I doubt that will happen here:
Among the vivid memories Nate Leipciger has of Auschwitz is his arrival at the Nazi death camp on Aug. 2, 1943, with his father, Jack, from the Jewish ghetto in Sosnowiec, 35 kilometres to the north.
“I had no idea where we were. It was unreal and beyond my imagination,” recalled Leipciger, 96, a well-known figure in Holocaust education in Toronto, in a Post interview. “After being tattooed (with the number 133628) and inducted as a prisoner and losing my identity, I thought this was hell on earth, from which I had little or no hope of getting out. I was in total despair. Only my father’s presence gave me some hope.”
About 10 members of his family, including his mother and sister, were murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau, the largest of the nearly 50 sub-camps collectively known as Auschwitz.
The largest, deadliest and most notorious of the Second World War Nazi death camps — and that’s saying something — Auschwitz still conjures images of gas chambers, skeletal inmates in striped uniforms, barbed wire, crammed boxcars, crematoria, and chimneys belching smoke and human ash. It is synonymous with killing on a modern, industrial scale.
It became that through the sheer number of its victims: 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz between June 1940 and the summer of 1944. Of those, 1.1 million were Jews, 900,000 of whom were gassed shortly after arrival. The death toll included up to 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 14,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and as many as 15,000 in other categories — criminals, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and “undesirables.” Many inmates were worked to death in surrounding factories. In January 1945, the camp’s Soviet liberators encountered 7,600 survivors in Auschwitz’s three main camps.
Opening at the Royal Ontario Museum today, just ahead of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp on Jan. 27, 2025 (also the annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day), the hauntingly named “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away,” bills itself as the single most comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the history of the concentration and extermination camp.
A preview by the Post revealed an exhibition that is at once stunning and numbing, comprising more than 500 original artifacts, and hundreds of photographs, charts, drawings, correspondence and diagrams on loan mainly from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum and more than 20 other institutions and private collections around the world. Many of the objects are being shown in Canada for the first time. ...
The exhibit comes amid skyrocketing antisemitism the world over, and when it appears knowledge about the Holocaust is fading. A Leger Marketing poll in 2020 found that only 43 per cent of Canadian respondents knew that six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. Among those aged 18 to 24, it was 40 per cent.
“It’s not easy to go to a museum to learn about the particular story of Auschwitz, but sometimes the things that are more difficult are the ones that are more necessary,” noted Ferreiro.
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