Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Visits Auschwitz-Birkenau

Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, was in Poland this past week to attend a NATO summit. While there, writes Yediot Achronot's Itamar Eichner, Trudeau paid an emotional visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp:

During the tour, Trudeau visited the section of the camp’s museum dubbed the ‘Canada Warehouse,’ an area in which property plundered by the Nazis from the victims was assembled. The prisoners gave this area the name because to them the Canada represented wealth.

While viewing the piles of shoes, bags, glasses and brushes which were stolen from the Jews upon arrival at the camps, the prime minister could not hold back his tears. Shortly after he visited the crematoria and the gas chambers in Auschwitz 1, he then made his way to Birkenau before embarking on a march on the train tracks to the ramp on which the Nazis carried out their selection process of fresh arrivals of Jewish victims.

Trudeau also bore witness to the ruins of the gas chambers in Crematorium 3 where the Jewish delegation accompanying him cited the memorial prayer, Kaddish.

“Today we saw the possibilities of deliberate human cruelty and evil. Let us remember always this painful truth about ourselves. Never enough tolerance. Humanity must learn to love its diversity,” Trudeau wrote in the guest book of the museum.

Trudeau was accompanied among others by Nate Leipciger, a former prisoner of Auschwitz born in 1928 in Chorzów, who emigrated to Canada in 1948 and now lives in Toronto.

IFCJ News