“Are you a Jew?” asked one of the guards.
“Yes,” answered the child at the barrier.
“Jews are not admitted,” snapped the guard.
“Oh, please let me in. I’m only a very little Jew.”

This was the game played by children aboard the MS St. Louis, the ship that sailed on May 27, 1939, with 937 Jews from Germany on board, heading for Cuba. All had valid Cuban visas, and hoped to be saved from Hitler’s coming madness.

Bernie Farber at the monument to the village and province where his father came from in Poland. Of the more than 20,000 Jews that once lived in the area,  more than 90 percent were murdered in Treblinka.

On Jan. 20, I had the honour, along with Canadian Jewish Congress national president, Mark Freiman, to represent Canadian Jewry at the unveiling of a singularly unique memorial honouring the ill-fated passengers of that Voyage of the Damned.

It was for me the culmination of a long-held vision – to help Canadians understand the horror of bigoted intolerance and its ultimate end point. Working with my colleague Eric Vernon, we hoped to offer the tragedy of the MS St. Louis as a metaphor for the Shoah itself. Here on one boat heading toward a new life of freedom were Jewish refugees – but they could have been any of us – mothers and fathers, children and young lovers, the microcosm of Jewry fleeing danger and hoping for redemption.

At that moment, when the storm clouds of Hitler’s hate were heavy but the deluge had not yet begun, the leaders of this country and others had an opportunity to create a spark of light and so diminish, if only for a brief space, the darkness that was gathering.

It was not to be.

Cuba refused them entry, as did the United States.

The New York Times wrote: “Off our shores she [the St. Louis] was attended by a helpful Coast Guard vessel alert to pick up any passengers who plunged overboard and thrust them back… The refugees could even see the shimmering towers of Miami… the battlements of another forbidden city.”

Gustav Schroeder, captain of the St. Louis, was a man of great humanity. Despite his loyalty to the Nazi state, his sense of responsibility led him to determine that these refugees should not be abandoned.

Desperate, he headed for the shores of Canada. The St. Louis found itself outside Canadian territorial waters but within a journey of a day or so to Halifax Harbour’s Pier 21.

Tragically, the luckless Jewish passengers encountered the antisemitism that was to become the refrain of the Canadian government when it came to the question of Jewish refugees. None is too many said a nameless government official. It might as well have been a government fiat. Prime minister Mackenzie King turned a deaf ear to pleas from my predecessors at CJC and refused to consider any offer of sanctuary.

Eventually, after weeks at sea, rampant sickness, despair and disillusionment overtook most of the passengers. A second editorial in the New York Times lamented, “We can only hope that some hearts will soften somewhere and some refuge be found. The cruise of the St. Louis cries to heaven of man’s inhumanity to men.”

Capt. Schroeder remained resolute and, with the assistance of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, negotiations with Britain, Belgium, Holland and France led to each of these countries accepting a total of 900 passengers (29 had managed to get into Cuba). But the reprieve was short-lived: the Jewish passengers granted temporary asylum in mainland Europe were caught in the Nazi blitzkrieg. More than one-third of them perished under the Nazis.

Canada – Jew and non-Jew alike – failed our brothers and sisters in 1939. Our remembrance of that failure is both a Kaddish and an act of tshuvah.

We must remember not only those who travelled on the St. Louis, but also those who travelled by foot and wagon on hidden roads to the edge of the killing pits, and those who travelled by cattle car to the killing centres that dotted the map of the kingdom of death. We must speak for those whose voices were lost and for those thousands of survivors who came to Canada after the war, wore their agony as undergarments beneath their everyday attire and helped build this country. In Auschwitz, “Canada” was a place where life could be maintained. Our survivors made that fantasy a reality.

I am also here for my father, Max, a survivor of the Shoah. Max, while returning to his small Polish village after searching for food for his family, was caught in a Nazi “aktion” and herded on to a cattle car whose ultimate destination was the Treblinka death camp. Miraculously, he managed to kick through the slats of the cattle car and jump off the moving train. He made his way home only to discover that his entire family had been taken on that train to death. It was at Treblinka that my father lost his first family, and I lost half brothers I never knew.

Have you been to Treblinka? I have. It was soul-destroying. It was a blustery cold February in 2006. I am not really sure what I expected. I had been to Auschwitz and Majdanek – both death camps turned into museums that today are testaments to man’s capability for evil. However as museums they seemed almost pristine in their presentation of horror. At Treblinka, the Nazis attempted to destroy any last vestiges of their horrendous crime. There are no barracks, no railway ties, and no remnants of electrified fences. Indeed Treblinka itself is difficult to find. I am told this was the way the Nazis wanted it because unlike the other camps that had originally been built as labour camps, Treblinka had only one function, to murder the Jews of eastern Poland.

There is nothing there today but the monuments erected by the generations that followed the war. Treblinka is empty. It is oblivion. It is the void to which the Nazis sought to consign the Jewish people. But there is a monument in Treblinka. It means that the bodies could be destroyed but our memory of them could not. The monument we unveiled on Jan. 20 in Halifax had that same meaning: that we understand how we failed our brothers and sisters, but that we will not do so again.

I came to Pier 21 as well for my mother Gertrude, who, 12 years before the St. Louis, disembarked from the ship Alaunia, ironically in Halifax at Pier 21, after a harried flight with my grandmother from Ukraine, where Jewish persecution and pogroms were commonplace.

How jubilant she must have felt taking her first tentative steps onto Canadian soil, dreaming of what could be possible for a 13-year-old Jewish girl in Canada, the land of her dreams. Sadly, the gates for Jewish refugees were soon to slam shut, leaving behind thousands who should have had the opportunity to share that dream.

By the grace of a thousand miracles the dreams of my parents, Max and Gertrude, both refugees, became my goals in life. Their histories became my future inspiration. Their tragedies and triumphs became my vehicle for understanding tolerance, human dignity and the need to treat everyone as we ourselves would want to be treated.

My parents taught me that memory is our best hope for the future. And it was memory that in fact drove me toward the day we unveiled Daniel Liebskind’s “Wheel of Conscience” at Pier 21.

On that day, as I sat listening to the dignitaries speak, I returned to the last few minutes of my time at Treblinka. I remembered clearing the snow from a small bench. As I sat, a small ray of sunshine broke through the grey sky, as if God Himself was taking a quick peek at this tardy explorer who had waited so hard to be here. Tears ran down my frozen cheeks. I looked up to see the monument erected in the middle of what was once the camp. It was in the shape of a piece of Judaism’s most holy of symbols, Jerusalem’s Western Wall. Eerily, surrounding it as far as the eye can see were jagged stones each inscribed with the name of a lost Polish Jewish community pointing a dagger-like accusing finger heavenward. I rose slowly, walking toward the stone that memorialized my father’s village, and as the ray of sun slowly receded back into the grey sky, I said Kaddish. I placed a small pebble upon the gravestone as a witness to the memory of my father’s village.

As the ceremony came to a close in Halifax, a sense of pride overtook me. I realized that while we failed our people 72 years ago, today we stand on the shoulders of those who suffered the indignities of the kingdom of death; today we speak for those whose voices have been forever stilled; today that little stone I placed at Treblinka will forever be the “Wheel of Conscience” at the Halifax Harbour.

Bernie Farber is the CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress.