Thursday evening, in a lounge deep in the maze of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict studies, three genocide survivors gathered together before a small audience to share their stories.
Max Eisen, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, began the evening with the story of his deportation and life in the concentration camps. Even after his liberation and the return to his hometown, he was never accepted back into his community.
“Not a single neighbour had a nice word to say,” he says. “[When I came back] I heard one say, ‘Who says Hitler killed all the Jews? Look, there’s one coming!'” He realized that he was not welcome, and came to Canada with the help of a displaced persons group.
“Every genocide starts the same,” added Dr. Acol Dor, a survivor of the current genocide in Darfur. She talked about witnessing the death of her father when she was seven. He was not allowed to be buried by the family, and was left for birds to eat.
It was a visibly difficult subject for Dor to speak about it, but she forced herself on.
“I talk about it because I don’t want anyone else to go through what I went through,” she said. “Thank God the world is awake for Darfur.”
Dor added that the United States government is not doing all they could to help because Arab powers in Sudan have ties to U.S. oil interests.
The event, called Witness to History, is a signature program that is part of Students Helping Others Understand Tolerance (SHOUT), and Holocaust and Genocide Education Week, which is taking place across the GTA until Nov. 9.
SHOUT’s organizers maintain that by listening to survivors’ stories, audience members become witnesses to these historic events, and will continue the chain of storytelling to honour those who died, and to help prevent history from repeating itself.
Leo Kabalisa, the final speaker in the panel, is a teacher from Kigali, Rwanda who has lived here for 15 years. He escaped Rwanda just before the genocide, and lost all four brothers, his father, and most of his extended family within two weeks of his arrival in Canada.
“I got to 82 people I had lost and then I stopped counting,” he says. “How can you be sitting watching TV when you learn about the death of your entire family?”
Though all three speakers shared the same feeling of helplessness, they tried to look toward improving the future instead of dwelling on the past. “To hate is giving my power to someone else,” says Kabalisa.
Campus event listings for the remainder of the week can be found at holocausteducationweek.com
