HALIFAX — Edwin Black, RIGHT, issued a challenge to the more than 200 people in the Yom Hashoah audience in Halifax.
“Do we shed a tear with the beautiful music we just heard, and think of the agony of survivor Phil Riteman [one of Halifax’s main Yom Hashoah speakers], or do we look ahead 10 years and say, ‘What did we know, when did we know it, and what did we do to stop Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur?’”
The award-winning American journalist and author of six best-selling investigative books also had this warning:
“Can the generation that survived the Holocaust to create Israel be considered successful when we have threats of nuclear annihilation [at the hands of Iran] on our doorstep?”
In a dynamic presentation at the May 1 event at Saint Mary’s University, Black, a Chicago-born, Washington-based author whose parents survived Treblinka, quoted from his international expose, IBM and the Holocaust, a book that’s available in 61 countries and 14 languages.
“The Holocaust was special and it has nothing to do with the numbers [six million Jewish deaths],” he said. “It was a 12-year, internationally advertised, out-in-the-open persecution.”
He accused business leaders in the United States and Europe of being war criminals.
He said U.S.-based IBM had punch cards on every Jew in Europe, knew where they were, what their abilities were and enabled the Germans to find them and use them. IBM’s systems organized the trains that transported Jews and other non-Aryans to the death camps.
He said General Motors provided the trucks that the Germans used to invade Poland, Austria and other European nations.
Even Coca-Cola invented Fanta as a drink to refresh German troops, he said.
All this can happen, and is happening, again because money talks, he continued.
“It took place in the 1930s and 40s, and it is happening now because the Mideast has the oil money and has announced its intention to obliterate Israel with missiles. How? They buy what they need with petro-dollars that I helped give when I drove here, that you provide when you drive your cars.”
The audience was as hushed during his 15-minute address as it was when candles were lit to commemorate the millions lost in the Holocaust.
It was as silent as excerpts from letters and essays, written in the 1940s by youthful Holocaust victims and survivors, were read by Halifax-area youths, Jewish and gentile, who have attended the March of the Living and gone on an Asper Foundation-sponsored visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
And the audience paid equally rapt attention as Halifax cellist Shimon Walt and pianist Barbara Pritchard played Ernest Bloch’s Prayer, from Jewish Life No 1.
Black, the editor of the Cutting Edge News website, which receives nearly 100,000 hits each month, has worked for the New York Times and has been interviewed on national U.S. TV programs such as the Today Show, CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports, Dateline NBC and the Oprah Winfrey Show.
“We have forgotten, but we say we will always remember,” he said. “We’re forgetting, because holocausts have happened since, and no one is speaking out in the right way. Now another nation [Iran] is pledging to do in 12 minutes what Hitler tried to do in 12 years – wipe out the Jewish people [in Israel].”
Other Yom Hashoah ceremonies took place in Atlantic communities through the weekend in Sydney, N.S., Moncton, N.B., Saint John, N.B., Fredericton, St. John’s, and Charlottetown, where large crowds heard talks from Holocaust survivors.