believed would last for a thousand years, was in its final days and there was nothing their black gloves remained more attached to than strangling the Jewish people, the fulfilment of Hitler’s “Final Solution”

There were several reasons my 10-year-old mum never boarded the train to Auschwitz. She did wear the Yellow star in the Jewish ghetto of Budapest and she was not able to share an apartment with her mother, who had been dragged away in the middle of night to a concentration camp, not as well known as Auschwitz.

My mother had no idea whether her mum was alive or dead. There was never an email or text or call. Every day in 1944 for my mother was one where she was forced to say goodbye to friends, neighbours and members of her extended family. There wasn’t much reason to believe she would ever again see her mother alive.

Ultimately, there was only one reason she survived the Holocaust. And his name was Wallenberg. The Swedish passport he handed her kept her from being forced to ride the cattle car to Auschwitz. Within a few months, Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies — which I am always fiercely proud to say, included Canada. U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his country’s allies were able to extract the surrender of Hitler’s forces.

And so my tiny, skeleton-like, grandmother who had fallen ill, having been literally worked to the bone, was liberated by the Allies just days before she was to take her final shower in a gas chamber.

No matter how many years of life I am granted, I will never feel that I have fully thanked Canadians for their sacrifices to defeat the man who tried to murder my mum. And I don’t know how to thank the late Swedish diplomat, who saved her from riding the train of death. And I don’t know how to thank Irwin Cotler, who was inspired by mum’s saviour to fight for human rights worldwide.

This week we learned that Mr. Cotler was in a fight for his own life in my old hometown.

Police are guarding him 24 hours a day, because of a death threat. Why would anyone want to murder this kind, elderly gentleman?

I think both you and I can speculate why. And his religion ranks at the top of the list.

Unhappy Hanukkah.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. charles@charlesadler.com