‘We are not learning from history’: Hate must be halted, Manitoba Holocaust survivors warn
Decades after Adolf Hitler sealed his deadly legacy, Winnipeg Holocaust survivors have a warning for Manitobans.
Stop the hate — or once again, the hate will stop humanity.
“It’s very frightening, because history repeats itself constantly,” Regine Frankel told CBC. “And it seems that we don’t learn from history. We are not learning from history.”
Frankel, whose family was forced into hiding during the Second World War, agreed to share her story in response to recent racially motivated and hateful incidents.
In the space of a few weeks, a Muslim woman visiting Manitoba was targetted by a self-proclaimed “Nazi,” an Eritrean family in Winnipeg was taunted by a neighbour who displayed both a Confederate flag and a swastika flag, and anti-Semitic graffiti was scratched onto city sidewalks and a park bench.
Anti-Islam rallies are being planned on social media. And the list goes on.
It’s an ugly outbreak confirmed by both police and human rights agencies.
At a CBC Asks town hall event in Winnipeg Thursday night, Winnipeg Police Service Const. Rob Carver called it the most “significant” such outbreak he’s seen in his more than two decades on the job.
The U.S.-based Southern Poverty Law Center went even further.
“The fact of the matter is this is white supremacy, this is white nationalism,” said the centre’s Lecia Brooks at the town hall.
Dark deja vu
For Holocaust survivors, it’s a dark deja vu.
Frankel, who grew up in France, remembers the months prior to the Second World War. Word was getting out, she recalled, that Hitler was after the Jews.
“Things were going on about the Jews, what they were doing to the Jews,” Frankel recalled. “But people stood by, the world stood by, while things happened.”