Mr. Chair, I grew up in a community in York Mills and went to school with a lot of colleagues who were the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors. I, myself, came from an Estonian background. My family had seen waves of Soviet, Nazi, and then Soviet occupation before they fled, and many of those in the family who did not flee met a fate in Estonia in the Soviet Union under the communists, including in their concentration camps, similar to that met by many of my friends' relatives in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and through their empire at the time.

We grew up and we shared those experiences. I remember how poignant that was and how important it was to learn from it all and to recognize those horrors of the 20th century and to resolve never to let them ever happen again. That is why, to me, it has been so unthinkable lately to hear things said that, in my childhood, in my teen years, I never dreamed we would hear people say in Canada and elsewhere in the world. This rising tide of anti-Semitism is indeed very real; it is alarming, and things are said that we have never heard before.

The reason a debate like this is so important, I think, is that when I was growing up, those events of World War II, of learning the horrors of the concentration camps and the Holocaust, were really only 25 years old or a little bit older than that. It was really fresh in people's minds and memories.

Today, we have to recognize that is, now, quite some time ago. We are talking 70 to 75 years ago that people were learning of these things. That is why it is important for us to also remember the horrors that could happen if we do not take an unremitting, uncompromising stand against the hatred of anti-Semitism and the associated horrors that can occur.

I know that my friend comes from a Polish background and also saw many of those horrors happen in that country itself. He referenced Auschwitz-Birkenau. He, of course, in his own experience, has been very much affected by those tyrannical horrors of communism and fascism that really tainted the 20th century as one that almost did not have the worthy name of “civilization” that we would like to think we were, in a modern sense.

I would like to hear his thoughts and his reflections on how that experience influenced us growing up and the changes we have seen happening now and what lessons we should take from all of that.

Peter Van Loan

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