It was powerful. It was moving. It was disturbing.
It was a trip back in history that Mayor Steve Clarke hopes the world never repeats.
He was talking about his recent trip to Europe, dubbed Compassion to Action, organized by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies.
“It was a trip, but it certainly was not a holiday,” said Clarke. “I guess that's what makes it different. It was an educational trip and experience, learning about if not the darkest, one of the darkest periods of our recent history.”
Over the 10 days, he and 27 others from across Canada, went from Germany to Poland to Israel.
“The group was largely made up of senior law enforcement personnel, educators and a couple of mayors from across Canada,” said Clarke, who was nominated to participate in the event by Vince Hawkes, the former OPP commissioner.
“I was nominated, but I paid for my own trip,” noted the mayor.
Clarke said tour guides accompanied them at every stop on the trip, which had many compelling moments that left an indelible mark.
Starting in Berlin, he said, a stop at the Wannsee Conference House was very powerful.
“That is where, in 1942, Hitler and his senior generals got together and signed off on what they called the Final Solution,” said Clarke. “That was their plan or strategy to murder 11 million people, predominantly Jewish. The minutes of the actual meetings were displayed in a case in the room.”
The irony of it all, he said, was that those evil plans were schemed in a beautiful home set on a picturesque lake.
“The most compelling for me was a moment being at a concentration camp called Ravensbruck,” he said. “It was predominantly for women and children. Some 30,000 women were murdered there.”
That was the first camp they visited. They also went to Auschwitz, where one member of the group, Max Eisen, had been held as a 15-year-old, 75 years ago.
“We heard from the tour guides and read about what had happened at the camps, but the way Max was able to tell his story was the most compelling,” said Clarke.
Eisen explained how he and his family were rounded up from their hometown in Moldava, Czechoslovakia and taken to Auschwitz with tens of thousands of others.
“Max recalled that every day they would walk back after work,” he explained. “If you saw someone in between a barbed wire walkway, you knew they were going to the gas chamber. One day, Max said, he saw his father on that pathway.
“He ran over and the guard knocked him back,” Clarke said. “His father yelled at him to tell the world about what's going on in here if he gets out alive.”
All three camps the group visited worked in a similar fashion, like a well-oiled destructive machine, he said.
“People would show up by train, in a cattle car, where they would be for days, held without water, food, or washroom facilities,” said Clarke. “They were enclosed without a window to let in air.”
Those who weren't sent to their death in the gas chambe spent their days doing hard labour.
“In the morning they got coffee, at lunch they got a bowl of cabbage or potato water and a piece of bread, and for dinner they had tea,” said Clarke. “They were working so hard they were burning at least 3,000 to 4,000 calories. That condition, alone, led to many, many deaths.”
Leaving Poland, the group continued their journey to Israel, making a stop at Tel Aviv and then travelling to Jerusalem, where they visited the wailing wall and Yad Vashem, a holocaust museum among other places.
“One of the things that struck me was that we all grew up hearing about all these places: Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea, and Golan Heights, but it’s all in a country that's 40% the size of Nova Scotia,” said Clarke. “You can drive across Israel in an hour and half and five hours from top to bottom.”
A common theme he noticed in information given throughout the trip was that of populism having been a factor leading to the Second World War.
There was systematic discrimination against the Jewish people that has gone on for thousands of years. That was how Adolf Hitler was able to rally so many people behind him, said Clarke.
“I think we always need to be on guard for politics that become very unhealthy,” he noted. “I would suggest now is one of those key times. There are populist movements going on all around the world.”
Clarke said he draws two conclusions from his trip.
“One is that it is imperative this history is kept alive, which I believe will reduce our ability to repeat it,” he said, talking about Canada’s own dark history in relation to the First Nations.
“I think the other one is that we all need to take care of each other and make sure everybody is afforded the same opportunities and chances," said the second-term mayor.
Clarke said in a number of interviews he’s done on the Champlain Monument, he has stressed the need to understand each other's perspective.
“There are varying perspectives to the monument,” he said. “Many see it as an icon on a postcard. Some see it for the reason it was originally erected, to mend relations. His figure is seen by many as having been the advent of colonialism and leading to the '60s scoop, residential schools, and limits on Natives going off reserves.”
If true reconciliation is to be realized, said Clarke, then all stakeholders should be taken into consideration.
“And if all stakeholders were to be taken into consideration, that, to me, means the monument has to come back in some way, shape or form,” he noted.
“I have faith in Parks Canada that they will make a decision that accomplishes that. It is also one of those scenarios where it's possible that everybody doesn't get what they want, but everybody gets something they want.”
