Ideas - The 'shocking betrayal' of widespread antisemitism

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

Marsha Lederman is a child of Holocaust survivors. She lives with the fear that one day someone will take her and her son like the Nazis did with her parents and their parents. "This is ludicrous," she has told herself many times. But then people celebrated the October 7th attacks and she watched how antisemitism showed up in the circles she felt most at home. Lederman and Jeanette Goldman,This spring to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, Lederman and child Holocaust survivor Jeanette Goldman shared their family stories on Zoom at the University of Toronto's Regis College — an online event due to security reasons. They spoke about what true solidarity means today as antisemitism continues to rise in Canada. Lederman says, "We cannot allow antisemitism to stop us from speaking about antisemitism of all things."Guests in this episode:Jeanette Goldman is a retired federal judge and a child Holocaust survivor.Marsha Lederman is a journalist, daughter of Holocaust survivors, and author of Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust Once Removed, and October 7th: Finding the Humanitarian Middle.Mary Jo Leddy is a Catholic theologian, author, activist, and founder of Romero House in Toronto.Bertha Yetman is a Regis College Alumnus, and organizer of “Remembering the Holocaust.”

Who's your favorite writer of all time? And if you could sit down and have dinner with them, what would you ask? It might be tough to get a dinner date, but I can try to give you the next best thing. I'm Matea Roach. On my podcast bookends, I sit down for honest conversations with some of today's literary stars. People like Zadie Smith, Ken Follett, R.F. Kwong, and Louise Penny. Whether you love books or just want a new perspective on your every day, check out Bookends with Matea wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyand. I have a very vivid memory of a deportation. In the middle of the night, we children were dressed quickly and taken to an attic, where we were told that we must stay in the complete darkness, in complete silence. The Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people were killed, continues to defy comprehension, more than 80 years after it ended. Throughout the night, we did not sleep. Throughout the night, what we heard was shots. We were bursts of fire. And in the morning, when everything was over and we were able to go back to our ghetto homes,

we noticed that a hospital nearby, all the patients had been taken out and shot. And what we had to do, I, a five-year-old, had to cross these bodies to get to our bodies. was going. That image was with me for many, many years. One of the many legacies of the Holocaust is a two-word phrase, never again. And a big part of never again means continuing to remember. It wasn't just a series of miracles that somehow allowed my parents to survive and find each other and start again. It was also the miracle of other people, of good people. Very brave people. My mother was strong and lucky, but she also survived because her sister, her aunt, and the other women around her at Auschwitz refused to let her succumb to typhus.

And they did what they could to ensure that their Nazi overseers would not see how sick she was, because that would have meant an immediate ticket to the gas chamber. Every spring, Jewish people mark Yom Hashawa. A Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust. On Yom Hashawah, 2026, a Catholic college at the University of Toronto invited two Jewish women to share their stories. A sign, perhaps, of the church's ongoing inner conversion, away from centuries of anti-Semitism and toward a deeper listening and presence.

I don't just want to tell the event. that occurred to me. I want to pay tribute and honor the incredibly courageous and honorable Poles who risk their lives as well as the lives of their families to shelter and save those whom were actually survived. Neither I nor my brother would have survived without the risk that they took, and many of them lost their lives as a result. Holocaust survivor and retired federal judge, Jeanette Goldman. Our sages have said that he who saves a single life, it is as though he has saved the world entire.

But if never again is taken to mean the end of anti-Semitism, the world and Canada still have a lot of work to do. In 26, one week after Yom Hashelah, the Senate Committee on Human Rights released its report on anti-Semitism in Canada. Although the Jewish community is just 1% of Canada's population, it has been the number one target for hate crime since 2023. Most alarmingly, places of worship, community centers, and schools have been threatened and

even damaged by gunfire, arson, and vandalism. Anti-Semitism is not only an attack on Jewish Canadians, it is an attack on our democracy. This has to stop. We have Canadian laws when it comes to hate. We have a tradition in this country, wherever you come from, whatever God you worship, we live in peace and harmony. There are many days when I think, just stop, you don't need the hate that's coming your way. Why keep sticking your neck out? But I do and I will continue to write and speak. I will continue to speak out against war and anti-Semitism and racism and terrorism and terrorism and terror. and killing. How could I not? Good people were so brave and stuck their necks out so that my parents could survive the hell of the Holocaust. I owe those people everything. Marcia Leederman is the child of Holocaust survivors and the author of two books, Kiss the Red Stairs, the Holocaust once removed, and October 7th, searching for the humanitarian middle. But I'm speaking

to you online instead of being in a room with you, sharing my story and sharing space as it should be. What does it say when a Holocaust remembrance event is moved online because of security concerns? Tucked away in a room on the University of Toronto campus in front of a camera connected to Zoom, Jeanette Goldman and Marsha Leatherman tell their stories. For me, the Holocaust is not just, just a history lesson. It is my family story. It is not just history. It lives in me, in my blood and my bones, and quite literally in my genes. We call this intergenerational trauma. I don't know if you believe in miracles, and I'm not sure if I believe in miracles, but the world could really use one right now. Of that, I am certain. I say that.

as someone who feels like I am a miracle. I was not supposed to be. My elimination or actually the prevention of my existence was the goal of the Nazi project. And this evil project

killed all of my grandparents, the woman who would have been my aunt, should have been my aunt, and two of the boys who would have been my uncles, including one who was just 11. or 13. I don't know his exact age. And there is so much I don't know and can't know about these people who should have been my relatives and who are my family. But somehow my parents survived. A miracle. I'd like to share with you part of the story of how they survived. I'll begin with my mother,

my mom, Gittla or Guta, Gittel, Gutsha. they gave her the name Gene when she came to Canada. She was born in Radham, Poland, in 1925, and she was 14 years old when Germany invaded. My mother's family was forced into the Radham ghetto, and when she was 15, she was taken off the street of the ghetto by a Nazi guard, forced to move furniture into the barracks that they were setting up for these Nazis, and then she was forced to move in there with the Nazis,

as were several other Jewish teenage girls. It was horrible, but it saved her life because she was there in the barracks when the ghetto was liquidated and her parents and little brother were sent to Treblinka, where they were murdered. My mother also had an older brother who had left Poland before the war for Palestine, and my mother had a sister,

but she didn't know where she was or what had happened to her. Her sister's name was Ella, her big sister. After the liquidation, my mother became a slave laborer at a munitions factory in Radham. And then in August of 1944, she was loaded onto a cattle car and sent to Auschwitz. But a miracle happened there too. Not only was she sent to the line where people would not be killed immediately, But shortly after she arrived, after she was tattooed with a number on her forearm, with her new identity, a number, and had her head shaved.

Another young woman with a shaved head came running toward her. It was Ella, her sister. They were reunited at Auschwitz. As the story goes, they laughed and laughed because they both looked so ridiculous with their heads shaved. But of course, the laughter. was really about the joy of their improbable reunion. And then another miracle. After three months in that hell,

Gutscha and Ella were transferred out of Auschwitz into Germany proper to a satellite camp of Buchenwald. They became slave laborers at another munitions factory. And then at the end of March 1945, they were ordered to March. They were three days, a death march on their way to Bergen-Belsen when the Germans who had been guarding them disappeared suddenly. The women were left in a field and for the first time in many years they were not

under the guard of their enslavers. They didn't know what to do, but they were tired, so they sat in this meadow and rested. They were in a field in a town called Countets, Germany. Not long afterward, more soldiers came along. But these soldiers were American. My mother, her sister, and about 700 other Jewish women, mostly Hungarian, were liberated by the U.S. Army. It was April 1st, Passover, and it was Easter Sunday, a rebirth. My father, Jacob Laterman, was born in 1919 in Lodge, Poland. After the German invasion, his family ended up in a place called Pietrichakov Tribunowski. This is what I know of his story. I didn't hear it from him, but from my mother long after he died.

And my sisters who were older than me and had more time with him helped fill in the blanks. In the ghetto in Pietrichov, he was forced to work. One day, this group of slave laborers was lined up and told that every 10th person, would be shot, no reason required. They did the count, and my father was a number 10. Desperate, he offered a Nazi guard a bribe. He had a gold watch with him and more jewels hidden away that he could bring him later. The guard did hide my father and told him to wait until the end of the day. From his hiding spot, I imagine my father hearing those shots every 10th Jew, one of whom was supposed to be him. At the end of this day, the Nazi retrieved my father and took the watch,

told my father to go get the other jewels and bring them the next day to work, and he could continue to work and live. My father's family did have jewels hidden away, but he did not bring them to that Nazi. Instead, he took them to a home of a Polish official he had heard would provide false papers for a price. When my father got there, the man wasn't home, but his wife was, and this part of the story always astonishes me. She let my father into the home. And when her husband came home, and my father made his case and asked this Polish official for these false papers, and the man said, no, he would not give my father those papers. His wife intervened.

She asked her husband to do it for my father. And he did. And while he was preparing these false ID papers, this very good woman gave my father a meal. She fed my father in every way. That day, my father became. on paper, todayish Rudnicki, a Catholic poll. He would be called Tadik. He took those papers and went to a Nazi office in the city of Chentsdahova, where work papers were issued and work assignments

given out. This labor was badly needed, as German men of fighting age were all off fighting. My father was assigned to a farm in a village in North Rhine, Westphalia. He took the train into Germany and made his way to that farm, surrounded by the enemy, pretending he must have been terrified. But at that farm, he found not just an employer, but a family, the Flotmire's. He worked with them, he ate with them, he slept in a room attached to their home. Every Sunday he went to church with them. My father had to figure out very quickly how to act in a church. He'd never been inside one before the war.

I can only imagine what he silently prayed for in that beautiful Catholic church in Holson, Germany. After my mother died, we found our father's little Polish Bible that he had bought as part of this ruse among her most treasured things. My father lived for the rest of the war, pretending to be Tadik Rudniki. It was nearly three years of living a lie with so much at stake. When the war ended, my father heard about these 700 Jewish women who had been liberated, not very far from where he was. He traveled there hoping to find his sister. She was not there.

She had been murdered in Treblinka, along with his parents and little brother. But he met my mom. a miracle. They got married, lived in countenance, had a daughter, they moved to Canada, and had two more children here, my middle sister and me. The fact of this amazes me now. I think about it after all the trauma that they had been through, losing their families in a flash, suddenly becoming prisoners and slaves for no reason other than the fact that they were Jewish, and yet they were able to to put it behind them somehow and build new, beautiful lives here in Canada.

Buy a house, start a business, have children, go shopping, play cards with their friends, live. I started this talk by speaking about miracles. It wasn't just a series of miracles that somehow allowed my parents to survive and find each other and start again. It wasn't just luck and circumstances. It was also the miracle of other people, of good people, very brave people. My mother was strong and lucky, but she also survived because her sister, her aunt,

and the other women around her at Auschwitz refused to let her succumb to typhus. She was very ill, but they helped her get to roll call and to work, where the work was hauling boulders around, and they did what they could to ensure that their Nazi overseers would not see how sick she was, because that would have meant an immediate ticket to the gas chamber. She also survived because of the other young women with her in the Nazi barracks in Radham. They all helped each other through what was a shocking, terrifying experience for these teenagers. They were teenagers. One of these women ended up in Paris after the war, and she had two sons, one of whom became a filmmaker,

and he made a documentary about these women. He called it May Settmer, My Seven Mothers, because he knew his mother wouldn't have survived without those six women around her. That he would not have been born. They were all his mothers. In my father's case, the actions of others, and in his case non-Jews, were essential

in his ability to survive. There's no question that he lived because other people stepped in, sometimes in the tiniest of ways, sometimes in ways that put their own lives at risk. Beginning with that first Nazi soldier who didn't shoot him but took his watch, maybe that was greed.

But I choose to think, and I do believe there was something else there as well. Then there was the Polish man who gave my father, the false papers and his new name and his wife who begged him to do it or maybe ordered him to do it. That woman is the reason I am alive today. I don't know her name. I never will. I hope she lived a good life and was comforted by the heroic actions that she took. And of course, the Flot Myers. My father did not tell them he was Jewish, not until the war was over, but they must have suspected.

I do know they were very religious, devout Catholics, and they hated the Nazis. And I believe with all my heart that their Catholic beliefs and the moral compass that their religion provided to them guided them to help my dad, whether they knew he was Jewish or not. He became more than a worker on that farm. They made him part of their family. They did not have to do that. Treat him like a son and a brother. Eat with him, get to know him. as much as they could really know him. My sisters and I found the Flot Myers a few years ago

through some clues in a journal my father left behind and with the help of a German researcher. And in 2023, we traveled to Germany and met them at the farm, the same farm. The grandson of the farmer who gave my father work and a home and his life still lives there. in that very house, Michael, I was able to walk into the room where my father slept, see the same view from the window that he would have seen every day

as he concealed his identity and was thankful for his life. The family store is its Christmas tree there now. We are in a very precarious time in the world, not just for Jews, but in Canada, things are feeling particularly terrible right now for the Jewish community. community with a frankly shocking rise in anti-Semitism. You know, I had spent years trying to calm myself about my Holocaust-related fears that one day someone would come for me and for my son, the way the Nazis came from my parents and their parents. For years, I told myself, this is ludicrous, you're safe, you're fine,

no one is going to target you because you're Jewish. And then on October 7th, 2023, it felt like that happened. Not the same, I know, but my intergenerational trauma was severely triggered. Then I saw people celebrating the October 7th attacks. And then I witnessed the rise of anti-Semitism, particularly in progressive circles where I had once felt at home. This was a shocking betrayal. And then my mind went to that very Holocaust place, if it had had happens again, who will hide me in their attic? And the list suddenly felt a lot shorter. This intergenerational trauma, science is beginning to show, is passed down genetically. Studies on children of Holocaust survivors, people like me, have demonstrated this.

I live with the trauma that my parents experienced because of widespread anti-Semitism that was allowed to go unchecked, that was encouraged and became murderous. This has had a profound effect on me in this time, and it wasn't just the October 7th attacks. I was also very upset seeing Gazans forced from their homes, carrying around their possessions and their children. I was also triggered. Once again, I was picturing my ancestors being forced from their homes, taking whatever they could manage, suitcases that ended up in piles in Auschwitz in a warehouse they called Canada because it was filled with riches. The valuables that were hidden there were redistributed to terrible people, probably still decorating some homes in Germany, an inheritance that families like mine were robbed of.

Now watching the images of war in Israel, in Iran, in Lebanon, I'm gutted. I know the situations are not comparable, but everything is getting mixed up, not just in my body, but in the general discourse. In my job as a newspaper columnist, I've written about all of this, the October 7th attacks, the war in Gaza, the war with Iran,

the rise in anti-Semitism, and I've received a lot of feedback, some of it quite hateful. How can I, as a child of Holocaust survivors, possibly question Israel's actions. How can I, as a child of Holocaust survivors, not write off Israel completely, for its actions in Gaza, and now Lebanon and Iran?

I am staunchly anti-war, but I know that things are not always black and white. I believe my writing on this topic has been nuanced, and I believe the way out of this nightmare, although it's very far gone now, I believe it's through the humanitarian middle, as I wrote in my book about October 7th. Can we please remember that all these people who were slaughtered at a music festival or bombed to bits in their homes are people, human beings?

There are many days when I think, just stop. You don't need the hate that's coming your way. You don't need to continue to write about this. Why stick your neck out? Why keep sticking your neck out? but I do and I will continue to write and speak. I will continue to speak out against war and anti-Semitism and racism and terrorism and killing. How could I not?

Good people were so brave and stuck their necks out, literally put their necks on the line so that my parents could survive the hell of the Holocaust and so that I could exist and have my own child and be here today. to tell you about what happened to us. I owe those people everything. I don't have a fortune to give them. I don't even know most of their identities. But I can give them this. My promise to speak out about hatred in the world,

about targeting the other, about murderous men in power, about needless deaths, about the Holocaust and horrors that still shock me, even though I've spent my whole life learning about those. We cannot allow anti-Semitism to stop us from speaking about anti-Semitism, of all things. We cannot allow it to keep us apart. I am very distressed about this and of course about the events in the world.

These wars and how foreign wars are being weaponized against people here in Canada, people like me. We are in need of a miracle right now when commemorating the Holocaust is considered, political or even dangerous. Whether I believe in miracles or not, I most certainly do believe that as human beings, we can make miraculous things happen by being brave and doing the right thing. So I'm going to end my story with a plea.

I beg of you. Stick your necks out. I'm here because others were brave. My parents were brave and the people who helped them. I owe them everything. And now in their memory, I'm counting on you and your courage to help others. Thank you so much. Marsha Leiterman is the daughter of Gittla and Jacob Leiterman, survivors of the Holocaust.

She is also the author of Kiss the Red Stairs, the Holocaust once removed, and October 7th, searching for the humanitarian middle. Marsha Leatherman spoke at Remembering the Holocaust, a forum sponsored by Regis College at the University of Toronto. The event was originally meant to be held in public, in person, but was moved online due to security concerns. This is Ideas on CBC Radio 1 and around the world online. I'm Nala Ayyad. Who's your favorite writer of all time? And if you could sit down and have dinner with them, what would you ask? It might be tough to get a dinner date, but I can try to give you the next best thing.

I'm Matea Roach. On my podcast bookends, I sit down for honest conversations with some of today's literary stars. People like Zadie Smith, Ken Follett, R.F. Kwong, and Louise Penny. Whether you love books or just want a new perspective on your every day, check out bookends with Matea Roach wherever you get your podcasts. Jeanette Goldman survived the Holocaust as a child, then moved to Australia where she grew up, and eventually settled in Canada, becoming a federal judge. On a warm April afternoon in Toronto by the open windows of the room where the online session originated, Jeanette Goldman told her story. The final solution that nefarious plan to exterminate the Jewish people,

designed and planned at the infamous Wancy conference was directed solely at the Jewish people and resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews. What is not well known or realized that of that 6 million, 1.5 million were children. The odds against survival were enormous, but for children, they were almost non-existent. I am one of that minuscule minority. I and my brother, two children who survived the Holocaust. However, in telling my story today, I don't just want to tell the events that occurred to me. I want to pay tribute and honor the incredibly courageous and honorable

Poles who risk their lives as well as the lives of their families to shelter and save. those who miraculously survived. Neither I nor my brother would have survived without the risk that they took. And many of them lost their lives as a result. In fact, in 1943, an edict was proclaimed that threatened death to anybody who, any pole who sheltered the Jews.

Despite that, my survival is due to their wonderful courage and their sense of morality to do what was right under such a situation. enormously dangerous circumstances. Our sages have said that he who saves a single life, it is as though he has saved the world entire. My story begins in March 1941 when the Jews of Krakow, the city where I was born, were forcibly relocated to the ghetto of Krakow. A month after that relocation, my mother was killed just before Passover. Pesach. My father already knew that the chances of survival for children in the ghetto were

minuscule and desperately tried to find ways to save us. The deportations had already begun. Shortly after entering the ghetto after a deportation, my father received a postcard from an uncle who had written the prayer for the dead on the postcard. My father understood the message. He must have thrown it out of the carriage where he and his whole family were taken to our I have a very vivid memory of a deportation. In the middle of the night, we children were dressed quickly and taken to an attic where we were told that we must stay in the complete darkness, in complete silence. Throughout the night, we did not sleep. Throughout the night, what we heard were shots were bursts of fire. And in the morning, when everything was over and we were able

to go back to our ghetto homes, we noticed that a hospital nearby, all the patients had been taken out and shot. And what we had to do, I, a five-year-old, had to cross these bodies to get to where I was going. That image was with me for many, many years. My father looked for ways to save those children. He turned to his brother, who was on a work detail. A group of Jews were taken out of the ghetto to work outside the ghetto. It was led by a man named Pavel Skrinsky. And we had some sort of connection to him because he and his wife were superintendents in a building

that some of my relatives had apartments in. So my uncle turned to this man. And they noticed, that detail noticed, that this man was a kind man. He shopped for them in shops where they were no longer allowed to enter. He would bring goods for them. smuggled them into the ghetto. My uncle turned to him and said, two small children, can you do something? And miraculously, the man said yes. His wife, Paulina Skrinska, who had a daughter

in my age, came into the ghetto because she had paid a permit to come into the ghetto and go out, and took me out as a daughter, and she came back and took my brother. The plan was to find some sort of poles who would shelter us throughout the war, who would hide us through other war. It worked for my brother. He didn't look Jewish. He had blue eyes and straight hair. And Skrinska found a home for him where he survived the war and was later found with great difficulty by my father after the war, not remembering him at all. And the Christians who had so carefully looked after him were devastated. because he was leaving. But for me there was no home. I looked too Jewish. It was too dangerous.

So my father was at a great loss what to do. Certainly to go back to the ghetto was too dangerous. Communication through the ghetto was again by a wonderful righteous Gentile, the designation by a grateful nation for those who helped to save the Jews. I'm talking about Tadeus Pankevich, a pharmacist, the only poll who was allowed to remain in the ghetto in his pharmacy, yet had the permission to move in and out as he wished. He became the conduit for all information, for any contact with the outside world. And the plan my father devised was that Skinska would take me to a nearby ghetto in Boknia, which was still open. You could still go in and out.

There, my two aunts, survivors of their whole family, shot when they were discovered in hiding. One 18 years old, the other one 14, lived, and I would be with them. And with them, I would be taken to the border with Czechoslovakia and smuggled across to Hungary and later on to Western Europe. And indeed, that's what happened. I was there and my older aunt said, leave the ghetto, go to the safe house outside the ghetto, wait for me there and I will take your brother and bring him and we will all go to the border. It did not happen. We left the ghetto just on the day when it was firmly locked.

My aunt, my 18-year-old aunt, was shipped to Auschwitz. Miraxi, she survived in a barrack of 1,000. Twelve survived. She was one of them. I was left in the care of my 14-year-old aunt. Skinska took us to the border. it was an arduous, hazardous journey. The conductor in the train let us off a station before we were supposed to actually exit.

And we spent a frightful night in the forest. Eventually we arrived at the border, and here there was a miracle. Had we arrived the night before, we would have been shipped to Auschwitz. They had been a raid, and all the Jews who were waiting to cross had been shipped to Poland and then to Auschwitz. the end of the story. We were housed in a barn with animals until it was safe to cross the border. Imagine crossing the Carpathian Mountains, five-year-old child, a 14-year-old girl. I remember my aunt threatening me. If you don't go, if you stay here, I'm going to leave you here. Everybody threw everything away and moved. The mountaineers who were our guides sometimes helped and carried me and other children.

arrived in Czechoslovakia, and there we were sheltered by the Jewish community and smuggled to Hungary. In Hungary, we were housed in an orphanage that was supposedly, the inmates were supposedly Polish refugees, Christian Polish refugees. Our director was a pole who again risked his life to shelter us in this orphanage. And we, of course, we learned all the prayers and we knew how to conduct ourselves. I knew to respond to a name Helena, never using my own name, and that was my name throughout the war. Somebody informed on us, and we scattered. That was a time when my aunt and I were homeless. We were on the streets.

Kind people gave us food. Sometimes we found shelter until we were discovered by this amazing man, Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who sheltered Jews, protected refugee Jews in his homes under the auspices of the Swedish government. From there, we were smuggled to Romania, and in Romania, we were, Romania was part of the Axis, aligned with Germany. We were captured and placed in a concentration camp. It was not a death camp. There was hunger and there was illness, but there was no death. we was very shortly liberated because war ended in Romania in 1944 when Romania joined the Allies. From there, I was very ill at that time already I had TB. Through the Jewish underground, we managed to reach then Palestine.

And I was first in a sanatorium to cure my disease and then in an orphanage. I was reunited with my father in 1947 after five years of a separation. My brother and my grandmother survived the war as well, and we went to Australia, the only country which allowed us access. My father survived with Oscar Schindler, the wonderful Pole, who saved more than a thousand people in the concentration camp that he founded. There was a Nazi commandant, a Nazi commandant, But this is what Schindler did.

Towards the end of the war, when the commandant wanted to take his people on the death marches, where many died. Before that happened, Oscar Schindler sent a telegram purportedly coming from the command center, Nazi command center, and told this commander that he was wanted at a certain location away from the camp. It is in this way that everybody was saved. As Hannah Arend observed, in the Holocaust, the moral universe was inverted so that those who did good felt guilty for not doing more, and those who were guilty felt no responsibility at all. By their actions, these righteous Gentiles stand in stark contrast to those who were complicit and those who had the opportunity and did nothing.

Survivors often asked, how did you survive, as though there was a formula. I think the poem that I'm going to end with will speak to that. Any case, by Wissuva Shimbovska, a Polish Nobel laureate who wrote this poem. Any case. It could have happened. It had to happen. It happened earlier, later, later, closer, further away. it happened, but not to you. You survived because you were first, you survived because you were last,

because alone, because the others, because on the left, because on the right, because it was raining, because it was sunny, because a shadow fell. Luckily, there was a forest, luckily there were no trees, luckily a rail, a hook, a beam, a break, a frame, a turn, an inch, a second. Luckily, a straw was floating on the river. Thanks to thus, in spite of, and yet, what would have happened if a hand, a leg, one step, a hair away? So you are here, straight from that moment still suspended. The net's mesh was tight, but you threw the mesh. I can't stop wondering at it. Can't be silent enough. Listen, how quickly your heart is beating in me. Thank you. of the Holocaust, retired federal judge and member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada,

reading the poem Any Case by Wiswava Shimborska. She spoke as part of remembering the Holocaust, held by Regis College on Yom Hashawa, Holocaust Memorial Day, 2026. Attending this event as a respondent was the Canadian author, Catholic theologian and refugee advocate Mary Jo Ledy. I feel we must be silent and allow our hearts to become more human. In my work with refugees, it's sometimes hard to hear the suffering quite often, actually. and you stand ahead of us in this way

that you have shown us a way a way of miracles, way of hope. And all I want to say is we should never make suffering the basis of hope. We need to say, the basis of hope is we are human beings. We are human beings and the people we work with are human beings.

And in the telling of the story, we reclaim our humanity as well, our hope for humanity. Thank you. Attendees were invited to share their questions over Zoom. One person asked what parallels could be drawn between the Holocaust and other atrocities that have occurred since,

and what insight or advice might follow from those parallels. Here's Marsha Leiterman. Yes, of course there are parallels, but the Holocaust was a singular event. It was an industry created to murder people, to take their things away from them, and then murder them, and then use bits of their murdered bodies like their hair to stuff mattresses for the people back home in Germany. I mean, this is beyond. But each of the catastrophes that we're

seeing today are also singular events that have their own stories. I don't think we need to compare things to the Holocaust to say this happened and then this happened and it's like the Holocaust, so beware. Let's just beware. These wars are terrible. The things that the refugees that Mary Joe Letty is helping, what they have lived through, what they have survived, is horrific on its own. I totally agree. Each one of these atrocities that we have seen in our lifetimes is a unique event. I don't think they need to be compared and never again is aspirational. We hopefully we will work towards a world

where these events will not occur again. Well, people will be secure. Well, they will not be targeted because of their race and their religion or whatever other equality distinguishes them. It is not something that we can achieve immediately, obviously, but it is something we should all work towards.

I know that there are expressions of anti-Semitism, and it devastates me. It makes me feel insecure. But I have faith that we will overcome this, that we live in a democratic society. We have the right to fight it. I think in other societies we have kind of shrunk back. when we are attacked, we shrink back and try and protect to hide ourselves. I think that would be a huge mistake. I think that each time there is an event like that, an anti-Semitic event, we have to speak out, shout out, and demand justice and accountability. That's what I would say to everybody.

We are all fighters in this fight, in this war against anti-Semitism. And so the fight is for the fight. those listeners who are not Jewish to fight on our behalf so that we too will feel secure and safe in this wonderful country, Canada. My little... Yeah, here, here. Antisemitism is not just a Jewish problem. It is a human problem. It is a problem for all of us. I spend far too much time on social media reading what people are saying, and I know that people's fears are real. I understand that. And our fears should not be dismissed as hysterical or irrational.

And anti-Semitism should never be dismissed as justified because of something that's happened. That's something that a Jewish person has done. It's not just us who need to speak out about that. And that's why it's really important to be here at Regis College talking about this. anti-Semitism has been present in Christianity in various forms from the beginning, and for hundreds of years afterwards. The Holocaust was a turning point for the church. Having witnessed the complacency of Catholics in his Bavarian hometown during the war, German theologian Johann Baptist Metz later wrote,

You cannot do theology with your back to Auschwitz. So even or perhaps especially in 2026, there is a significance to the act of a Catholic institution like Regis College inviting survivors of the Holocaust to come and speak. Here's Jeanette Goldman. It's not been easy for me to tell my story. And I do it because it's truly to honor those who were so courageous. But to be with you or Christians,

practicing Christians and to be able to reveal our fears and our trepidations and our insecurity means that the atmosphere has changed somewhat. When my mother was a child in Poland, the Jewish kids knew to be careful on Easter weekend, but especially Good Friday, because in the churches, the priests would be preaching about how the Jews killed Christ, and I'm guessing there were inflammatory sermons. And my mother, you know, very matter-of-factly told me, oh, we used to get beaten up on Good Friday after the Catholic kids came out of church. They'd go running, looking for Jews to beat up.

And, yes, she told that in a very matter-of-fact way. And I wonder if my 10-year-old mother could ever imagine that her daughter would one day be sitting in a Catholic college. being welcomed to tell her story. Remembering the Holocaust was organized by Regis College alumna Bertha Yetman. She describes the eerie silence around the Holocaust during her childhood in Newfoundland. I grew up not even having heard about the Holocaust. My first memory of anything and I did not know about it was Life magazine, used to come to our home.

And this week, the front cover of Life magazine was Ada Weichmann. And I remember my mother and her friends and father, and he's saying he was the picture of evil. So I heard something. I heard something about it.

And never really, and then, you know, over the radio. But there was 10. terrible silence about the Holocaust. Amongst the Jews as well in America. And it wasn't until I think that the film world

began to pick up on it and I remember sitting watching this incredible movie, The Pond Broker. You know, I'll say it was silent, as Jeanette just said, in the Jewish community too. It wasn't talked about a lot

or it was talked about but not in maybe an organized way I grew up hearing about the war this happened in camp this happened in ghetto but it was never really explained to me from A to B to C and then

you talked about film I remember the mini-series Holocaust that ran in the 1970s and I watched it my parents said we're going to watch this and I remember watching it and thinking, oh, this is what happened to my family. Oh, and my parents, God love them. They always went to any film about the Holocaust, about this time, about the Second World War,

and I remember going to see Schindler's List with my mother and thinking, how can you sit through this? I can barely sit through this knowing this happened to you. And you lived this. So this was my family story. That sort of how it began to coalesce in my brain through art weirdly. And, you know, I think people know much more about it now than when you were growing up, Bertha, or even when I was growing up. I grew up in Australia in a very religious Jewish family. My father was a very strong person. And my brother and I used to ask him, how could you bear the humiliation? That bothered us the most, the uttered inhumanity. My father was a proud person. And he said, you know, humiliated and degraded are those who degrade, not their victims. And he truly lived by that, by that. motto. He did not feel that he had been robbed of that. He had stood strong and he believed that we

must continue. We memorialized every day of the week all those who had died. We only spoke about the dead. And I think that it was religion. It was that belief, that very strong belief that my father had that sustained him throughout the war. And he maintained that, and in a freezes society to maintain that going forward. He did not lose faith in his God. He did not accuse God of doing that. He said there are things that you don't understand, but that faith must go forward. Remembering the Holocaust was held on Yom Hashawa in April 26. It was sponsored by Regis College at the University of Toronto. It featured author and journalist Marcia Lederman

and Holocaust survivor Jeanette Goldman. Special thanks to Bertha Yetman, Mary Jo Letty, Father John Meyen, and Paul Babbage. This episode was produced by Sean Foley. Technical production, Emily

Carvasio. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer Nicola Luchitch. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad.