Holocaust survivor shares his harrowing story at U of G event

A speech by Sol Nayman, Holocaust survivor, was one of several U of G events hosted for Holocaust Education Week. He and his family were deported in a cattle cart such as the one that was displayed near Branion Plaza. CREDIT: NICOLAS BUCK / THE ONTARION

ELENI KOPSAFTIS

Evil happens when people let it happen, and our best defence against it is never to forget where it leads.

— Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Sol Nayman was born in Stoczek Wegrowki, Poland in 1935, just four years before Nazi forces invaded the nation. He is the last living Jewish person from his hometown and one of 3.5 million Jewish people in Europe to survive the Holocaust.

For Holocaust Education week, Nayman spoke to U of G community members about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor and about the importance of learning from history. The event, which was held online on Nov. 11, was hosted by Guelph Hillel, an organization that facilitates an open community for Jewish students at the U of G.

Nayman said that the memories and accounts of survivors continue to be crucial because the trauma of genocide can carry forward for countless generations.

However, Nayman said he was initially conflicted about being considered a survivor because he had never lived directly under Nazi occupation or been in a Nazi death camp. He said he only took on the title after he visited the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum. The museum defined a Holocaust survivor as “all those who were displaced, persecuted, or discriminated against under the racial, ethnic, and political policies of the Nazis and their allies between 1933 and 1945.”

For his 75th birthday, he wrote his story in a personal account of the Holocaust (sometimes referred to as the Shoah, the Hebrew word for “catastrophe”) titled Zadie’s Story. In the account, he explains having to flee to Soviet-occupied Poland with his family when Hitler invaded his hometown in 1939.

By this point, Hitler had long cultivated Nazi Germany’s antisemitic principles through his racist Nuremburg Laws and his military’s refusal to intervene during the torching and vandalization of Jewish property during the event now known as Kristallnacht. The Nayman family would be deported by the Soviets and sent to Syktyvkar, the former capital of the Komi Republic, not far from a slave labour camp.

There, food and water were scarce and disease was rampant. The winters were terribly cold, reaching as low as -40 C, and many died daily due to sickness and starvation.

“We were crammed into a small room in one of the barracks with another couple … A hanging sheet separated us. We had wooden planks for beds. We would burn wheat or dry cow dung in a metal barrel for heat,” said Nayman.

In 1943, Nayman and his family would be transported to Ukraine, and while he stated that many Ukranians were sympathetic to the Nazis at the time due to being “liberated” from the Soviets by Nazi forces, a few farmers in the area were kind to his family and often shared produce with them. “No one survived the Holocaust without the help of others,” he said.

When the war ended in 1945, The United Nations allowed European Jews to emigrate, so the Nayman family set their sights on Canada. When immigration officials informed them that only the children would be granted visas, they bought bogus marriage certificates to improve their chances and falsely claimed to have tailoring skills to meet the country’s limited tailor quota.

After a nine-day journey on the General Sturgis transport ship, the Nayman family’s first step into Canada was at Pier 21, the same pier that had rejected Jewish refugees on the SS St. Louis just nine years prior. Many of those refugees would later be murdered by the Nazis.

Nayman was eventually given a photograph of the General Sturgis that was inscribed with the words, “Canada became a better place on October 16, 1948, when the Nayman family landed on Pier 21 in Halifax.” Nayman told the event participants that he gave a lot of thought to that statement, and to how it would have applied to the Jewish refugees who had previously been turned away.

“Perhaps we, and the 40,000 or so other survivors who made Canada their home, made it [better]. But then on the SS St. Louis, [how] would those 937 Jews [have made] Canada a better place in the fields of medicine, finance, technology, the arts? How many future Nobel Laureates may have been on that ship?”

Nayman noted that since the Holocaust, 15 genocides have been carried out throughout the world. He listed Ukraine, Cambodia, Croatia, Uganda, and Rwanda, to name just a few.

“If the world allows those and other mass killings to happen, it is because the lessons of the Holocaust have not been learned or have been ignored, or simply that the so-called civilized world would rather not know,” Nayman said.

He also showed a picture of a Uighur detention camp. There, more then one million Muslims have been denied the ability to practice their religion and are being sent to re-education camps. There are also reports that these camps utilize treatments akin to those of the Nazi death camps, such as starvation, torture, rape, electric shock, and medical experiments.

To prevent these mass acts of hatred and violence, Nayman explained that we must all educate ourselves on the Holocaust so that we can spot the signs of history repeating itself.

However, education is not memorizing that Hitler killed six million Jewish people, said Nayman. Rather, it is understanding how one person can start a hate movement with just words, how millions of ordinary German citizens were convinced that hatred was standard, and how countless nations and millions of people were indifferent bystanders.

“Six million victims of the Shoah no longer have a voice, so it is up to the diminishing universe of survivors and all of us to sustain their memories, which are an eternal gift to the world and a warning of what can happen when hatred prevails,” said Nayman.