A Dutch-Canadian Holocaust survivor explains what Israel means to him

This week marks Israel's 60th birthday. It also happens to mark the 63rd anniversary of the liberation of Holland -- and my personal liberation after nearly three years in hiding with my Dutch saviours, Albert and Violette Munnik and their daughter, Nora.

As I reflect on my life as a Jew, these historical events are linked in a powerful way.

The 1945 liberation was not so liberating for many Jewish children: The majority of Holland's successfully hidden boys and girls were orphaned. But in my case, my parents miraculously returned from their hiding places after enduring years of hunger and fear. We were the "lucky" ones. Over 80% of Dutch Jews had been murdered. Of all the Jewish children in post-1939 Nazi-occupied Europe, only 7% survived.

But in 1945, there was not yet any perspective on the vastness of what would become known as the Holocaust, the nearly successful annihilation of European Jews. We did not yet know that hundreds of thousands of children had been gassed, bayoneted, shot and burned alive in flaming pits. As a five-year-old, I soon would be hearing the accounts from the few who returned from places like Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.

On a personal level, moreover, it did not feel like freedom to be removed from my hiding family -- with whom I had bonded. For the first time in three years, I cried. During the years of hiding, I had neither complained nor cried. We little children somehow knew we were in danger and at the mercy of our hiders. We intuitively became quiet and co-operative.

Not that I had anything to fear from my hiding family. But in 1961, returning to visit my Christian parents, a neighbour admonished me for not thanking him for not betraying me. Such kindness!

Leo and Emmy, my parents, had lost their own parents, brothers and sisters -- my grandparents, uncles and aunts. So 1945 felt not so liberating. While grateful to have survived, we remained captives of death, through those we lost and through our ravaged community. Real freedom came only in 1951, when we left behind our lives in Europe and came to Canada.

We were so proud to be Canadians. After all, I had seen Canadian liberators driving tanks into my hometown of The Hague, chasing fleeing German troops. Canada was already on our minds. (Strangely, it was in the minds of Auschwitz inmates as well. They named the storage area of goods stolen from arriving Jews Kanada, as they imagined Canada to be a place of abundance and riches.) The Dutch people have never forgotten Canadian sacrifices to liberate Holland, and Dutch children today probably remember those sacrifices more fervently than Canadian children.

In Canada, I became a Jew again. It was a slow, and at times solitary process: My father had turned away from his faith and my mother was ambivalent until her later years.

As a teenager in Canada, I also became connected with Israel, the land of my ancestors, that tiny sliver of land smaller than Vancouver Island.

Some of my relatives had moved there, and I visited in 1961. Standing on the YMCA tower in Jerusalem, I was warned to keep my head down to avoid being shot by Jordanian sniper fire. I could see, but not visit, the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site. I learned that the Jordanian occupiers had razed 30 synagogues in the old Jewish section of the city and that the former British Palestinian Mandate was primarily in Arab hands. It was clear that the Arabs wanted to destroy Israel.

I once heard Auschwitz survivors say that when the world discovers what was done, there would be no more anti-Semitism -- and surely no more mass murders of Jews, or any killings on such a scale. How wrong they were.

Israel's hard-fought successes are resented by a world that has grown increasingly anti-Semitic once again. Canada's own Justice Louise Arbour has denounced Israel's security fence as illegal, an interference to Palestinian life. (The steady stream of homicide bombers who, prior to the fence's existence, blew up countless Israeli civilians, including Jews and Arabs, and yes, many Holocaust survivors and their families, was apparently not considered an interference to Jewish life.) This madness continues to this day, with the likes of Jimmy Carter acting as an apologist for Hamas.

A recent Vancouver Sun editorial stated "Anti-Jewish sentiment is inexplicable given the Jews' contribution to civilization. While their numbers have always been small, they have been awarded 158 of the 750 Nobel Prizes handed out since 1901, having distinguished themselves in chemistry, literature, economics, medicine, physics and, of course, world peace. As hatred of Jews is irrational, so too is the demonization of the democratic Jewish State of Israel."

But the Holocaust taught us that the unbelievable must be believed, that the impossible is indeed possible. The political left in Europe and elsewhere view Palestinian rights as their cause -- and seize on any pretext to attack the Jewish state. Palestinian Arabs, meanwhile, claim to be the victims of "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide," yet also claim to have grown from 700,000 refugees to 4.5 million.

Had the 2000 Clinton-Barak peace initiative been accepted, even in principle, we could by now have celebrated eight years of palestinian progress. Sadly, we must keep waiting.

But even as Israel is demonized around the world, I remain confident for its future. That is because, as a Canadian, I have learned to hope.

It was in Israel, six decades ago, that the Jews reclaimed their land. But it was here in Canada that I reclaimed my own Judaism.

drrobkrell@hotmail.com - Dr. Robert Krell is Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychiatry, The University of British Columbia; and Distinguished Life Fellow, American Psychiatric Association.

Credit: Robert Krell; National Post

Copyright CanWest Interactive, Inc. May 8, 2008