Holocaust symposium reaches thousands of students

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Fanny Wedro has spent more than three decades telling her Holocaust survival story to students, and on Wednesday, it was still bringing listeners to tears. Wedro, who now resides in Calgary, lived in Ukraine during the Second World War and spent 18 months living in a forest, enduring the cold, hard winter and lack of food until Ukraine was liberated in 1944.

“I’m in my declining years, there’s a new generation now, it’s up to them to see that we shouldn’t have another holocaust. . . . It should never happen again. There shouldn’t be any hatred. There should be more love,” Wedro says. “If I reach just two or three people, I’ve done my job.”

Wedro has been speaking at the Calgary Jewish Federation’s holocaust symposium ever since a holocaust denier from Eckville, Alta., made her realize she needed to get her story out.

Thousands of high school students are touring Mount Royal University from Tuesday to Thursday to view documentaries and listen to the stories of various survivors and their children. Wedro’s particularly moving story about escaping the Nazi occupation left many students in tears.

“I came here not expecting (much),” said Darren Ancheta, one of the students in attendance. “But it really blew me away.”

One of Wedro’s stories was of watching two German soldiers play a sickening game of catch with a two-year-old child, with the mother in between, trying to get her child back. Wedro says she then saw the baby get smashed onto a fence.

“The fact that someone could inflict that onto someone else was shocking,” said Ancheta.

“Everything was so vivid for the first time,” said Maya Ramkissoon, another student in attendance. “I’ve done school projects on this before, but this is the first time it came to life.”

Elliot Steinberg, the manager of communications for the CJF, says that over the years, tens of thousands of students have listened to Holocaust survivors share their stories. Now, some 70 years after the end of the Second World War, it is becoming more and more rare to hear from Holocaust survivors themselves. The children of many survivors continue to pass on their stories at symposiums such as these.

“This is not just about the Holocaust. It’s an opportunity for us to talk about genocide in general, how to counteract that, and to teach students that if they see an injustice, to speak out,” said Steinberg.