TORONTO — It is, said former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, a story that needs to be told, and standing before the families of those deemed Righteous Among the Nations, he told it.
In the heart of the Nazi era, when Jews were being rounded up and murdered and when many of their neighbours chose not to see what was happening around them, a few particularly brave souls acted heroically to save Jewish lives. In doing so, they harkened to their consciences, acted with supreme courage and “were a glimmer of humanity in the depths of the Nazi darkness,” he said.
They showed the greatest of human virtues, he added: courage, fraternity and tolerance. And quoting the Talmud, Sarkozy noted that whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.
Sarkozy delivered a touching and sometime stirring address at last week’s True Heroes Gala, sponsored by the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem. The gala posthumously honoured Ludwik and Monika Koszczyc and Bernhardina and Elizabeth Gertruida van de Pol, who have been named Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem memorial authority in Israel.
Touching many bases, Sarkozy slammed the barbarism of the Nazi era, and using the same term for the recent terrorist attack on Parliament Hill, he criticized that incident as a barbaric attack and an assault on Canadian democracy requiring solidarity among allies.
“We are not entitled to weakness,” he said.
With the honorees’ families looking on, Sarkozy described how they overcame fear and “recognized in the persecuted Jews their brothers, sisters in the human family.”
Speaking through an interpreter, he said “each of their tales is a hymn to life heard tonight.”
Earlier, an audience of nearly 1,000 heard how the Koszczyc family, at great risk to their lives, took in six-year-old Samuel Bernan (Misha Kasinski) in the region around Vilnius and saved his life while others in his family were killed. Samuel spent each day hiding behind a stove.
The Van de Pols saved Chava Loopuit Dinner after her parents desperately tried to find someone to take in their daughter in Amsterdam. Her parents were both murdered on the day they arrived in Sobibor, a death camp. Dinner lived in an attic at the van de Pol home in the village of Drogeham in Holland.
Both survivors went on to start families of their own – Bernan in Lithuania and Dinner in Israel, where she had five children, 23 grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren. Descendants of the Koszczyc family travelled to Toronto from Manitoba for the event, while the van de Pols’ family now live in Ontario.
In paying tribute to the rescuers, Sarkozy said they teach us two important lessons. The first is that people always have the choice of what to do. You have the choice to act or to give up, to choose honour over dishonour, to choose courage rather than cowardice, and to choose good versus evil, he said.
The righteous teach another lesson, he continued, of never compromising their values and acting on those values. He slammed those would argue anti-Semitism is an opinion. “It is a disgrace. It is not something to be discussed. It is something to be removed.”
Turning to events of the day, he said that “when Jews in France are attacked, it is the republic that is attacked.”
Such attacks threaten the unity of the country and attacks on the Jews will eventually spread to attacks on others, he suggested.
Sarkozy rejected the view of some that the Shoah is far in the past and should be forgotten. “To forget would be to commit another crime,” he said.
And turning to the Jewish state, he said, “I will forever be a friend of Israel because Israel is the answer to the Shoah.”
In addition to honouring the families of Righteous Gentiles, the event served as a major fundraiser for the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem, with $2.6 million raised.
Along with the speech by Sarkozy, others addressing the gala audience included Israeli Ambassador Rafael Barak, Yad Vashem director general Dorit Novak, Fran Sonshine, national chair of the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem, as well as dinner co-chairs Ed Sonshine and Fred Waks.
Proceeds raised will go to support the educational and commemorative initiatives of the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem, including sending Canadian educators to the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. More than 180 educators have already participated in the program.